Eee PC, distro choice, power mgmt

[Bruce Dawson]

I've had good luck running xubuntu on "constrained" PC's like the Koolu.
I suspect the power managment works, but am not sure because I use these
things mostly as servers.

Note that xubuntu uses Xfce instead of fvwm, so I'm not sure if this
approach will work for you. (But at least it will run a gnome
application when I need to.)

--Bruce

Ben Scott wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>   So, I was in BestBuy the other day, and saw and bought an Asus Eee
> PC 900A for $200 (1 GB RAM, 4 GB SSD "hard disk", 1600 MHz CPU,
> 100BASE-T, 802.11g, MMC/SD, 3xUSB).  It ships with a Xandros Linux
> configuration which finds new and interesting ways to suck.  So, I
> plan on repartitioning the entire SSD and installing a better distro.
> (This was my intent all along anyway.)  I'm unsure on distro choice
> and wanted to poll for opinions here.
>
>   What I'd like to find is something lightweight and capable of
> supporting a traditional Unix environment.  I want X11, FVWM, and
> xterm as my main UI.  I want to avoid the collection of
> always-running, memory-hungry daemons which most modern Linux distros
> seem to assume these days.  I might tolerate them on a desktop PC that
> has resources to spare, but this little laptop is somewhat resource
> constrained.  I believe this rules out Fedora and Ubuntu.
>
>   I also want the hardware to work.  Fortunately, it seems like there
> are quite a few projects which will give me the needed drivers and
> modules for any number of distros.  So good.  I'm eying "DebianEeePC",
> which is basically Debian "testing" with hardware-specific packages
> pre-loaded.  I'm thinking Debian is a good choice for this because
> Debian has a small base footprint, allows heavy customization, but
> still comes with lots of packages of modern toys.
>
>   But what about power management?  In particular, I'd like to set up
> this guy with suspend-to-RAM and suspend-to-disk, so that I can have a
> mobile environment that wakes up quickly where I left off last.  I
> have absolutely no clue about how this stuff works with modern Linux.
> Am I setting myself up for trouble by going the minimalist route?  Is
> the suspend stuff all really complicated, and thus warrants bloated
> desktops and a plague of daemons to make it work?
>
>   On a related note: For suspend-to-disk, is it required that I have a
> swap partition equal to main RAM?
>
> -- Ben
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