Eee PC, distro choice, power mgmt

Alan Johnson alan at datdec.com
Fri Feb 6 10:14:58 EST 2009


On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 11:10 PM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> 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?
>

I'll start by confirming what others have said already: it should be
sufficient for a full distro.  I have run full Ubuntu 8.04 on lesser
hardware very happily.  I have played with Xubuntu on a few machines and
have not noticed a huge difference between it and Ubuntu, but I think it is
more about the apps it uses, and maybe the hardware I've tried isn't quite
old enough for Xubuntu to stand out.

However, if you really want to strip it down and build up piece by piece to
keep it as lean as possible, you might consider Ubuntu Server over
DebianEeePC.  The minimal install is only a few packages more than I
remember seeing on a minimal Debian install, and I have managed to get FVWM
running fairly easily from there.  I think I found guide in the wiki.

Be warned that this could take quite a bit of work digging around the wikis
and forums to find out what the packages you want to install are,
particularly for power management and such, but I don't really know.  For
me, it would not be worth the effort, but to each his own.  If it were me,
being and Ubuntu fan boy, I'd look up the Ubuntu 'netbook-remix' that Jarod
mentioned.  Probably I'd get annoyed by some tiny difference I was not used
to and then install full Ubuntu.  I'd spend a little more money on RAM if I
had to before fighting with a leaner distro, or is 1GB the max on these?  I
am pretty sure RAM is all I would need beyond the specs you listed, but it
would only come in handy when I have 20 tabs/windows open in Firefox,
Evolution, and 2 Open Office apps going at once.  I get the feeling that
this is not your intended use for this machine since you are looking for
FVWM + xterm as your GUI. =)

Oh, and Ubuntu is very usable at 1024x768.  800x600 starts to get annoying
without some signifcant customization.  What is the res on this thing
anyway?

-- 
Alan Johnson
alan at datdec.com
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