Alright, so I’ve had some more EEE adventures since my last post.  First off, I need to do a system restore.  I’m amazed that I’m actually still able to be writing this on the EEE.  About an hour ago I was thinking I would have to make a run down to Office Max to pick up an external DVD drive so I could do a restore of the OS.  I’m pretty sure that in trying to install Xubuntu I fubared the boot loader.  Grub will only load when I have the Xubuntu Live CD USB drive in one of the ports.  Not really a fun problem to have.  On the other hand, I do now have an inadvertent security lock on the system!

I will probably wait until tomorrow to do the restore though because the one upside of getting Xubuntu installed is that I can boot into Memtest86 and determine for sure if the memory module that I bought at Fry’s on Friday night is bad or not.  I’m leaning toward not but apparently getting a blue screen of death tied to the PCI.SYS file often means the memory is corrupt.  If it is the case (and somehow possible) it has to somehow be corrupted in a way that it doesn’t bother Xandros and the EEE but somehow prevents XP from loading and installing.  Then again, it could be tied to the fact that I haven’t had much luck with installing OS’s off of USB drives.

The other compelling reason to restore the OS to the factory settings is that the Synaptic Package Manager (basically the Linux equivalent of add/remove programs on a Windows box) is busted because I tried to uninstall Adobe Acrobat Reader.  While I’m completely satisfied with the EEE and how Asus packages it (and all of the issues I am having are tied to things I tried to “hack”) Linux continues to give me problems with things that on a Windows computer just don’t happen.  I’ve never had trouble uninstalling a program in Windows and I’ve never been told I can’t kill a frozen process because I don’t have the right permissions.  Honestly, as funny as it is to see screen shots from airports and bowling alley’s of Windows computers that have crashed, my Vista desktop runs and runs and runs while I can’t operate the EEE for more than about an hour before something crashes or requires me to reboot.  On the upside, reboots take about 15 seconds so it’s not like they are a big inconvenience.

I may still end up finding a way to get XP on here before I head out to Uganda but for now I’ll just stick with Xandros.  One small victory I had the other day was getting Wine installed on here so that I can run Windows programs.  I was able to get Baseball Mogul to install, but unfortunately it wouldn’t render the entire lineup screen so I had to give up on that.  The other thing it lead me to discover is that the 4gig SSD of the EEE is actually separated into two partitions, one fixed and one that the user can edit.  The biggest downside to this is that when you go through and remove all of the programs you don’t need/want, you don’t actually gain any usable space.  I found about 500mb of programs and language packs (I don’t need Chinese language support) I wanted to remove but that would have no impact on the amount of space I have as the user.  Apparently there are ways around this but the involve making changes to the SSD that are hard to reverse without an external DVD drive.

So for now that’s where things stand.  I still don’t have any regrets with the hardware but I think I would be much, much happier in a familiar XP environment instead of the capable but unpredictable environment of Linux.

After spending the better part of this afternoon battling with various cd’s, dvd’s, and flash drives, I am unfortunately no closer now to having XP on my EEE than I was this morning. Actually, in some ways I’m further from it. I’ve basically concluded that I’m going to need an external dvd drive and a fresh copy of XP Pro SP2 if I really want to get it done. That being the case, I’m now looking at doing EEEXbuntu. It is a build of the Ubuntu Linux distribution that has been optimized for the EEE. Part of why I want to get over to XP is that I have to either change to a different OS or upgrade the current Xandros kernal if I want to take full advantage of the 2gigs of ram I installed. As it ships, the EEE only recognizes 1 of the 2 gigs.

If neither of those OS changes is feasible, I’ve at least been able to tweak the Xandros desktop to the point that it better suits what I want it to do. After some digging around the internets I’ve cleared enough space off the taskbar that it is now useful. I just finished replacing the normal launch “start” button with a smaller one that clears more space too. I also got the clock switched over to 12 hour mode rather than military time. I think there are a couple other small tweaks that I’m forgetting. I’m still not happy with the current desktop themes and I wish I could find a better one but so far no luck. Anyway, that’s about it for now, I’ll be sure to post again if I get XP or EEEXbuntu up and running. Ciao!

I wanted to update my progress with the EEE PC since yesterday.  Bad news first, I can’t get my jerry rigged external DVD drive to be recognized by the EEE so I haven’t yet gotten XP installed on it.  I’ve got a few leads for how I might be able to do it with a USB flash drive, but I’d rather get a working dvd drive figured out.  Another similar option would be to try EEEKubuntu, a build of the KDE version of Ubuntu designed for the EEE.  Again though, I’d rather get a working dvd drive to install XP from.

Anyway, on to some good news.  I was planning on waiting until I got my Amex rebate at Costco to get a new portable USB powered external hdd to pair with the EEE since it only has 8gigs of internal storage (4 on the ssd and 4 on the sdhc card).  I stopped at Circuit City, to see if I could find a cheap solution to my external DVD drive issues, and found a 160gig western digital pocket drive on sale for $110, cheaper than at Costco.  So I went ahead and bought that too since I was planning on getting it anyway.  The best part is when I got home I discovered that the EEE does in fact put out enough juice through it’s USB ports to power the drive.  I was afraid (after reading somewhere) that it didn’t put out the full 5v needed for powered USB devices but everything seemed to be working so I’m not going to complain!  I also went ahead and used the photos from our VFC photo walk today as a trial for how long it would take to transfer images from my CF card to the external hdd.  I transfered 660mb of data and it took about 10 minutes.  Not going to set any speed records but nothing to be embarrassed about.  It’s also worth noting that this was with my slower Ultra II CF card, my 4gig main card is almost twice as fast, definitely fast enough to serve that purpose.  It would be nice if I can find a codec for linux that lets me view the .cr2 files so that I can at least get some idea of what I’ve got.  Unless I’m able to get XP on this thing I don’t think I’m going to be doing much if anything as far as image editing but as someone mentioned earlier today in a piece I was reading, it would be nice to at least get a jump start on my workflow before getting back.  If I can at least get Gimp on here that will let me play with the pics I take on my Sony since those are in JPG.  Anyway, I think that’s about it for now, I’m going to do some more reading about the EEE and see if there are any other tweeks I can do if I can’t get XP figured out.  Off to Geekland!

I’ve solved my laptop issues for the upcoming Uganda trip! After spending a good portion of a slow day of work checking it out online, I decided to go out and pick up the Asus EEE PC. First impressions? AMAZING! There are a few issues related to the form factor that I still need to figure out or get used too but I’m already learning to type on the small keyboard (one of the biggest complaints by some). Maybe that is just more of a generational thing with the current tech writers. Whatever. My first impressions of the screen are really good too. It’s just a 7″ widescreen but it doesn’t feel too cramped, at least not as much as you might think. While I don’t have any personal experience with the XO OLPC or the Classmate PC, I have to admit that Asus pretty much has me sold on the low cost ultraportable. I’ll see how it handles XP when I get that installed on here tonight but so far I’m hopeful!