I did have Jolicloud on my eeePC (900A), and it was fine for a while. Actually, it was a pretty neat distro. However when you try to install things using apt-get like a normal distro instead of through the “app cloud”, some things stop working and it goes downhil. This, combined with me itching to hop a couple of distros let me to switch.

So I started out using UNetBootin to create a Live USB stick for Fedora 13 (LXDE), and installed on the EEE. The eee is actually pretty well supported with Fedora, including the wireless (on the 900 model that I have, the 1100+ may be a different story). This was okay, except that it was not optimized for the small screen, and some of the GUI prompts actually hung off of the screen. Not to mention I was missing some “tap and click” functionality of the trackpad thing. Total time installed…. about 4 hours.

From this point on…I had a bit of trouble.

I now realize that my problems had a LOT to do with the drives I was using, and drive order on boot, etc. The main drive of my EEE is a 4GB SSD. I also have a 2GB SD card in the reader, which I intended to use as /home. and then, the USB media was another drive (when one was used).

I have a cd-r with CrunchBang 10 Alpha 2 “Statler” (which I run on my other laptop), so since this release does not play nicely with live USB media, I hooked up my slim CD/DVD RW USB drive and booted the cd-r I had previously burned. Somehow, this got completely messed up and would not boot after install. after trying to fix it for a bit, I gave up, and then I moved onto…

SLiTaz. This is a very small distro, about 30mb, which I ran from a USB stick. On boot, it installs entirely into the RAM and is extremely quick. This is much like Puppy Linux, however there is a root and standard user (Puppy only has root…or that was the case the last time I used it, anyway). I installed this to the disk, using the same setup with /(root) /home and swap partitions between the SSD and SD card. This setup would almost boot, but no kernel found– so I just edited the GRUB prompt and got it to boot no problem. Then, however, I could not log in as my standard user! I could log in as root, and change passwords and anything else– I even removed and re-added my standard user, and still could not log in.

At this point, I was even more frustrated. I decided to try CrunchBang Statler ONE more time. Hooked up the USB CD drive again and reinstalled. However THIS time I just installed all to the SSD. worked like a charm. After the install was setup, I got the UUID for the SD card and modified my /etc/fstab to mount it as /home. Voila! Everything working like a champ.

Also, in #! 10, the trackpad works terrifically! Tap and click, along with 2 finger scroll–which is awesome! I like it a lot.

Now, this brings me back to Fedora. I was still wanting to try this out, since I had only looked at Fedora 11 very briefly, and I had actually used Red Hat (pre-Fedora) for a while from 2000 to ~2002ish. I have an Acer Aspire Revo (which I’d written specifically about before but that was wiped out from the other host crashing), I decided to install Fedora13 on here to dual-boot with Windows7.

I first shrunk the Windows partition using Gparted which I installed onto the LiveUSB environment. The install went very well, everything set up properly. I installed grub to the first sector of the /boot of Fedora, rather than to the MBR however, because of some issues I had read of involving Windows 7. As I went to boot, it went straight to Windows without a hitch. A problem, as I wanted to boot to Linux. I then installed EasyBCD onto WIndows and added Fedora to the boot menu. After this, it has continued to work beautifully.

I added RPMFusion repositories for any “Free” or “nonFree” content that is not included by default in the Fedora release. I also used the Unofficial Fedora FAQ to get flash working and some other things.

I downloaded the latest HeyBuddy RPM from PSquid’s site. Now I am all up to date, and doing some further exploration into Fedora. I am liking it, so far–and I really like the LXDE interface! I don’t know if I would switch from Arch…But if I was switching, this would be a contender (As would CrunchBang).

Alright, That’s all I’ve got!

tags: #distro

Tags: #crunchbang #distro #distrohop #fedora #linux

Published Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:24:35 +0000

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