I’ve been running Windows XP on my trusty Eee 701 netbook for about a year and a half now (last mention). XP worked fine and did the job. However, as time passed it slowly used more and more space. When you only have a 4GB SSD drive to work with, space is a precious commodity!
Today, while running updates, it ran out of space. And trust me, that’s with the bare minimum installed. Some Asus drivers, Google Chrome. Everything else — even .NET frameworks — uninstalled.
Seemed like a good time to try Ubuntu Netbook Edition (formerly known as Ubuntu Netbook Remix). Downloading and installing went quite well thanks to some great instructions and I’m happy with how well it runs on this first generation netbook. Remember, I’m sporting 1GB of RAM and a 900 Mhz Celeron here… Boot times are crazy fast. I’ll have to get a stop watch out soon, but I’m thinking well under a minute.
Speaking of performance, the included Firefox browser wasn’t so great (nor was it all that great in XP on this thing) but installing Google Chrome was easily done. The chrome install didn’t add an icon to the menus, but that was easily done with the Menu Editor. Chrome runs great on this rig.
Primary use for this machine is to sit on my desk during the day and run a few monitoring web pages (connected to a 17″ monitor and slaved via Synergy+) and be my little “on the go” machine when I’m out and about. I look forward to seeing how well this fresh install works.
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[...] enough but after I did some updating I ran into a series of BSOD issues. Since I have recently been using Ubuntu Netbook Edition I decided that would be a great OS for this little [...]