Alternative Distros, What other distro are you using? Options

[louigi600]

Ok I installed slackware 12 on SD and I can load the kernel from lilo installed on Boot Record of the SD (press esc at boot and select the SD device to boot from .... that loads lilo from the boot record on the SD) ... but then I get kernel panic probabbly because the usb-storage driver is module and root is on usb-storage.

There is also another problem: it takes about 30 seconds after boot for the SD to be seen my kernel ... and this could be too long even if I compile usb-storage into kernel.

Somehow all these problems have been solved on slax6 ... but I still prefer making my own custom install.
Also it's not so clear exactly how these problems were solved.
I will try making a bootable usb-stick and see if I can boot up from there.

[louigi600]

I was having some trouble with slackware 12's mkinitrd .... in the meantime slackware 12.1 was released so I decided to start over again.

So I now have:
xandros on SSD untouched (eccept grub config to also boot slackware on SD)
slackware 12.1 installed on a 4 Gb SD and lilo also installed on Boot Record of SD (but very slow to load kernel and initrd .... this is why I'm using grub from xandros).

To get slackware 12.1 to boot up correctly I had to make a little twinging:
build a custom kernel with usb-storage compiled in,
build an initrd anyway because the SD takes some time to settle so that kernel can see it (and hence a normal boot ended up in a kernel panic: cannot mount root),
made some adjustments to initrd to do fdisk -l and sleep for 10 seconds before attempting to mount root file system (found this helpful in order to boot successfully).

Hope this may be usefull to other people.

[louigi600]

For those who like Slackwre there ale other alternatives to slackx (which I found not to have the correct driver for the eeepc atheros card).

Apart from doing things from scratch from current these guys have gotten things working correctly out of the box:
http://slackeee.strangled.net/

In fact thanks to these dudes i revisited the madwifi-nr-r3366+ar5007 driver which dew to pci express hotplug I was unable to get working the first time I attempted.

[scottlfa]

Just got an E, its running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Now, Custom Kernel.

SD has everything but the /usr directory on it, including a swap partition. Soon to undergo physical mods.

[Tom61]

Oh yeah, if anyone wants a works straight out of the box distro for the EEE, Mandriva (spring 2008 release) is the way to go. I installed it to an 8GB SDHC in my EEE 900 a few days ago to try out some things (mainly the updated video drivers compared to Xandros), and the hot keys, wifi and most other things worked. No scripts to run, just works. I've heard some things like the mic don't work, but at least that's not a critical thing. All other distros I've tried don't have WiFi out of the box, and need to plug it into Ethernet to run a script to get it working.

[scottlfa]

Found Ubuntu to be pretty easy to set up with a script I found at eeepcusers site. Was painless for the most part. Now to get a gprs modem for it

[scottlfa]

lol - switched to pclinuxos (the one fluxflux modified). Its very stable so far, has its issues but all is good. On 512 megs it leaves over half untouched most of the time. All keys work thus far, battery life is good and media playback is solid. Leaves about 400 or so megs left on a 2gig ssd. Mounted the /var, /tmp and /home on a sd card.

Will post a pic soon.

[ppyo]

I got a 4G EeePC, plain vanilla Xandros distribution. After playing with it a bit, found that it is an OK distro, but I love Ubuntu too much. So I installed Ubuntu-eee (8.04), with the Riceeey fixes. Works like a charm!

Ppyo
----------------------
Zaurus SL-C1000, Cacko 1.23
EeePC 4G, Ubuntu-eee 8.04

[tux]

Just finished installing Ubuntu 8.10 aka Intrepid Ibex as dual boot with the original xandros. The xandros install is on the ssd and the Intrepid is on the 16 GB SDHC card.

Seems to need less 'tweaking' than previous generations of Ubuntu.

[beckerb]

Hi!

After trying eeeBuntu NBR, I am right now using fluxflux eee, which is a modified version of PcOSLinux or so, it is gtk based, fast, nice, everything works besides my bluetooth dongle.....

I don´t really need more.

Greetings from Austria.

[jfv]

I have a 2G surf. I left the Xandros on the SSD because I want all the hardware to work and it hasn't given me any major grief. I now have both ubuntu and puppeee installed on removable media and I am playing with them. I recommend unetbootin to create bootable usb sticks or sd cards. Works great on a standard ubuntu desktop.

[Tom61]

A recommendation when installing another distro to an SDHC card; don't use the internal SSD for /home. If you fill up /home Xandros can't even boot and KDE can't load in other distros (IceWM did load in Mandriva, but it complained about dcopserver interprocess communications). I accidentally filled up /home (16GB SSD) by copying files from an external disc that I meant to copy to SDHC card, which had enough room, to the internal SSD, which didn't.

If I install another distro, I'll likely just have /home be on the card, and link to the internal SSD from there.