I thought I was a good boy for installing all of Asus’s updates to my EeePC 701, which I’ve used for six months without a problem. But, one of the more recent updates left me without a way to launch programs after it booted.
Ok, I needed to clear off the hard drive (flash memory, technically) and install an operating system. I could have grabbed the recovery disk and reinstalled the stock operating system, an outdated version of Xandros Linux which Asus customized for the machine. But as long as I had this tabula rasa in front of me, why not try out a full-blown, modern Linux distro on there? After some reading, I chose Ubuntu-eee.
At its core, the EeePC 701 sports an Intel Celeron CPU and an integrated Intel video chip. So, pretty much any PC operating system will install on it. But, the screen resolution is 800×480, while most Linux distros assume at least an 800×600 display these days, causing the bottoms of windows to get cut off. Second, the wireless card uses an Atheros chipset, which isn’t always recognized right away. Lastly, people worry about the limited number of writes a flash cell can endure before it fails, so there are tweaks to minimize writes.
I burned Ubuntu-eee to a CD and installed it, a pretty painless process. As soon as the fresh install booted, it told me there were software updates available, and I dutifully installed them to make my laptop as functional and secure as possible.
That was a mistake — an updated wifi driver left me unable to connect to anything. Son of a…
I googled around and found the “Ricey script“. It’s a shell script for Ubuntu on EeePCs that downloads a patched version of the Atheros wifi driver, installs an overclocking script (bumping the CPU up to its rated 900MHz), fixes sound, adds handlers for the hotkeys (fn+1, fn+2, etc.) and takes care of a nasty problem where the thing just wont shut off. It’s a great script, provided free by a member of the community, and it fixed all of my problems.
But…why was it necessary? Aside from the overclocking, all it does is fix driver and ACPI issues. Why did an update cripple my system like that in the first place? Sure, I’ve had that problem with other operating systems, and I know Apple isn’t immune to this kind of problem. But in this case, the fixes were already out there, and have been for a while. Why weren’t they included in the distro, either Ubuntu-eee or Ubuntu itself? Why did I have to find the fix on a message board? Asus didn’t have these kind of problems with their stock distro! They managed to break their custom program launcher, but I never had any system-crippling driver issues like this.
Overall, Ubuntu-eee is great. I used to love how the stock OS booted in 30 seconds and let me get right to work. After experiencing Ubuntu-eee, I don’t know if I can go back, and I can live with a 65-second boot. I’m a little put off by my experience getting it running, though. Linux on the desktop? Not when I have to download & run a shell script just to get it going.
August 6th, 2008 at 3:35 am
Nice review!
The reason Ubuntu doesn’t support the wifi out of the box is because the wifi driver isn’t clean nor good code. Upgrading Ubuntu Eee shouldn’t stop wifi from working - seems you’ve been very unlucky.
And yeah, the ricey script is great! He’s part of the Ubuntu Eee development
Get Ubuntu Eee 8.04.1 (www.jonramvi.com) when it’s released. It’s harder better faster stronger. Meaning the boot time is reduced and the wifi driver is better.