While I’m babysitting (hehe) the Madre as she recovers from surgery, I’ve taken the time to update the look and feel of my EeePC netbook. I didn’t think the Intel graphics would handle Compiz, so I thought I had no chance of running Avant Window Navigator (AWN). Boy was I wrong! This netbook continues to amaze me.. oh yeah did I mention it pushed a full 1900×1200 resolution via VGA output to our bedroom TV? Hawtness. Here’s the final product so far
Ooooh purdy
While I love my EEEpc, browsing the web with that 8″ screen can be interesting at times. I found this handy little (pun intended) add-on for Firefox called Littlefox. Essentially, this add-on shrinks the application footprint of Firefox, allowing you more screen space for actual browsing. A must have for any netbook owner.
Finally (Woot shipping suxors) the EeePC arrived yesterday. After a full charge, I fired up the mini-laptop to see what this bad boy could do. From cold boot to functional O/S = 25 seconds. Impressive!
The packaged O/S (Xandros Linux) isn’t horrible, but it seemed to be the Mac version of Linux. Limited sub-menus, no shell access, etc. Hell, there wasn’t even a package manager installed! After 45 minutes of playing around I decided it was time to grace this baby with some Fedora love.
The LiveUSB boot to install was quick and easy. There were some driver issues with the microphone that I’m still hashing out (aka annoying Jillian with the constant speaker squeals at 11pm) but other than that everything was fully functional.
The 4GB SSD was immediately full after patching all critical and bug updates, so I paid a visit (literally) to NewEgg for my new 16GB SSD and 2GB memory module. Once those are in I will have myself a mini-laptop capable of just about anything Linux based!
