eee PCs Boot Booster
Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:12 - Daniel - Other - Comments (2)
All eee PCs have a feature called Boot Booster. This caches the Bios and Video Bios onto the HDD and speeds up booting by a few seconds.
To enable it you have to set up a primary partition on the first HDD with at least 8 MB and the type code 0xEF.
After the next reboot the Bios will cache itself into this partition and a new option is available in the Boot options called Boot Booster. Enable it and the eee PC will skill Bios loading and Bios configuration and will directly load the Boot Loader.
Tags: bios eee asus
Debian for eee PC
Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:53 - Daniel - Other - Comments (2)
I used fluxflux for quite some time on my eee Pc, but I didn't really like the PCLinuxOS it was based on. It worked quite well for some time, but the last release is kinda aged and after upgrading the OS I had some serious problems. Since I prefer Debian based systems anyway I took a quick look at Debian Lenny and Ubuntu.
Ubuntu has a special version for netbooks called Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It's not as heavy as a full Ubuntu install, but it's still quite big. Also I has a few problems with the eee 701.
Debian on the other hand can be installed with only a minimum system that uses very little space (I know, ubuntu can do that too with it's alternate installer CDs) and supports pretty much everything on the eee 701 thanks to the work of the DebianEeePC Project.
Installing it is very simple. Just follow the steps of the HowTo. I installed just the standard system and later added the x.org, gnome-core, gdm, network-manager and iceweasel by hand. After that the OS install is just about 1 GB and some stuff even is optional. For example you can skip gdm and network-manager tofree a few MB if you don't need a fancy graphical login and manage your connections manually.
The only thing that doesn't work at the moment is changing the volume with the function keys, but I don't really need that anyway.
To sum it up, Debian on the eee PC is very nice. Boot time is lightning fast and the hardware works "out of the box". If you think about installing another OS on your eee PC, Debian would be a good choise.
Tags: linux ubuntu fluxflux debian asus eee
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