ASUS Eee 1008HA – I fixed that for you

The ASUS Eee 1008HA is the latest in the popular line of ‘netbooks’ that are reportedly taking over the world, or at least the consumer electronics portion thereof. We picked one up from Amazon for about $419 as a way to keep in touch during summer travels (because, really, what good is a vacation if you can’t have a daily internet fix), and keep our darling 2-year-old entertained with some pre-recorded digital media during a 5-hour plane trip.

So, it all worked according to plan, and even with a modest 1280×600 screen resolution and an almost freakishly glossy screen, I have only one serious gripe: it comes with a sad and outdated operating system that was never much good even when it was new.

Fortunately, it is pretty easy to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the 80Gb secondary partition, making a nice dual-boot platform. We only leave the DOS partition in place because unfortunately a Digital Restrictions Management system is necessary to allow us to view certain TiVo Desktop files and DVDs (which I will refrain from ranting about now).

A few tips and tricks picked up so far:

• Ubuntu Netbook Remix was the easiest to install for me, because it comes as a .img file which can be put directly on a 1GB or larger USB stick with good old ‘dd’ and then simply plugged into the netbook – no GUI helpers needed.
• Pressing <Esc> key during bootup (have to be quick!) will allow you to enter BIOS setup and make sure the USB device is first in the boot order. Also turning off ‘Quick Boot’ and other optimizations may or may not be necessary (I have some attempts where the PC seemed to stubbornly ignore the presence of the bootable USB drive)
• Neither wired or wireless hardware worked out-of-the box, as the drivers have not quite made it through to release in UNR. But, this awesome blog post led to this helpful Amazon review which solved that problem.
• UNR is great and suits this hardware very well – have not used anything except Redhat-based distros for a few years but so far I like it. I did find it necessary to reduce the size of the default desktop icons, for aesthetic reasons.
• Although I have not yet ridded myself of Windows, it is apparently quite easy to get a refund if you do.

Other gripe – the mouse/trackpad is incredibly sensitive and when I am typing, any proximity of the thumb causes a click or movement in some random place on the screen. This is an annoyance shared by most laptops (except for those having the famous and sadly almost-extinct nipple mouse). So I will have to research a way to reduce this effect somehow, some way.

If you are thirsting for more detail on my ever valuable opinions about this machine, see my Amazon review and my attempt to be helpful on the Ubuntu web fora.