Eee PC and Xandros: No Thank You

Asus' preinstallation of Xandros on the Eee PC is easy to use but it's no good for people who want to go beyond the out-of-box experience. With that in mind, I'm ditching it.

From now on, it's Xubuntu all the way. I'd rather recompile everything against Asus-provided sources ONCE rather than have to hack around their installs, custom packages, and unionfs. The unionfs is the biggest pain in the butt. To remove it, an initrd needs to be built from scratch, an init script written by hand, and a tricky copy/migration.

This is how the EeePC unionfs works:

The default Xandros OS and software is on one partition and the user gets another partition. They're mounted on top of each other (think "shuffling a deck of cards") using unionfs so that all preinstalled files are "read only." From a recovery standpoint, that's fantastic. It means that a user can NEVER break critical OS files and will always be able to wipe the slate clean in case of file corruption. However - if the user upgrades OpenOffice, Skype, Firefox, or other preinstalled software, the factory copies are not overwritten. They're simply ignored and the newer files (copied into the user space) are used.

If the OS and applications were 1.5 GB of a 40 GB hard drive, this wouldn't be a big deal. There is still plenty of "wiggle room." However, the Eee has only 4GB TOTAL meaning redundant copies of software will sit in unrecoverable storage space. Uninstalling any factory apps will not regain storage space either. Again: If all I wanted to do was use the Eee for what it does out of the box, I wouldn't mind. I want more, though. With that, I'm going to Xubuntu.

An Eeeuser.com forum member built a Xubuntu installation .ISO with the Xubuntu hacks preinstalled. I am testing that now and will send my report to that user. I'm going to volunteer to assist in a comprehensive tear-down of his changes beta test for him and blog about it here.