Thanks to my compulsive tendency to install every vaguely intriguing application I come across, and a bad habit of tweaking stuff without really understanding what I’m doing, my Eee PC went a but wonky recently. So I did the F9 trick, which resets the Eee to its default state—a great feature, that—and worked out what I really need on the thing.
So, here are the steps I took to turn a stock Eee into the perfect machine for writing on the move.
- Enable Advanced Desktop Mode, because Easy Mode is just silly.
- Add extra repositories, from which to download applications not provided by Asus.
- Install SSH server, so you can connect your Eee from other computers:
sudo apt-get install openssh-server
- Install Subversion, to keep all your files in sync:
sudo apt-get install subversion (setting up a Subversion repository is left as an exercise for the reader).
- Install AbiWord, because OpenOffice is too slow on the Eee:
sudo apt-get install abiword.
- Install VLC, for playing telly programmes on the train when you can’t be arsed working:
sudo apt-get install vlc
- Tweak Firefox to make it more Eee-friendly:
- Install the MiniFox theme.
- Install the Fullerscreen add-on.
- Install the Google Browser Sync add-on, to keep your bookmarks, passwords and history synchronised with your main computer (optional, but well handy).
- Remember to keep all your stuff on a removable SDHC card, not on the Eee’s internal memory card.
That’s it. The whole procedure takes under ten minutes, most of which is spent waiting for the list of repositories to update and the 15MB AbiWord to download.
I’ve been running the Eee like this for ten days now, and haven’t missed any of the gizmos I’d installed over the last few months. More importantly, the Eee is now as fast as crikey, and I haven’t had a single application crash on me yet.
Just in case anyone thinks I’ve lost the will to tinker, I feel moved to point out that I wrote the above while waiting for a Puppy Linux CD to burn.
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