Finding a decent OS for my Asus EEE 1000he

Last fall, after my one year old Macbook battery died and Apple refused to fix it I decided to spend twice as much as a replacement battery to buy myself a new Asus EEE 1000he netbook instead.

I intended this computer to fulfill note taking at the university, browsing, media playing and to serve as a calculator (Matlab/Maple).

The machine came pre-installed with Windows XP Home and I quickly replaced that with EEEbuntu 3 and have been running that for 4 months. The main problem I have with EEEbuntu is that it's not maintained and the Gnome desktop environment seems to be sucking the life out of my little netbook.

My quest is to find a netbook operating system with the following qualities:

• Fast booting
• Lightweight desktop environment
• Ability to browse (preferably using Chromium)
• Flawless hardware support for my 1000he
• Run Maple and Matlab

I will be going through the candidates and updating each review as I hopefully will be able to find an operating system to my liking.

Moblin 2.1

Intel's effort in improving start-up times and performance on their Atom based computers. The user-interface is a Gnome based environment with a completely custom user-interface. Now maintained by the Linux foundation. The distribution appears to be built on-top of a Redhat as it uses RPM and Yum.

The good

• Startup time: 37 seconds (from power-button to working interface)
• Performance: Desktop effects working fine and everything feels snappy
• Interface: Lightweight, pretty and overall "snappy".
• Hardware support: Wireless, bluetooth and graphics worked without any effort

The bad

• Touchpad: Way too sensitive default setting and no way (despite some intensive web searching and terminal browsing) to disable the touchpad-tap "feature".
• Preferences: No settings or preferences options anywhere in sight. Was able to dig up the gnome-control-center from the terminal though
• Wireless: Constantly dropping my wireless connection and failing to retry
• Browsing: Although perfectly usable, extremely slow compared to Chromium
• Media: Unable to find a way to browse network shares from the interface and digging up Nautilus from the terminal isn't really that nice.

Conclusion: 4/10

The two things I love about the Moblin system is the welcome screen that integrates pretty much everything you need onto one place and the impressive startup-time.

The deal-breaker here was being unable to disable the touchpad-tap feature that clicks the selected area automatically if I happen to touch the touchpad while typing. That is the most single annoying thing when using netbook and laptop computers. Poor wireless performance is also an issue and the high learning curve of the Moblin interface.

Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix

This is essentially Ubuntu 9.10 with some minor changes to the Gnome shell to optimize the screen space. The interface can be changed back to normal Gnome if wanted.

The good

• Software availability: It's Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution. You can get almost anything working on it.
• Touchpad: Touchpad clicking (tapping) easily disabled in 'references' and two finger scrolling enabled there as well (although not by default).

The bad

• Startup time: 61 seconds. Almost twice as long as the Moblin.
• Two finger scrolling: The computer comes equipped with a multi-touch touchpad that allows you to scroll by using two fingers on the screen. This is not enabled by default.
• Media: Crippled by default. No mp3, no video and no flash after installation.
• Netbook interface: Start out ok, but getting rid-off it way too complicated (compared to 9.04). So if you do not like the netbook interface, install vanilla Ubuntu 9.10 instead

Conclusion: 8/10

Although the out-of-box experience is somewhat lacking, getting flash and other media support can be easily fixed. Installing the 'flashplugin-nonfree' package takes care of flash support and decent "plugin-wizards" take care of other multimedia codec problems.

My big beef is the 61 second startup time and the heavy interface, but otherwise it's almost perfect.

I managed to reduce the boot-up time to 45 seconds and making Gnome snappier by using a raw pixmap GTK theme (I know it's Windows looking but it's fast).