ej, if you can find an Eee PC at a sensible price, you'll probably have a lot of fun with it. Glancing through the forums, half the people who buy them seem to do so with the sole intention of changing both software and hardware as much as humanly possible.
Although the little 701 retains the charm of "an original," it can also be the most infuriating little bundle of binary malevolence imagineable.
First things first - I've finally coaxed Pupeee onto an SD card (and thank you for the link to the forum.) Again, I had to resort to using the desktop and the live CD, rather than the Unetbootin flash drive and Eee PC internal card. I'm immensely grateful to the clever folk who write such useful code and give it away free, and I hope they'll forgive me all my cussing when I come to a grinding halt during an installation - 'cos I can't get to the bit of the page which holds the arrow which needs to be pressed in order to continue. Interestingly, this has only proved almost totally insurmountable (by me) with two OSs intended specifically for the Eee PC. They seemed to totally overlook its unusual screen resolution.
Perhaps they had the 900 and 901 onwards in mind.
I did EVENTUALLY get Eeebuntu from the flash drive (Unetbootin again - great fun, but needs to be installed to something else in order to create a persistent install - I think) onto an expensive 4gb Sandisk SD card. It took a mere seven and a half hours. At least it completed. My Transcend card gave up the ghost after an hour or so - haven't had the courage to try it out on something else to see whether or not it is toast.
(If I plug the card into a USB card reader, it's almost as quick as a standard USB drive. The object of the exercise, though, is to have a second operating system and a little more storage available without a vulnerable USB stick protruding from the computer.)
If anybody knows a simple and affordable solution to the Eee PC's very slow internal card reader (the problem is most accute writing TO the card), please post it here. I'm unashamedly looking for something really simple, please!
A program called Eeectl (I think) seems to do the trick for Eees running XP. It makes it possible to adjust such things as CPU performance without any actual expertise. As soon as I see words like "compile" and "kernel", I realise that I'm really right at the very start of the journey...
The problem may, of course, be a hardware one - seems to be a possible weakness of earlier 701s. Needless to say, the machine is out of warranty. It does seem that there is some hope if a certain amount of tweaking can be done to ensure steady voltage to the card-reader, or something like that. Eeectl (?) apparently allows one to achieve this without actually speeding up the CPU, unless one actually wants to.
The little 701 gets quite hot enough as it is. Apparently, this is mormal - the CPU is rated at 900mhz but underclocked, in standard form, to about 650.
Oh, and it took two hours of chopping and changing between UK and US English and keyboards (amazing variation on offer in Eeebuntu) before I was able to type "|" - necessitated by a command-line resolution copied from a forum to overcome a problem with Eeebuntu's updates. It turns out that to type "|" on a 701, you press AltGr (which I'd figured out) and then "¬."
Hope THAT might help somebody!
So - an educational weekend. And yes, I'm increasingly inclined to think that Linux can be used by we non-geeks, especially in view of the fact that most of the real problems I've had have occurred whilst "playing." With the aid of the internet and forums like this, even a beginner can experiment and mostly come out on top. Although I'm still very much in the early learning stages, I'm already more confident on computers, I think, than I was just a couple of weeks back - which must be a good thing for anyone, especially folk who enjoy online hobbies, and even earn their livelihoods, on sites like eBay.
So - any simple suggestions to enable me to get the Eee Pc's card reader working at a decent rate of speed and reliability would be very welcome!
PS GParted and Super Grub Disc are essential rescue tools for the enthusiastic Linux beginner who decides to use the desktop to tramsfer operating systems between two other media, which themselves need partitioning etc - a couple of little "surprises" when the desk-top suddenly finds itself without one of its two operating systems have been resolved the aid of these two - still not quite sure how - phew!