Okay, to be quite honest my Debian Lenny 64-bit Toshiba Satellite Pro A300 laptop is really fast. Certainly the fastest machine that I’ve ever used, problem is that makes you hungry for more speed. So far I have followed several of the suggestions included in this Debian EeePC page, for example adding the relatime option to the disks.

I’ve also switched on boot concurrency and installed preload, as discussed in this forum thread. Early days, but it does feel very snappy indeed. The bootup doesn’t seem much faster, although apparently preload can slow things up a tad, but it is still around one minute, including about 5 seconds for the bios and another 15 seconds for typing in the kdm and kwalletmanager passwords.

I’ve also moved the unmountnfs.sh from the shutdown scripts to position 14, to enable this to be completed before closing the network services. This has dramatically improved the shutdown performance.

Follow these links for more information:

• Debian EeePC Tips & Tricks
• Debian Forum Topic

Lastly, exim4 is installed by default, but you really don’t need this if, like me, you send/receive mail through a dedicated server, this shaves a second or two from the boot process.

I guess the logical replacement distro to install on an eepc, is the Ubuntu EeePC remix. To be quite honest I think you have to have a pretty compelling reason to go anywhere else. My compelling reasons were that I just wanted a standard distro, that I know well and can look after without having to learn new skills; as a KDE user I ideally wanted access to KDE apps. It really was always going to be Debian Lenny EeePC.

The installation instructions were an absolute doddle, which really don’t require any help from me. I installed KDE, expecting it to be a bit sluggish, but the great surprise is that it is really fast.

All in all a really good experience and it really is lovely to be typing this on my Debian Lenny EeePC.

Thank you Debian.

When my old Dell laptop died, I naturally fell back to using my EeePC. Now I’ve been using my EeePC for about six months now, and a very happy user I have been. When I first bought it, I visited eeeuser.com to enable me to add icons to the easy mode interface, so that I could add openvpn and NoMachine NX for connecting to our LTSP server. Once done I had an ideal machine for taking notes and doing occasional server admin from the shell, and even connect to our LTSP server via VPN.

So now my old Dell laptop has died, and without warning my eeepc has been promoted to primary laptop. So of course I wanted to bring it all up-to-date, I went into the upgrade option and saw that there were several upgrades waiting, which I duly installed. This whole process felt scarily reminiscent of Windows Update… Sure enough my custom icons had all disappeared, but fortunately I had anticipated this and had taken a backup of the simpleui.rc. But the problem went deeper than that, I found that Xandros had changed the whole file structure, and even when I found the new locations for the simpleue.rc file, my custom icons were simply ignored.

Some Googling “eeepc lost icons” found that I was not alone, but there was seemingly no fix for the problem (I think solutions have since been discovered). In any case, I was by now feeling pretty fed up with such a non-standard system, so decided to leave Xandros and go to a standard Debian distro… more on this in due course.