From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc
Groovy hepcat c186282 was jivin' in comp.os.linux.misc on Mon, 11 Aug
2025 01:05 pm. It's a cool scene! Dig it.
Wish I still had my EEEPC, but I dropped it off
a roof alas trying to align a security cam. As
best I recall, MX was the only distro with a
smart enough version of Grub to recognize
the M.2 "ssd".
My first laptop was a EEEPC701, the smallest of the EEEPC family, with
4GB ssd. I read a review of this machine in Linux Format, then looked
for a vendor advertising this machine. I rushed straight to the one
with the best advertised price, told the salesman exactly what I
wanted, and away I went with my new toy. :)
I didn't like the Xandros-based OS that was installed, for a few
reasons:
1) the overlay file system meant that the available storage space was
divided in two,
2) I didn't like the UI, and
3) it was based on Xandros, which I just didn't care for.
After hearing about Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I decided that would be a
better option. Unfortunately the UI that came with that also sucked! An
early version of Unity, in a later version of UNR, was unusable. And my internet connection was slow and unable to download a new UI (I prefer KDE3/Trinity), so I installed KDE3 from a Debian disk. I had to be
careful what to install, because the wrong thing could make part of UNR uninstall, borking the whole system!
Some years later the little fella developed a problem. The fan
controller chip went into melt-down, causing the whole machine to
overheat. This is apparently a common problem with the EEEPC. It was
almost dead in the water. I quickly bought a second hand replacement.
There was just enough life left in the dying machine to boot from a USB
stick and copy the entire contents of the ssd to a file, then copy this
to the new one, saving the day just before the old machine gave up the
ghost. It never booted again.
When, a few weeks later the new EEEPC also puked-up its fan
controller, I was more careful with it. At first I got a laptop cooler
table thingie, and operated the machine with its bottom access panel
open. Then later I found a workaround online. If you remove a wire
(actually I removed two) from the fan cable, it runs continuously at
full speed, taking the broken controller out of the equation.
Anyhow, some time later, I found and bought another second hand
EEEPC701. This one is a later version of the machine. It had more
storage (8GB I think), but to my utter chagrin had a different
touchpad. This one didn't support edge scrolling and corner tapping,
which I had been using for years, since that first EEEPC. It had
multi-touch instead - absolutely inappropriate for such a tiny
touchpad! Just one of my huge flingers trook up enough splace on that
thing, let alone the two, three or four needed to middle-click,
right-click or scroll! So I took the touchpad out of the old, dead
EEEPC and put it in this new one; and lo and behold, it worked
perfectly, just the way the gods intended! And with the OS copied from
the other one, it works the way I want it to.
Somewhere along the line I also got a larger EEEPC, the 9 inch version
I think, but seldom use it these days. I still occasionally take it out
and do stuff with it.
Anyhow, the point is that EEEPCs are still perfectly good Linux
laptops, even if their screens, keyboards and touchpads are quite
teensy. Mine (apart from the dead first one, of course) are still
working, and I still use one of them every day. I keep it beside my
bed, and use it for several purposes, even connecting to the bigger PC
on the other side of the room. As long as its fan controller doesn't go kablooey on ya, the 701 is a veritable boon. And even if it does, you
can work around that.
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