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I've just bought myself an old Eee PC 901 from eBay. It's primarily going to be used for web browsing, reading eBooks, classwork for the community college web design course I'm hoping to enroll in soon and occasionally as a media centre. Current OS is Windows XP but I want something that will boot quicker and take up less RAM. I've also rather gone off Ubuntu since the Unity desktop came in.

Any suggestions?

EDIT: Sod it. Wrong forum, sorry.

I'd suggest Linux Mint for a simple Linux OS (I have Mint on my Eee PC). If you really want a flavor of Ubuntu I'd suggest Xubuntu. From personal experience, regular Ubuntu will absolutely crush an Eee PC.

Punted to GEC

Thanks Dalton.

The lightest you can go while still using relatively modern versions of packages is a stripped down Arch Linux installation, but it's exceedingly annoying to set up and the community is unbearable; the time spent making it work would probably be better invested working to earn money to buy a better computer.
I have heard good things about http://crunchbang.org/

TronPaul wrote:I'd suggest Linux Mint for a simple Linux OS (I have Mint on my Eee PC). If you really want a flavor of Ubuntu I'd suggest Xubuntu. From personal experience, regular Ubuntu will absolutely crush an Eee PC.

The laptop I bought from Ebay is slightly better than his and I'm running Ubuntu (12.04) without any lags. I've also looked up the systems specs for Ubuntu and Zaune's Eee should be able to handle it without any trouble.

EDIT: Zaune, did you pay much for the Eee?

Assuming that running a resource-starved virtual machine would have similar requirements, I've had good experiences with Lubuntu. It claims to be lighter than Xubuntu, and it performs quite well in a VM on a crappy laptop, so I'd assume it would do OK on actual hardware.

Enigma wrote:Zaune, did you pay much for the Eee?

£55 (about US$86), including shipping and handling.

Melchior wrote:The lightest you can go while still using relatively modern versions of packages is a stripped down Arch Linux installation, but it's exceedingly annoying to set up and the community is unbearable; the time spent making it work would probably be better invested working to earn money to buy a better computer.
I have heard good things about http://crunchbang.org/

Arch isn't horrible to to setup... of course I say this coming after spending 8 years running Gentoo.

But I'd recommend Crunchbang. It's simple to setup, has minimal requirements to run well and is based on debian so you have access to that entire library of packages.

Zaune, do you have any preferences regarding window managers and desktop environments? Package management too, for that matter.

I suggest puppy linux.
Boots from a CD, and is able to operate on a very wide variety of graphics cards.

Xisiqomelir wrote:Zaune, do you have any preferences regarding window managers and desktop environments? Package management too, for that matter.

Not particularly, but GNOME is the one I have most experience with as an end-user. Package management I'm not too fussed about, as I'm not planning to install much besides some ebook reader software.

ryacko wrote:I suggest puppy linux.
Boots from a CD, and is able to operate on a very wide variety of graphics cards.

Booting from a CD is less useful on an EEEpc which doesn't have a CD drive...

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much you'll get out of a 901, it will basically run like a bag of ass no matter what you put on it (The linux distro that came with them Back In The Day is terrible though, I have one and it's total arse)

I have a similar model of Eee pc that I picked up for $200 on a Woot sale a few years ago. Vendetta's right, it's just going to suck. What kills me the most is the 4GB of space it has on the main drive, which is apparently barely enough for a base OS these days.

I'm currently running an older version of Lubuntu on it, but I'm so hard-up for space on it I can't run the latest package updates.

It can be workable, but maybe only for intro to programming assignments (which I used it a lot for!). It chugs on web browsing.

Vendetta wrote:

ryacko wrote:I suggest puppy linux.
Boots from a CD, and is able to operate on a very wide variety of graphics cards.

Booting from a CD is less useful on an EEEpc which doesn't have a CD drive...

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much you'll get out of a 901, it will basically run like a bag of ass no matter what you put on it (The linux distro that came with them Back In The Day is terrible though, I have one and it's total arse)

There are some distros that boot from a USB drive.

ryacko wrote:

Vendetta wrote:

ryacko wrote:I suggest puppy linux.
Boots from a CD, and is able to operate on a very wide variety of graphics cards.

Booting from a CD is less useful on an EEEpc which doesn't have a CD drive...

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much you'll get out of a 901, it will basically run like a bag of ass no matter what you put on it (The linux distro that came with them Back In The Day is terrible though, I have one and it's total arse)

There are some distros that boot from a USB drive.

Most livecd based distros will boot from an USB drive just fine.

GNOME would not be recommended for it, even 2.x is resource heavy a bit. You'll better off with a XFCE.

Another very small footprint linux would be Damn Small Linux for it.