EEEnchanting

The weekend brought a brief respite from the march of the daily schedule. I used some of my “discretionary free time” to continue to work on configuring my EEE laptop. [Also, Dawn and I got 2 more components stained for the never ending bookcase project.]

My esteem from my little EEE continues to grow. By “work on configuring” I of course mean playing around with the boot sector of my EEE until it no longer will boot…twice. This should have been the source of great consternation…but the folks who make the EEE predicted I would foolishly hack away at their little computer and sent a “plan B” care packed with it. Included with the EEE is a CD which will allow you to create a bootable USB stick with the EEE Xandros Linux on it. Once you create that you can simply plug it into your EEE and tell the laptop to boot off the USB stick. Tada! You now have an EEE with a factory fresh OS installation on it.

Killing my EEE the first time.
The first time I rendered my EEE unbootable was due to removing Xubuntu form it…which is a cool story in and of itself (I’m guessing I’m using a definition of “cool” not widely shared). I managed to install Xubuntu (another flavor of Linux) onto an 8GB SDHC card and boot off it. Keep in mind that my EEE only has 2GB of internal HD space. I turned my little laptop into a dual booting machine with Xandros on the 2GB disk and Xubuntu on the 8GB card. That’s pretty cool. Ultimately I decided to get rid of Xubuntu because, while it was cool, it wasn’t very useful for my long term goal. [My long term goal is to make the EEE my mobile research computer]. Evidently in the process of making the computer a dual boot I wrote some mojo onto the main disk. In removing the second operating system I didn’t get the mojo right and it blew up in my face.

Killing my EEE the second time.
Once I got my EEE back up and running after removing Xubuntu I decided what I really wanted to was to try to extend my 2GB internal drive with the 8GB SDHC card. The default partitioning of the EEE has two partitions. One partition has all the factory supplied software on it and the other had all the user added software on it. The idea was to move the user partition from the internal drive to the 8GB SDHC card and link it so the operating system didn’t notice the change. Effectively this greatly increasing the available space I’d have to install software (which is nice because the LaTeX software eats up most of the free space on the 2GB model). Once again I had to do some mojo so that the computer would mount the SDHC card during boot up and not notice I pulled a quick one. I botched the mojo on the first attempt and rendered the computer unbootable. Luckily I was able to boot off a USB drive and take another stab at the mojo…which I got right the second time. So now my EEE has as much storage as the EEE’s that sell for $200 more.

Of course the fun isn’t over yet. While everything appears to be working that doesn’t mean it’s all stable. I’ll have to use it for a few weeks before I’m convinced this is a stable configuration. Hopefully things will continue to work and I’ll have a viable mobile research computer. Even if I’m sent back to the drawing board I’m mightily impressed by the robustness and possibilities of a tiny $300 laptop.