BSD on a Netbook.......

[OVERKILL]

I bought my wife a EEEPC netbook a few Christmases ago, I believe it is a 1005, anyway, she just inherited my HP cr@ptop, as work bought me a nice new Lenovo T-series, so I decided to see how BSD runs on this thing. The cheap ones came with a customized Linux distro, but this has the larger 160GB hard drive, so a full-blown install will be fine.

For ease of GUI use and software install, I chose PC-BSD, since it is based on my favourite: FreeBSD. And should be simple enough for my wife to use when she wants to use it.

How many have done the experimentation with these devices and *NIX distro's? I know there are quite a few Linux distributions geared at Netbooks; some even geared specifically at this model.

 

[apwillard1986]

I have a Dell Vostro A90 (Dell Mini 9) that has recently become my distro test bed. It runs Lubuntu like it was built for it. The distro it shipped with was a modified ubuntu with which I was unimpressed. I ran Mac OS X on it for a year. When

I was 11 or 12 my friends and I used to have to work our tails off to get any distro to work properly on hardware we knew was compatible. Nowadays it almost all plug and play. Alot of that thanks to a very generous open source community.

 

[Colt45ws]

I run Gentoo on my EeePC 1000HE. In fact, I just rebuilt it because I messed it up and the was the quickest way to fix it.
Since its all compiled from scratch its fully optimized for the Atom. Its actually surprisingly quick.. I run XFCE for the GUI and it starts up quick.
Bad thing is, compilation is a nightmare. Takes forever. But thats alright. I just fire up a Linux VM on my i7 and use DistCC to distribute compilation to it. The i7 yawns and its done.
Oh yeah! Something Ive found that really helps on these with linux kernels, is to use Con Koliva's BFS Scheduler patch. Does WONDERS.
Also, BTRFS filesystem with LZO compression enabled helps too.

Linux littlepip 2.6.39.4-zen #5 ZEN SMP PREEMPT Mon Oct 24 02:27:37 GMT 2011 i686 Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N280 @ 1.66GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

 

[SrDriver]

Tried BSD 9 RC on my Desktop connected by Ethernet to the net and it worked OK.

On my Laptop had a lot of issues using wireless connections.

Ended up using Debian LXDE on my Netbook and it works fine.

 

[greenaccord02]

I've run all kinds of stuff on my 900 and have never had bad experiences. The atheros chipset on which their wireless is based seems pretty universally supported. Everything else has been 100% fine no matter what.

 

[OVERKILL]

Yes, everything seems to be supported well on this right out of the box, and it is much faster than XP. I'm very fond of BSD, FreeBSD in particular.