Alright, so I’ve had some more EEE adventures since my last post.  First off, I need to do a system restore.  I’m amazed that I’m actually still able to be writing this on the EEE.  About an hour ago I was thinking I would have to make a run down to Office Max to pick up an external DVD drive so I could do a restore of the OS.  I’m pretty sure that in trying to install Xubuntu I fubared the boot loader.  Grub will only load when I have the Xubuntu Live CD USB drive in one of the ports.  Not really a fun problem to have.  On the other hand, I do now have an inadvertent security lock on the system!

I will probably wait until tomorrow to do the restore though because the one upside of getting Xubuntu installed is that I can boot into Memtest86 and determine for sure if the memory module that I bought at Fry’s on Friday night is bad or not.  I’m leaning toward not but apparently getting a blue screen of death tied to the PCI.SYS file often means the memory is corrupt.  If it is the case (and somehow possible) it has to somehow be corrupted in a way that it doesn’t bother Xandros and the EEE but somehow prevents XP from loading and installing.  Then again, it could be tied to the fact that I haven’t had much luck with installing OS’s off of USB drives.

The other compelling reason to restore the OS to the factory settings is that the Synaptic Package Manager (basically the Linux equivalent of add/remove programs on a Windows box) is busted because I tried to uninstall Adobe Acrobat Reader.  While I’m completely satisfied with the EEE and how Asus packages it (and all of the issues I am having are tied to things I tried to “hack”) Linux continues to give me problems with things that on a Windows computer just don’t happen.  I’ve never had trouble uninstalling a program in Windows and I’ve never been told I can’t kill a frozen process because I don’t have the right permissions.  Honestly, as funny as it is to see screen shots from airports and bowling alley’s of Windows computers that have crashed, my Vista desktop runs and runs and runs while I can’t operate the EEE for more than about an hour before something crashes or requires me to reboot.  On the upside, reboots take about 15 seconds so it’s not like they are a big inconvenience.

I may still end up finding a way to get XP on here before I head out to Uganda but for now I’ll just stick with Xandros.  One small victory I had the other day was getting Wine installed on here so that I can run Windows programs.  I was able to get Baseball Mogul to install, but unfortunately it wouldn’t render the entire lineup screen so I had to give up on that.  The other thing it lead me to discover is that the 4gig SSD of the EEE is actually separated into two partitions, one fixed and one that the user can edit.  The biggest downside to this is that when you go through and remove all of the programs you don’t need/want, you don’t actually gain any usable space.  I found about 500mb of programs and language packs (I don’t need Chinese language support) I wanted to remove but that would have no impact on the amount of space I have as the user.  Apparently there are ways around this but the involve making changes to the SSD that are hard to reverse without an external DVD drive.

So for now that’s where things stand.  I still don’t have any regrets with the hardware but I think I would be much, much happier in a familiar XP environment instead of the capable but unpredictable environment of Linux.

Filed under: life by Jonathan Assink