Before I went travelling I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my EEE because I wanted something relatively stable and that I was familiar with. Now that I’m back, I want to hack around with it a bit so, so yesterday I installed Arch Linux on it.
There is a pretty comprehensive guide to installing Arch on the EEE which I followed for the most part. Between that and the beginners guide, the installation and initial configuration were relatively straightforward. I installed from the 2009.02 FTP USB image, using a wired ethernet connection to download the required packages during the installation phase, but the EEE wireless card was supported “out of the box” on the first boot (after selecting the wireless-tools and netcfg packages).
The base installation was simple enough after a bit of reading. However, configuring Xorg almost drove me mad! After spending most of the day reading through the ArchWiki Xorg article, I finally came upon the (partial) solution of ignoring the xorg.conf file completely and relying instead on the startx command and the hal daemon. This left me with a couple of problems related to the keyboard layout, but did give me an X11 environment capable of supporting Gnome.
Installing Gnome was as simple as typing pacman -S gnome, but I’d recommend installing the gnome-extra package too while you’re at it, as the gnome package is pretty minimal to say the least!
I had no problems with sound or the internal microphone, and following the ACPI section of the guide enabled the hotkeys, OSD and power button to function correctly.
I’m still tweaking my setup here and there, but the system seems stable so far. It was a lot more work than simply installing Ubuntu or Fedora, but I think it was worth it to get a smaller, faster system running on the EEE’s (quite limited) hardware.