After neglecting my Asus EeePC 701 Netbook for a number of months, I’ve now loaded a new Operating System onto it. The Netbook had fallen into misuse even before I started “playing” with UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PCs). The UMPCs with all their miniature delights almost put the Asus EeePC right out of my thoughts.

Then, a several days ago I charged it up , booted up and looked at the same old pre-installed linux Operating System, which for some reason is giving error messages when I try to get updates. Fortunately, I had just seen (and downloaded) Eeebuntu, after reading “Let Eeebuntu Free your Eee PC” on the GHacks blog.

I followed the steps mentioned in the blog. This took longer than expected - which is almost always the case when working with computers – the third step (”Plug in a >= 1 Gig Usb flash drive to your computer.“) taking the longest. For some reason the smallest USB flash drive I could find was a 4GB SanDisk micro. It had files on it, so I had a “quick” glance through them, backed some up, then deleted them from them removable drive; formatting it would definitely have been faster. An hour or so later I had Eeebuntu installed on my Asus EeePC 701 Netbook.

Now the downside. I should have spent a little more time trying it out, because for some reason the screen resolution is cutting off the bottom of dialog boxes. What that means is that I cannot see the buttons at the bottom of the dialog boxes to apply settings (I need to look at an Ubuntu distribution on another PC to see what the buttons are). Once I know the layout of those all important buttons, I can change the screen resolution and join the Asus EeePC to my home wireless network…