Ubuntu on the Asus Eee ultraportable

In just a few short days since it began shipping, this little devil is a huge hit (“selling one every six seconds”). The Eee PC 4G is available in Canada through Canada Computers for $399 (Currently out of stock), The Source, pccanada.com, infonec.com and NCIX.com (out of stock until Nov 14th). A few entrepreneurs are trying to ebay the unit for $450 to $500. Is this becoming the impossible-to-find-must-have of Xmas07?

There are some nice previews on YouTube showing just how darn small the machine is. (Dimensions: 22.5 x 16.4 x 2.15~3.5 cm. Weight: 0.92 Kg ) The windows XP boot time appears to be under half a minute. The battery life is listed at 3.5 hours. The display is 7-inches with 800×480-pixels, and has a 4GB flash hard drive. It appears to have a quite rare 2 year warranty.

Although it comes preloaded with Xandros Linux, Rupert Goodwins at ZDNet installed Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 on it. The wifi aparently needs ndiswrapper to work. He says that a full Ubuntu install uses up 2.3GB of the internal 4GB SDD.  Another user  reports that an Xubuntu install uses up only 1.4gb  of the SDD.

There’s a discussion forum at Eeuser.com for a step by step guide to loading Ubuntu on the Eee.

It would be interesting to benchmark the Eee PC runing Rescubuntu or Helix and doing a dd image from one external USB2.0 hard drive to another. It could be an ideal portable setup for forensics and data recovery.