GoblinX Mini on the EEE PC
April 12, 2008 – 12:01 pmI love the era we are living in and sometimes i really wish I had an EEE Pc earlier. Low cost computers keep coming, and there isn’t a week ending without another good linux release…
The linux distribution we tried this week is GoblinX Mini edition.
GoblinX is a slackware-based linux distribution from Brazil.
You can download it from here, it is only 153.4MB in size and you make a live usb with ease, just like slax, by uncompressing the archive on a USB pendrive or an SD card and run the command sudo sh bootinst.sh from a linux terminal, or run bootinst.bat from a windows system.
Booting the system takes quite some time, about 1mn50s. However, you can choose from many booting modes, including a Rlinux firewall mode, and a “fastiest” mode reducing the booting time significantly.
The GoblinX customized Xfce desktop is very pleasant on the eee pc, and gives the feeling of being easy to use. The upper bar contains the menu for choosing programs, four virtual desktops, and three usage indicators, for CPU, memory, and swap.
The following function hotkeys worked out of the box on the Asus eee pc:
- Fn+F2 toggles wifi connectivity on and off.
- Fn+F3(F4) handles the screen brightening
- Fn+Downward (upward) Arrow for page down (up)
- Fn+11 for numeric pad lock, as well as Fn+12 for Screen lock
Closing down the lid didn’t put the eee pc in a hibernation mode, neither did it turn off the screen.
The GoblinX team bundled a utility called Magic Center, regrouping various tasks such as tweaking advanced settings, System performance, desktop appearance, Hardware settings, and contains a tool to remaster or create an ISO image of the system.
The software suite includes the lightweight Abi word processor, gnumeric spreadsheet, and Calendar instead of openoffice.
The multimedia part is covered by Audacious music player, and Totem video player. Grip is able to extract and encode music from a cd rom, and Brasero can burn dvds.
On the networking part, the Mozilla firefox browser is included, as well as Pidgin messenger. A download manager is also provided, urlgfe.
The Gimps handles picture creation and editing, while gThumb will do the picture viewing part.
I’m writing this article from the live usb, in Abi, and the only 1% of the CPU is used, as well as 225MB of RAM memory. When adding firefox to the math, about 240MB of RAM is used.
All in all, Goblinx is a nice and easy to use system, with a slackware pedigree garanting a stable and secure environment.
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