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eeepclinuxos live usb review

March 16, 2008 – 2:19 pm

Not in my intention to raise the debate, but I have been a KDE user over the years with Mandrake. My production laptop has mandriva and pclinuxos alongside, so I was very curious to test an adaptation of pclinuxos for the eee: eeepclinuxos.
I must state first that the OS is still in a development phase (beta 2), so software glitches are possible. The project is already remarkably mature though.

Creating the boot disk

You can download from the torrent file located here.
To simplify, the process is the following:

1) Burn the iso file.
2) Start your new live disk on another PC (or from the EEE if you have an external drive).
3) In the utilities desktop folder you have a live USB installer.
The tool is very easy to use, it created a bootable live USB for us in a few steps and about seven minutes.

It took 1mn23s for the desktop to load on our EEE. PCLinuxOS has a tradition of great interface design, and this adaption doesn’t disappoint at all. The advanced desktop has a green tone, with a prominent eee pclinuxos logo.

Software

The development team created an exclusive utility: eeepclinux tool.

Choosing “Easy mode” enables an interface looking like the Xandros interface Asus developed.
Overclocking gives you the possiblity to overclock your CPU on the go, raising the frequency from 630MHz to over 900MHz. Quite a brilliant and useful idea if you have to use a resource intensive application! An autologin option is also provided.

Internet tab

Two internet browsers are included, firefox and konqueror. Thunderbird will manage your emails and podcasts, with Kopete as the default multiprotocol chat client. Eeepclos team bundled ekiga softphone, a SIP client. It will allow you to call landlines over the world with you voip provider. Skype is present as well.

Multimedia

The digikam software will manage pictures from your digital camera and photo albums. Inkscape, a quality vector illustrator, was prefered to the Gimp.
Audacity can edit and transform your sounds, apply basic effects and convert between formats.
MP3 playback worked out of the box with Amarok. The Kaffeine player handles the video playback part.

Work tab

The OpenOffice suite covers text processing, presentation and spreadsheet tasks. Mozilla sunbird software will manage your calendar and time.

Eeepclinuxos is a truly promising operating system tailored for the Asus EEE PC, bringing great innovations to the community. We are really impatient and looking forward for the final release to come out.

Beta 3

Since we first wrote this article a new version version was released. The Beta 3 improved in many ways the stability and user experience. KDE was updated, as well as the wifi drivers. Boot time was reduced to only 62 seconds on our system!

I replaced the default Xandros OS with eeepclos, because of all the benefits we mentioned, and the fact you can gain significantly on the SSD memory space. You can do a full install from the live USB pen drive, and a comprehensive step by step guide can be found on the desktop.

I created a little video to show what programs are included with eeepclos, and how the easy mode interface looks.

Official eeePCLinuxOS page

Update: A new beta is out (3-1)