Being a huge fan of Ubuntu, I’ve been using the OS on most of my hardware for quite some time – including my first release spec Eee PC 701. Originally running Ubuntu 7.04 and then upgraded to 7.10, it’s always been a bit ‘finicky’ – mainly as a result of the non-standard hacks I’ve had to implement to get things like the shortcut keys working.

I decided the time had come to move to something a bit newer, however, and have just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04.  Using the ISO from the Ubuntu Eee website, it was a fairly painless install.  I was disappointed to see that the installer didn’t set up fstab in the manner I prefer – with a limited number of writes on the internal SSD available, I like to put /tmp, /var, and others on a tmpfs mount – but that was easily sorted.

What wasn’t quite so easy was the wireless.  Unfortunately, Asus have opted to use one of Atheros’s less supported wireless chipsets in the Eee – with no official Linux driver available.  The madwifi-ng driver included as part of the Ubuntu-Eee package sort of worked, but tended to drop out rather frequently – oddly, when the signal was at its strongest rather than its weakest.

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