Ubuntu 8.10 on an EeePC 701

What follows is a record of my struggle and success with installing and configuring my EeePC 701 with vanilla Ubuntu 8.10. My decision to install Ubuntu rather than a distro that was tailored for the EeePC stems from the unfortunate experience of installing Easy Peasy.

The system itself worked as installed, but it seriously lacked in the support and documentation area. In fact, the straw that broke my back was when after following instructions in Easy Peasy's own wiki, I couldn't get GDM to load even after reverting back to the pre-wiki changes. I even had to use my 8.10 boot disk to get back into the system because it was stuck in read-only. Talk about frusterating.

So I decided to use the standard Ubuntu 8.10 desktop distro and do all the customization & tweaking myself, a decision that I don't regret. True to form, Ubuntu's documentation and community support have more then come through for me time and again.

Rather than break the whole thing down into one big post, here's my plan for documenting this project:

1. Installing Ubuntu 8.10 & the Array.org kernel
   
2. Installing applications
   • Wicd
   • VLC
   • Trayer
   • Conky
   • Firefox
   • Gnome-Do
     
3. Customizing the appearance (eye candy)
   
4. Customizing the interface
   • User interaction
   • Dashboard
     
5. Cleaning up