Further thoughts on the Eee 1215B

So, I'm a few more weeks into using my Asus Eee 1215B netbook. I'm still very happy with it. It's nice and light and the battery life is wonderful. I've been having a lot of issues with it and Linux compatibility, however. I had to run Ubuntu 11.10 Beta-1 in order to resolve a suspend/resume issue I was having. Overall 11.10 is pretty stable but I did run into a few instances here and there where an application would crash, normally a background application though. In addition, I found another particularly annoying bug with the Fn-F9 key. This key combination disables the touchpad, which can actually be kind of useful if I'm typing a lot, and while the first time you press the button it works as it's supposed to (IE turns off the touchpad) I have yet to find a way to turn it back on short of re-creating my home directory. After doing this several times yesterday to fix my accidental button presses (the volume button is right next to the trackpad button) I decided to try something else. I checked out the top picks on the Distrowatch page. There I found a few candidates to try out.

The first candidate was Bodhi linux. I had heard good things about it it and I wanted to give it a shot. Bodhi is an Ubuntu based distribution that uses the Enlightenment E17 window manager. I've always wanted to try that windows manager out. I was sorely disappointed, however, to find that the installer would get stuck at a snowy looking still image at boot and would not move forward. Both the normal and "failsafe" install methods exhibited this same behavior.

The second candidate was Lubuntu 11.04. This is an Ubuntu derivative which uses the LXDE desktop environment. I was again disappointed, though not terribly surprised, that Lubuntu 11.04 had the same suspend/resume issue that Ubuntu 11.04 did.

The third candidate, Crunchbang 10 "statler", is a distro I use on my older Pentium III laptop. It's extremely light weight and based off of the Debian/GNU Linux operating system. I was more successful with Crunchbang than I had been so far with the others. It booted up fine (and quick) but sadly to a 1024x768 resolution. The 1215B has a widescreen monitor so this didn't look quite right. Upon further investigation, this appears to be a known issue with the Radeon HD6250 video cards and is only a problem in the live environment. I will likely return to Crunchbang if Lubuntu 11.10 Beta-1 does not prove any better.

This brings me to the distro I'm currently trying out, Lubuntu 11.10 Beta-1. Again, based off of the Ubuntu 11.10 Beta-1 I was using previously, I expect it to have some of the same bugs, most notably the touchpad issue mentioned early.

I'll add a quick follow up after I settle on a distribution to report on what I ended up with. Though I have a feeling it's going to be Crunchbang 10 from the looks of it.