Yesterday I received my new EEE 901, to be prepared for akademy, I want to install another distro on it. That distro has to have KDE 4.1.0 of course, else it is useless anyway.

My first choice would have been openSUSE. They don’t have a special EEE distro, but they have excellent instructions. Installing is a bit weird though. You can use 1 usb stick and install openSUSE 10.3 on it, and after that you can upgrade to 11.0. I think this way you start with a mess, and I don’t want that. The other option is with two USB sticks, without proper documentation how to do it with a cd-rom drive. As my 2GB USB stick could not hold the 2GB image anyway, I decided to just use the regular installer CD and see what would happen. Well, no luck, as openSUSE did not like the external CD-player (can’t find CD configuration images or something like that). Ok, a bit stuck now.

Second choice was Debian. I know the Debian KDE4.1 packages are ok and there is a DebianEee project. Unfortunatly that seems to run behind as the 901 wifi is not supported, I need to download compile the kernel driver by hand and after that Network-Manager still refuses to play with it. Besides that the KDE packages experimental and unstable repository. Although I did learn about apt-pinning, it still feels a bit uncomfortable.

So my third option was Kubuntu. It also has a dedicated ‘distro’ for the Eee. I’ve downloaded the iso and tried it. There is also no wireless or ethernet when you have booted from the live-cd. The instructions from wiki.eeeuser.com let you compile drivers and install extra packages via a flash drive. I just don’t get this. Why have I just burned a cd and now I need additional packages to get it to work?

Mandriva is bragging about excellent Eee support. It is an option, but the KDE 4 packaging in the past was not so good, running behind and available in there unstable repository, which is not generally advisable for the rest of the computer.