Installing on Asus eee box B202 - experiences?

[depontius]

I'm going to be putting Linux on an old Asus eee box B202. I know it's rather old and underpowered, but it's going to be my "walkaround diagnostic machine." It's only got 1G now, but I plan to expand that to 2G shortly.

Anyone have any experiences or suggestions they'd like to share, before I get started? I know it's not going to be a speed demon, but how bad is it, really?
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.sigs waste space and bandwidth

[eccerr0r]

My Asus eeePC 900A has an Atom N270 as well (i945GM chipset graphics, netbook) , but has 2GB now. It also (now) has a slowish SSD (32G 90MB/sec read, 55MB/sec write - the one that came with the unit was 4G and was miserably slow).

As a client machine, it does get bogged down on Adobe Flash in X11. It also is fairly slow at compiling (I put it around an P3-1200 in terms of speed, but it depends on what you're doing.) Other than that yes I'm running Gentoo on it, and it's building its own updates. I think the SSD and 2GB of RAM makes a difference, however...

[depontius]

I jumped the gun and installed XUbuntu-13.04 on it tonight, but don't plan on that being the long-term solution.

I'm leaving for a trip to Montana soon, and my wife was kind of pushing for me to get a laptop to keep in touch while I'm gone. (Glacier National Park is not her cup of tea.) I don't want to spend the money on one, at least not now, and I'm not even sure if I want a laptop - perhaps a Vivaldi tablet plus keyboard and mouse. I'd also rather spend laptop-type money on a new deskside later this year. Since there's a deadline looming I just did a quicky install.

In the longer term I'll reinstall with Gentoo - since at least part of its mission is going to be walk-around diagnostics, I want a good set of tools.

This system also has a valid Windows XP license sticker, so I'm kind of thinking of making it dual-boot. There are just some things where Windows is so entrenched that it's pretty close to impossible to do them without. If I had better luck with WINE that might not be the case, but sometimes I feel like the WINE learning curve - beyond fall-off-a-log-simple software - is above my jumping reach.

Right now the system is nearby downloading 56MB of post-iso-image updates.
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.sigs waste space and bandwidth

[depontius]

Last night I stuck another Gig of RAM in, and found out that the Xubuntu has problems. It says 13.04 is out of date and needs to update to 13.10, but then something fails.

I think it's time for Gentoo. I'm currently running a P3-700 as my main server, and I'm used to the speed of that thing during updates. If this Atom can keep up with that I'll be happy enough. Actually part of the purpose of the EEE Box will be a temporary home as I re-mission an old Socket-939 deskside to be my new main server.
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.sigs waste space and bandwidth