[CentOS] 5.3 on an EeePC??

Wed Apr 29 11:30:29 UTC 2009
Warren Young <warren at etr-usa.com>

Beartooth wrote:
>> Why do you want CentOS on an EeePC ? 
> 
> 	I have a strong if perhaps irrational preference for the .rpm 
> family

Me, too, and it's rational in my case.  I've experienced the whole range 
of both sets of tools, from the ground up.  RPMs are simpler to build 
than DEBs, and an rpm/yum-based system is easier to maintain than a 
dpkg/apt-based one, considering just packaging issues.  It's true that I 
have many more years experience with RPM based systems, but I've been 
using Ubuntu now for about a year and a half, and my opinion isn't 
shifting much any more.

I think much of the hype about how great the Debian packaging system is 
came from the days before they adopted yum, so Debian fans could point 
to apt-get and say "Isn't it great to be able to install packages from 
the net directly from the command line?"  Sure, once upon a time it was, 
but today, the main distinction I draw between the two sets of tools is 
that the Debian tools are more complex with no compensating benefit. 
(There are even some things the simpler Red Hattish tools can do that 
the Debian ones can't, easily.  rpm -qa, for one.)

But, enough of the advocacy rant.  Though I use CentOS far more often 
than I do Ubuntu, there are a few places where Ubuntu simply works 
better.  One of those places is on my Eee 1000.  Take it from an RPM 
fan: it's a poor reason to prefer CentOS for your netbook, unless your 
goal is to feed patches back to Red Hat for future versions of the OS.

> speed of boot becomes a major criterion. 

Ubuntu 9.04 greatly improved the boot speed relative to previous 
versions of the OS.

Separate from that effort, but speeding disk-heavy activities like 
booting still further, Ubuntu 9.04 also includes ext4 support.  You have 
to partition manually to enable it, but I recommend that for netbooks 
anyway because that's also the only way to avoid having a swap 
partition.  Swapping to flash is loony.

Between these improvements and a few tweaks to the automatic service 
startup list, my 1000 goes from the BIOS screen to a desktop in under a 
minute.  I'm running the netbook remix version.

Ubuntu 9.04 supports the Eee's power management features, too, so you 
can sleep it and wake it back up reasonably quickly.