Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 14 years and 10 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

How many more Eee puns can I come up with for my blog posts? 😀

The Windows 7 release candidate just wasn’t cutting it for me on my EeePC 900A. It looked nice, but Windows is just not meant to be crammed into 4gb of hard drive space. Even after vLite’ing the install I barely had 300mb free left on the SSD. Turning on drive compression (particularly for the WinSxS folder) just slowed everything down which really killed the whole netbook experience. So this weekend I decided to give Linux Mint a try.

Linux Mint 7 is based on Ubuntu 9.04 so it’s basically the same thing I am running on my other EeePC, just with a few differences. Like Ubuntu, Mint releases have version numbers and alphabetic code names. Whereas Ubuntu uses the adjective/noun alliterative combination (i.e., Jaunty Jackelope), Mint uses girls’ names that end in ‘a’ (hence the 7th version uses the 7th letter of the alphabet which gives us Gloria).

First, as always, I used the great eeebackup utility to make a backup image of the Windows 7 setup just in case I feel like going back at some point. I then used UNetbootin (the universal netboot installer) to “burn” the downloaded Mint ISO image onto a 2gb thumb drive and then booted my Eee from that to start the installation. The process was quick and painless and soon I was tweaking away (having gone through installs of Ubuntu Eee, Easy Peasy, Ubuntu NBR, and now Mint in the past six months, I am getting to be quite the expert at quickly configuring a Linux distro just the way I like it on my netbooks 🙂 ).

Just for fun, here’s a video I took of the 900A (white on left) booting Mint next to the 4G Surf (black on right) booting Ubuntu NBR. As expected, the 900A boots slightly faster due to its better Atom processor. Both are ready to go in just about 30 seconds though, which isn’t too bad.