Linux

As I had written about in the past, I am the proud owner of an EeePC 900 since December 2008. One of the things that was bugging me all that time was that it had to run on Windows. Frankly, I couldn't find a good reason to do so, as for the most part I was using Firefox, Skype and OpenOffice, all available under Linux. That, and it was extremely time-consuming waiting for that Windows XP to start up. So, I decided to install Linux on it.

Learn how to install it on your EeePC

As I have already implied, I installed Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring on my EeePC 900. Mandriva is such a great Linux distribution and almost 100% EeePC-friendly. The first obstacle I had to overcome was the seemingly broken touchpad behaviour. The next obstacle I had to overcome was of much less importance: simulating ASUS EeePC Control functionality on Linux. Thankfully, there is a great software called EeeControl, but it wouldn't install on my new distribution. Hey, I am a Linux guy, so I had to fix this too. It wasn't that hard after all. Interested?

Learn how to install EeeControl

Mandriva Linux 2009.1 is a great Linux distribution, much more elegant than its predecessor. However, there is a serious "regression" to its predecessor. The Elantech touchpad of many netbooks and laptops - most notably all EeePC's - and probably other brands of touchpads behave oddly. For starters, there is no gesture support. Forget tap-to-click, two finger swipe for scrolling etc. Then, the pointer movement is jerky, as if the touchpad is acting as a touch screen!

This problem happened because Mandriva switched from defaulting to the proprietary Synaptics driver to the open-source generic mouse driver. While this switch should be acceptable for their Free edition, doing so in the Powerpack and One editions is - the least to say - annoying, as it totally ruins user experience, especially if you are a newbie. Thankfully, it's quite easy to fix!

How did I fix this? Read on!

Sometimes, despite how advanced desktop GNU/Linux has become, it's desirable to have your computer able to boot into Windows without the use of an emulator. If you had Windows pre-installed on the computer at the time you installed GNU/Linux, this dual-booting ability is added automatically on all modern distributions. However, if you want to install Windows after Linux, this seems like a complete headache. Not really! The process is easy.

This article is written while installing Windows 7 Beta on a PC with Mandriva Linux 2009 already installed. Of course, the same procedure – with some minor adjustments – applies with any Linux distribution and any Windows version!

Read more: Dual booting GNU/Linux with Windows XP / Vista / 7