Ronnie Tucker

The big problem with installing a Linux distro on the ASUS EEE PC is that inevitably something will not work properly. The usual culprits are the wireless networking or the webcam. Most of this can be overcome by some sort of patch or tweak, eeeXubuntu is basically Xubuntu with built in patches to fix wireless problems but the webcam is still broken in eeeXubuntu.

NOTE: click any of the screens below for full size versions.

Biting at the heels of eeeXubuntu is pupEEE. As the name suggests, pupEEE is Puppy Linux with patches to make it fully compatible with the EEE including wireless and webcam!

First thing to do is download the ISO file from the Puppy Linux site. From there, you burn the ISO to CD, boot from the CD (on your desktop PC/laptop) and when you’re in pupEEE you run the Puppy Universal Installer. Run through the installer, but choose to install to USB Memory Stick. When it’s done it’s time to boot pupEEE on the EEE.

Plug the USB stick in to one of the EEE’s USB ports and turn on the EEE. When the grey ASUS EEE screen appears, hold down the ESC key and you’ll get a boot menu, asking you which drive it should boot from, the internal drive or the USB stick.

Ok, so now we have pupEEE running on the EEE from the USB stick. To install it to the EEE’s internal drive we, once again, pick the Puppy Universal Installer (left).
The installer will ask which media to install pupEEE on. Here we pick IDE (ATA) Internal Hard Drive. Technically speaking, the EEE doesn’t even have an IDE Hard Drive but this is the only option I could get to work with the EEE.

Now it asks which drive to install it to. There’s only one option so that’s pretty easy!

The next window is to ask if you would like to install to the hard drive (for sure) or to superfloppy. We chose to install to hdc1. After a final warning pupEEE will install to the internal hard drive of the EEE then ask us if we want to install the GRUB boot menu. Choose YES and choose all the default options.

When the install is complete, reboot the EEE and remove the USB stick. Your EEE should bring up the GRUB boot menu, pick the second option (Linux, hdc1) and your EEE will boot in to pupEEE.

pupEEE uses JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) for it’s windowing and looks quite basic but I like it, choose the blue theme and it reminds me of the good old Amiga Workbench!

The pupEEE menu bar hides its self automatically to give you more desktop real estate. Moving the pointer to the bottom of the screen has the task bar rise up and let you choose the Puppy ‘Menu’ button. The menu has been arranged in such a way that it does not appear taller than the EEE screen which is handy.

Like Puppy, pupEEE comes preinstalled with a ton of goodness. Everything from internet browser (SeaMonkey – above right), word processor (AbiWord – above left) through to VNC and bittorrent clients!

The biggest worry with other distros, as I mentioned, is getting the wi-fi to work. In pupEEE this is dead easy. Click the ‘Menu’ button and choose Setup > Network Wizard. Ath0 is automatically detected so click the ath0 button…

Next step is to click the Wireless button to gain access to the wireless settings…

In my case I clicked the WEP button and entered a helpful name, ESSID, WEP key, clicked ‘Save’ then ‘Use This Profile’. This takes us back to the screen above. Now click ‘Test ath0′. The Network Wizard should say, at the top of the window, if the test was successful or not. Click ‘Auto DHCP’, again it should tell you if the DHCP test was successful or not, and finally click ‘Done’ at the bottom of the window. Your wi-fi should be ready to go. Easy as that!

One thing to be careful of with pupEEE (and Puppy) is that you must mount drives before you can use them. This is easy and done by clicking the ‘drives’ icon on the desktop (looks like a USB stick). Up comes a window that lists your drives. To mount a drive, click the button to the right of the drive name. After a second or two it’s name will be in bold and a folder icon appears to the left of its name. You can click that to get quick access to that drive.

Installing new applications is quite easy as Puppy (and pupEEE) use the Puppy Package Manager which uses either .pup (old format) or .pet files which can be either official or unofficial. These are, it seems, similar to .deb files in Debian or Ubuntu.

Personally I haven’t tried the webcam but pupEEE does come with the Skype (with webcam) beta preinstalled. I tried various MP3 and XVID files and all played flawlessly in XINE (again, installed by default). There are basic text editors installed, SeaMonkey HTML editor and email client, FTP clients, Instant Messaging clients, PDF viewer and creator, Remote Desktop clients… you name it, it’s there.

pupEEE really does give the best of both worlds: it’s fast and small. In the task bar, beside the clock, is a CPU meter. I had to load up three applications (AbiWord, SeaMonkey and mtPaint) before I could get it to register any visible CPU activity, it’s that fast! And with Lord only knows how many apps pre-installed with pupEEE I still have over 3.2Gb free on my 4Gb internal drive!

This may be a small Puppy, but it’s a whippet!