My name is Massimo, I live in Italy but my heart resides in the Philippines since 1997.
Let me start by saying that I’ve not forgot my Arduino board in a drawer, I’ve been mainly playing with the provided examples without producing something worth to be blogged. Working with hardware require more free time than simply experimenting with software; time that unfortunately I do not have (attaching your Arduino board to your computer while travelling by train is a bit impractical and make you look a little suspicious). By the way during the last electronic surplus fair, here in Genoa, I bought an Ethernet shield: a little board that connected, sandwich like, over the Arduino board give it the capability of connecting and communicating over a local network and even over the Internet if you configure your network the right way.
I made some minor changes to the blog, a part from some cleaning in the “button salad” on the side bar the major change is the message board removal. Feel free to leave your messages as post comments.
I decided to give a look at some Linux distributions designed for netbooks and alternative to Ubuntu. I’m not going to replace Ubuntu any soon, even if I don’t like the latest version, the one I have installed is going to be supported for a long time. I’m simply curious to see what alternatives are available, for netbooks, and to test how they perform on my EEEPC.
The distribution I decided to start with is PupEEE: the EEEPC tailored version of the famous small footprint distribution Puppy Linux.
Download and install
I downloaded the latest version of PupEEE from its download page. Preparing a bootable media from the downloaded zip is a little different from usual but not difficult. Once I extracted the zip file on an empty SD card I simply executed the “bootinst.sh” script placed in the “boot” folder.
Once extracted PupEEE only takes only about 130MB of disk space (this is a really small footprint), I’ve been able to install it on an old 256MB SD card that I had left in a drawer with other obsolete or useless things.
