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.