I recently acquired an Asus Eee PC 1000 for development purposes. The default Xandros install… well, it’s just not my cup o’ tea. In fact, I hated it. So within hours of unpacking the 1000, I replaced Xandros with Ubuntu Eee, a nice little netbook-friendly Ubuntu-based 8.04 distro featuring Canonical’s Netbook Remix interface.
My servers run Ubuntu 8.10 and I would have preferred an 8.10 distro on the Eee PC, and could have managed… I just didn’t want to go through the trouble, frankly… And I’m glad I didn’t. 8.04 has proved to be perfectly stable and perfectly capable for what I need. Ubuntu Eee comes full-featured with a ton of apps I won’t use, and that’s okay. I ended up adding Emacs (hey, I use both: vim and Emacs, but I appreciate the Emacs mode for Erlang that comes with the Erlang distribution), Erlang, git, a couple of other essential build packages and that’s about it.
Maybe I’m playing with fire and maybe I’m not: I did not create /tmp, /var/log or /var/tmp memory-only partitions. They say that it’ll lengthen the life of your SSD if you do, and maybe it does… That it’ll give the netbook slightly better performance, and I can see why… They also say to use ext2 over ext3 for the same reasons… But to be honest with you, I don’t expect to ever exceed the lifetime of my SSD drive. I’d rather have data integrity with ext3 and all of my logs in one place if I ever need them (which may be unlikely) and all of the RAM I can muster. But to each their own.
So I have my little netbook with working wifi, I have a terminal window and I have Emacs. Can I actually develop on it? That’s a resounding affirmative, captain! The keyboard is actually much more spacious than I had anticipated and my only complaint is the ridiculous placement of the right-shift key to the right of the Up arrow. I’ve managed to mangle config files by mistake in vim because of this keyboard tragedy. Other than that, though, it’s a speedy, battery-efficient work of awesomeness.
