Hey,

I've got one of the early EEEPC netbooks. I took a look at http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ and http://wiki.eeeuser.com/overview.html but most of the data seems to be out of date. Makes sense since a few years after I got my netbook, they moved to the Atom chip and everyone else came out with netbooks based on more standardized hardware so there was no longer a need for special EEE Distros.

As you know, Asus and Xandros never really updated any of the software on there so it's getting a little old. I'd like to install a new distro on there that will get updates and have access to the latest software.

Suggestions on distros that will run well on this old hardware?

The most recent suggestion on one of the pages linked above is Xubuntu 10.04. Hopefully 10.10 and so on will also work. Any other suggestions? I think probably anything running Xfce or LXDE are preferable to *Box-based systems since my wife is the primary user.

Thanks!

If I were you, I would head over to distrowatch.com and check out all the distros and reviews. I would try out either Ubuntu or an equivalent if I were you, personally.

If you are fairly competent with Arch, that would be a good choice. I ran it for a while on my EeePC 2g Surf with LXDE. I run Tiny Core on mine now, which is quite impressive, but very quirky. Maybe AntiX would be a good candidate, it comes with IceWM, which is very light and very easy to use.

There is nothing really special about the early EeePCs, the only reason they had specialized distributions in the early days was because certain drivers weren't built into the kernel yet and people wanted everything to work out of the box. Now any modern distro will support all of the hardware without an issue.

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I've been very happy with Fedora on my Asus EEE 900ha and CrunchBang on my Dell Mini netbook. As you mention, all of the major distros have good support for the EEE PC series these days.

I would also say that Ubuntu is a good choice and I currently run it on my 900.

OK, cool - I didn't know all the drivers had migrated to the kernel. I'll check out either Ubuntu or Fedora since I have plenty of experience with those

I run Mandriva on my Acer Aspire One with Gnome desktop since '09...just keeps on going with no issues. The LXDE version is also good for netbooks.