Got my unit today. This is my 2nd netbook. The first one is a MSI WIND. I tried to put kubuntu 9.04 on USB drive. The drive booted my desktop and the Wind. The USB drive was detected in the Bios, but no matter what I do, it won’t boot the Eee PC. Finally I gave up and tried Wubi from WinXP. That did not work either because the new Wubi won’t run. Not sure why. In the end, I had to burn a CD and install it the old fashion way via a IDE CD-ROM connected through a USB interface (from a USB external hard drive).

The 160G hard drive has four partitions on it. The first one is WinXP, I put kubuntu on the 2nd partition, which may have some backup files for WinXP but I don’t really care about that.

The first surprise is that there was no network, wired or wireless. After finding out the hardware, AR9285 for wireless and AR8132 for ethernet, I found this post and installed the AR813X driver. The other driver did not work.http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1141529

For wireless, I used aptitude and installed the driver. (apt-get complained about dependencies)

sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-jaunty

So far, so good. The fan does come on after a while. The noise is audible but not very annoying.

Sound worked out of the box. Have not tested the web-cam or blue tooth yet.