Debian Lenny and the Eee PC?

The ASUS Eee PC, a subnotebook computer, was first introduced at at COMPUTEX Taipei 2007. The first models came with a modified version of the Xandros operating system. Xandros has roots in Debian, and strives to be easy-to-use for first time Linux users and Windows-centric businesses. The company has never been afraid of using proprietary components to make that happen, which has made it less popular with free software fans.

The little PCs, meanwhile, proved to be very popular. According to Wikipedia, ASUS sold over 300,000 units in 2007. Microsoft must have felt left out, so the next generation of the little notebooks were available with a modified version of XP. At the 2008 COMPUTEX DistroWatch noted that "not all was well at the ASUS stand. As a visitor interested in Linux, I was disappointed to find just one of the products on display running the open source operating system. Even worse was the fact that the entire area was plastered with advertisements displaying large Windows and Microsoft logos. The only flyer available at the stand was a Microsoft one entitled "It's better with Windows"."

Naturally, the free software community has been working on free Linux variants to run on these small boxes. The most notable projects are EeeDora, a Fedora based variant and the DebianEeePC project.

Now it seems the Debian effort may have a chance at becoming an official OS for the 2009 Eee PC. In a recent post to the Debian-eeepc-devel mailing list, Ben Armstrong says, "I just received an encouraging note from Ellis Wang of Asus in Taiwan following up on Martin Michlmayr's suggestions to Asus about how they could work more closely with the Debian community. Ellis has assigned Robert Huang the task of putting a working relationship in place between Asus and Debian, with backup provided by five other Asus employees."

It would be great if ASUS would make pre-installed Debian Eee PC models. But even if they don't, free software enthusiasts can install their choice of EeeDora or custom Debian for themselves.

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It's also worth mentioning Ubuntu here, as the most popular desktop Linux and one that's
already been tweaked to work on the eee PC.  Derived from Xubuntu and including the
lightweight XFCE, eeeXubuntu seems the most complete initiative here:
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ubuntu:eeexubuntu:home - also has a forum at
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewforum.php?id=36.  I run Xubuntu on an old 200 MB laptop so it
should run well on an eee.

It's also easy to use this as a base to install KDE or GNOME if you have enough memory, e.g.
you would use "apt-get install ubuntu-desktop" for GNOME.

Like Debian, Ubuntu is easy to keep security updated (apt-get install unattended-upgrades)
which seems to be an issue with the original Xandros.  However, Ubuntu typically is more
newbie friendly and there's a vast community of Ubuntu users to help solve problems.

I personally do not care about Ubuntu. I prefer a comunity managed distribution as Debian.

Stop promoting your Ubuntu company.

Er, you *do* realise that Ubuntu feeds from and to Debian, grew out of 
Debian, and that most (all?) Ubuntu employees and its founder are or were 
Debian maintainers at one point?

Your complaint seems at least slightly ridiculous in that light.

I have some scripts, notes, docs, etc which may be interest to folks wanting a free eee  :)

ftp://ftp.blagblagblag.org/pub/BLAG/developers/jebba/eee/

Random scripts (e.g. how do i use mencoder with eee? check lid status? etc):
ftp://ftp.blagblagblag.org/pub/BLAG/developers/jebba/eee/...

I was under the impression that ASUS was dumping Linux on the EEE platform. So perhaps
researching alternatives would be good.