As before, the installation process was painless and everything works as it should (including wireless and broadband Internet). I can connect to my embedded broadband Internet provided by Orange with no trouble at all and everything is fast and whizzy.

To give you an idea of how much things are better, when Windows XP was on the 901, startup took at least 90 seconds (a minute and a half). Startup with Eeebuntu takes a mere 17 seconds. I now have a netbook that is usable within a much more reasonable time frame. Actually using Eeebuntu is wonderful compared to XP too. Even with four or five apps open I don’t experience the kind of slow-down that XP was exhibiting on the same hardware.

When you add the fact that Eeebuntu comes with OpenOffice and a bunch of other useful applications as part of the base install, it’s easy to see why I now feel my Netbook is useful again.

The only caveat is that there’s no webcam software included with Eeebuntu. This was quickly solved by opening up a terminal window once I was connected to the Internet and using apt-get to install Cheese. In case you need it, the command is:

sudo apt-get install cheese

Incidentally, this won’t work for any installation other than an Ubuntu-based distro.

The only other moan that I have about Eeebuntu is more a personal taste issue. I absolutely hate the Eeebuntu startup screen. I think it looks rather amateurish compared to some of the nicer distro startups that I’ve seen. I dare-say I’ll get around to replacing it with something more aethetically acceptable at some point. :-D

So – if you’ve got a netbook that runs like a dog, I advise you give a Netbook distro a go. They’re not all as pants as the Xandros distro that comes installed on Linux netbooks! ;)