I finally got around to installing Ubuntu (Hardy) on my Eee PC this weekend. My only regret: That I waited so long to do it.

I used the eeebuntu Netbook Remix RC1 build; the install went very smoothly, with the only hangup being a need to reformat my USB drive twice before I could move the ISO image onto it. The Netbook Remix interface is pretty slick, providing both a better launcher then the stock Xandros install, and more flexibility for the power user.

I was expecting some hassle getting wireless going after the install. Instead, it worked out of the box. I did have to recreate my login keyring in seahorse for reasons that I didn’t bother to pursue; the default keyring didn’t want to unlock on login, but since I had nothing in it, I lost nothing in recreating it.

As far as post-install modifications, I made /tmp, /var/tmp and /var/log all tmpfs file systems to reduce writes to the Eee’s SSD (I also chose ext2 instead of a journaling file system during the install and mounted it noatime for the same reason). I had to hunt down and install a 2.x version of Firefox in parallel to Firefox 3.x since F5’s FirePass VPN client doesn’t work in 3.x. (Cheap shot: The reason why they call it clientless is that it doesn’t actually work on any clients out there. In seriousness, the advantage over traditional VPN clients just isn’t there.)

Other than the above and installing a couple stock Ubuntu packages (Thunderbird and libstdc++5 for Firefox), I haven’t had to make any tweaks to the vanilla install. If you’ve got an Eee, I highly recommend this upgrade.