When the ASUS Eeepc 701 (4G) netbooks were new back in 2007 they were capable of running the Ubuntu of the day reasonably well.
Recent versions of Ubuntu have exceeded their hardware capabilities. We have two of them in our house and haven’t been able to use them for years.
Maybe I could have installed some other light weight distro in them, but I only like Ubuntu. When I read about Ubuntu MATE I decided to give it a try.
Ubuntu MATE in a Live USB stick booted up in my old eeepc and ran just fine. I expected the 640 x 480 screen to be a problem as it is less than the minimum limits for MATE. It turned out that the small screen size is okay. Sometimes when a window has a button hidden below the bottom of the display I just need to use the mouse with the ‘alt’ key to grab and drag the window up so I can reach the bottom of it. It’s something I got used to a long time ago when I used Ubuntu in the Eeepc and it’s not too hard to live with.
The performance is in the acceptable range. The Eeepc never has been what one would call ‘snappy’ by today’s modern standards. Given the size of the machine and the hardware available in 2007 though, I would actually say it’s quite impressive for the time period. It might help a little that I did upgrade the Eeepc to 2GB of RAM when it was new. Ubuntu MATE works very well in it.
I didn’t think it would be possible to install Ubuntu MATE in the netbook’s 4GB SSD drive. The hardware requirements for Ubuntu MATE say I need at least 8GB. I tried an installation anyway, with 4GB in the SSD for /, and a 32GB class 10 SDHC card for /home. That adds up to 36GB, but apparently the SSD drive wasn’t quite enough for / and the installation failed.
Then I found a pdf about how to create a persistence type of installation instead. ‘Building a casperrw USB for Kubuntu/Ubuntu 10.04’ - here is the link: http://linuxlsga.net/usb.pdf
One thing I did contrary to the pdf’s recommendations was to format my partitions with reiserfs for less file system overhead and better flash memory performance.
The file system in the 4 GB SSD is labelled ‘casper-rw’ and the ‘home-rw’ file system in in the SDHC card. When I copied the MATE 15.04 iso to the /boot/grub in the 4 GB SSD it only occupied 1.9 GiB out of 3.71 GiB. I can probably fit another iso in there and dual-boot if I want to.
The installation is a success and now have the use of my favourite car computer again, or I can leave it home running ‘motion’ to keep an eye on my house when I’m away.
I’m really impressed with Ubuntu MATE and I have since installed it in my wife’s eeepc and in my main computer too. I love the speed and snappiness of Ubuntu MATE. It works even better with bigger, more normal hardware.
Last but not least I’d like to say thanks to the Ubuntu MATE devs, please keep up the great work, it’s much appreciated.