Last night I completed the first step in “fixing” my new 1015PN: I removed Windows Starter from it. Before doing so, I’d been playing with Debian Live to see how well it would run. The answer is pretty simple: very well. I was even able to use the Live image and install it to the 1015’s hard drive as an initial install. The nice thing here is the minimal nature of the Live image to begin with made the initial install lean and mean.
The other nicety is I was able to workout some of the configuration stuff ahead of time, rather than having to guess during th install process or figure it all out post install. For instance, I was able to bring my mutt and ssh configuration over and verify the functionality before committing anything to disk. The only gotcha was the wired setup which was lost for some reason during setup. That ended up being straightforward to fix and I was up and running shortly thereafter.
I’ll be playing with it more. I’ve got a debian/testing setup running here and performance is much improved over my old 900. One thing I’ll be doing is ditching LXDE. It’s nice, but I’m too used to awesome or dwm as a window manager. Resorting to the trackpad to get around the desktop is a hassle. I’ve come to prefer a keyboard driven approach.
I’ll have more later- it’s too nice out to spend the whole day banging away at this.