I almost thought about not doing the EEEpc challenge anymore. I was playing a video game and tried using the Surf to look something up about the game. The Surf was so slow to work that I thought that it’s not really a functional computer anymore. Not only is it a 9-year-old computer, but my low-end smart phone, the Moto-E, is more powerful than the first generation EEEpc. Not only that but recently, most Linux developers are only focusing on 64-bit architectures, while the 701 EEEpc has a 32-but processor.
Then the other day I was over at Distrowatch and saw that one of my favorite Linux distros for the 4G Surf had a new release recently and that would be watt OS 10. Watt OS and Zorin OS Lite have been trading the challenge crown back and forth for a couple of years now.
When I booted it for the first time I did have to use the forcepae trick to get it to boot into the desktop. While installing I once again used no swap space to get the distro to fit on the 4GB hard drive. After installing and running the updates, I still had over 800MB of space left. Unfortunately, I could not get the function keys to work correctly but that has been the case with most distros for a while now. The computer itself functions fine but by today’s standards it’s incredibly slow. While not as low as dial-up speeds it does have an issue loading modern products like GMail and Facebook.
So while wattOS is a very good lightweight distro for older computers, the Asus EEEpc 701 4G Surf is now just a historic oddity. Stay tuned however, because there will be a new Linux challenge coming shortly.
The Trench Reynolds Report 