16th Feb 2009
eee PC upgrade time – Ubuntu-eee 8.04 to Easy Peasy 1.0.
Installation
Clean install: 4gb drive mounted as / and formatted, 16gb drive mounted as /home and formatted. Once set up, install all of the updates before you do anything else.
Initial Thoughts
The whole interface has changed to be much darker, but it doesn’t seem very well implemented. Things don’t seem to match up, and the Easy Peasy logo has some serious white fringing. Not professional looking. However, one major plus: wireless now works. Flawlessly as I see it. However, the netbook remix styling still doesn’t; The colours are off and the icons still respond in unexpected ways.
Getting Rid
There isn’t a way of doing this in one click, but you can get rid of the netbook remix style interface and revive the “standard” Gnome desktop.
Bye Bye Netbook Remix
Once you get rid of the netbook remix interface you appear to have no way of getting to your programs. Don’t panic – pressing Alt-F1 will allow you to get up a floating program menu. Found that out myself through random panicky key pushing.
Getting rid of the interface is as simple as disabling Netbook Launcher and Maximus in the Session Preferences. This, once you have logged out and back in again will have removed the launcher. However, you are left with some rubbish lying around that does nothing. The first thing to remove is the now very useless Ubuntu Icon in the top left of the screen. You do this by right clicking and selecting “Remove from panel”. Do the same for the application Tabs next to it.
Hello Gnome Desktop
Now, your left with very little. Click in a space and select “Add to Panel”, then select “Menu Bar”. You now have a Gnome menu, so no more Alt-F1 clicking. Next thing is to do is to add a bottom bar, right click, “New Panel”. To this I added workspaces, window list, deleted files and the shutdown applets.
All complete – nearly
Simple steps lead to one near complete Easy Peasy-less desktop. The last thing to do is to go rummaging around in /usr/share/background for easy-peasy-4.png and to replace/rename it to get rid of another white fringed easy peasy logo, this time on the suspend lock screen. Your netbook is now a tiny desktop. One without the power and a tiny screen.