UP­DATE: you can get this pro­gram now at google code

I have been us­ing my eee for a while al­ready with a sort of Kubun­tu in it.

How­ev­er, my favourite wire­less/wired net­work man­age­ment app is wicd, which is a Python/GTK ap­pli­ca­tion. Or was, since ver­sion 1.4.1 re­quires python-g­nome2-ex­tras.

Which de­pends on ....

libart-2.0-2 (>= 2.3.18), libaspell15 (>= 0.60), libatk1.0-0 (>= 1.13.2), libbonobo2-0 (>= 2.15.0),
libbonoboui2-0 (>= 2.15.1), libc6 (>= 2.6-1), libcairo2 (>= 1.4.0),
libfontconfig1 (>= 2.4.0), libfreetype6 (>= 2.3.5), libgconf2-4 (>= 2.13.5),
libgda3-3, libgdl-1-0, libgdl-gnome-1-0, libgksu1.2-1 (>= 1.3.3), libgksu2-0 (>= 1.9.6),
libgksuui1.0-1, libglade2-0 (>= 1:2.6.1), libglib2.0-0 (>= 2.14.0), libgnome-keyring0 (>= 2.19.6),
libgnome2-0 (>= 2.17.3), libgnomecanvas2-0 (>= 2.11.1), libgnomeui-0 (>= 2.19.1),
libgnomevfs2-0 (>= 1:2.17.90), libgtk2.0-0 (>= 2.12.0), libgtkspell0 (>= 2.0.2),
libice6 (>= 1:1.0.0), libnspr4-0d (>= 1.8.0.10), liborbit2 (>= 1:2.14.8),
libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.18.2), libpng12-0 (>= 1.2.13-4), libpopt0 (>= 1.10), libsm6,
libstartup-notification0 (>= 0.8-1), libx11-6, libxcomposite1 (>=1:0.3-1),
libxcursor1 (>> 1.1.2), libxdamage1 (>= 1:1.1), libxext6, libxfixes3 (>= 1:4.0.1), libxi6, libxinerama1,
libxml2 (>= 2.6.29), libxrandr2 (>= 2:1.2.0), libxrender1, zlib1g (>= 1:1.2.3.3.dfsg-1),
python-support (>= 0.3.4), python (<< 2.6), python (>= 2.4), python-gtk2,
python-pyorbit, python-gnome2-desktop

In short: a 87MB down­load. That can't be good. In fac­t, there are al­most no changes from 1.3.1 which did­n't re­quire all that! Ex­cept for one change that makes all the dif­fer­ence on a eee PC: ver­ti­cal re­siz­ing to un­der 400px. :-(

So, be­cause I am who I am, I did this:

It's a re­place­ment for wicd's gui.py and tray.py. On­ly needs PyQt4 which I al­ready had and de­pends on:

libc6 (>= 2.6-1), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.2.1), libqt4-core (>= 4.3.2),
libqt4-gui (>= 4.3.2), libstdc++6 (>= 4.2.1), python-central (>= 0.5.8),
python (<< 2.6), python (>= 2.4), python-sip4 (>= 4.7), python-sip4 (<< 4.8)

See a dif­fer­ence there?

Took me about 3 hours to hack to­geth­er, and works (ex­cept for wired con­fig, the prefs di­alog, stat­ic IP and script­s) but the hard work is done.

If any­one wants a copy, just ask. I ex­pect KUbun­tu could use some­thing like it?

As I said be­fore, the bas­tardized Xan­dros [1] sucked. In fac­t, I man­aged to de­stroy it. So I de­cid­ed to switch to an­oth­er dis­tro. Any dis­tro.

En­ter ee­eX­ubun­tu, a eee-­tuned Xubun­tu [2].

Since I pre­fer KDE to XFCE, I start­ed hack­ing at it, and pro­duced, IMVHO, a much nicer thing.

As you can see, it takes slight­ly less space than ee­eX­ubun­tu's de­fault, and a whoop­ing 1GB less than the de­fault dis­tro.

How did I do it? First, by de­cid­ing what I want­ed.

• No Open­Of­fice. Kof­­fice is enough to read doc­s, then there is Google doc­s, and I pro­­duce my texts us­ing do­cu­tils

• No print­­ing. I have not used a print­­er in 5 years. What are the odds I will use one from the eee?

• wicd for net­­work con­­fig­u­ra­­tion. It works for wire­­less/wired/en­cryp­t­ed and has no prob­lem what­­so­ev­er re­­con­nec­t­ing af­ter sus­pend.

• yakuake for ter­mi­­nal. It us­es the least screen-s­­pace pos­si­ble: none if you are not us­ing it.

• Fire­­fox + Flash (I would use Kon­­queror, if flash9 had not bro­ken it)

• Kmail + Akre­­ga­­tor for mail and RSS

It works great, boots in 35 sec­onds (and I have not tuned that, yet).

Here's the list of in­stalled pack­ages and here's the list of re­pos I am us­ing

Maybe some­one more en­ter­pris­ing will make a re­al dis­tro out of it.