Just a quick heads up on this.

I used to be a 701 4GB owner until June 2008 when I bought my 900.  I gave my 701 t0 my brother in the hope that he and his family would warm to Linux.  I left him running Xandros in advanced mode.

I popped over to see my brother last week and after showing him what BackTrack 3 could do on my 900 he said he wanted it on the 701.  Which I did.  BackTrack 4 Pre Release, in fact.

Now, while it worked well, it booted to a command prompt requiring that you type startx to get the thing going and when you are logged in, you’re logged in as root.  All of which is fine and dandy if you know what you’re doing, but in a family with a six year old who likes to use the machine to go onto the CBeebies site and use Tux Paint, it’s maybe not the right distro.

So I installed Mint 7 instead.  And it works as well as it does on the 900.

The install was almost identical to the 900 install that I ran through earlier *click me to see it*, except when the partitioning screen appears, be sure to choose the “Use the entire disk” option.

After the install, I tweaked it, keeping in mind that a small child would be using it, I stripped out the same stuff as I did on my 900 install *click me to see the tweaks* and also a few other bits.  I removed Brasero, Pidgin, The Gimp and Open Office, which I replaced with Abiword.

And added Isla’s beloved Tux Paint.

Now, if you install Tux Paint on the 701 you really must install the tuxpaint-config package as well.  This little utility will allow you to choose the correct screen settings, making the most of the 701’s small screen.  I don’t remember if the configuration utility appears in the menu or not, so just open a terminal, Applications > Accessories > Terminal, type tuxpaint-config and hit enter.

All in all, Mint 7 on the EeePC 701 4GB is a very pleasurable experience.  I could have removed more and given it a bit more room, but a machine which is only used for browsing doesn’t really need  loads of free space and after following my install guide and tweaking it, there was 1.3GB free.

Enjoy!!