2 weeks ago, I bought a shiny ASUS EEE PC 1000H, it looked big enough to do fun things, and the 160Go hard-drive of the Windows version was way better than what other versions could offer us. First thing I did was reinstall the whole thing under ArchLinux, my favorite linux distro.

I took the latest archboot, and within 30 minutes I was booting on my shell, archboot using the 2.6.28 kernel, most of the hardware was working, I plugged to the internet and started installing xorg, gnome and gdm. Most people are saying that GNOME on the EEE is useless because of the screen size, but with a little tweaking, you can get really nice results. Here is what I got after working for several hours:

Once gnome installed, I had somes issues with Fn-Keys preventing me to set the sound or luminosity without overlays bugs and such, to prevent this, install the “acpi-eee” package from aur, add eee to the DAEMONS variable in rc.conf and you’ll be ready to go.

So, now GNOME isn’t really pretty when just installed, so we’re gonna take care of that. First install the xf86-video-intel package from extra, then install compiz-fusion. You’ll need to add the following lines to the “Device” section of your xorg.conf file:

Then add fusion-icon inside the Gnome Session Manager. You can now look on gnome-look.org for themes, I use the GNOME colors backgrounds and icons.

You should also look toward the “splashy” package, it adds a nice splash when booting arch and the themes are easily editable.

Update: Info about the wifi
Using the wifi is not something very hard, first plug your EEE using an ethernet cable, then with yaourt, fetch the aur package named rt2860 and install NetworkManager with the corresponding applet for your WM, and you should be ok.