Mandriva Linux on EeePC 900

I've been quite vocal about my appreciation of OpenSuSE 11.0 and how well it works (after a lot of fiddling) on my EeePC 900.

Well, the few bits that didn't work started to annoy me, along with the fact that it didn't take advantage of the faster FSB and effectively ran the access to the memory slower than the hardware was actually capable of.

So I had an idle look on www.distrowatch.com and then did a little surfing for EeePC out-of-the-box compatible distros. I saw that Mandriva have just released their 2009 version and it's supposed to be 100% compatible.

Long story short: it is.

Downloaded the .iso file and burned a DVD ROM (external usb DVD drive - very useful) this morning, and after only about 3 hours of effort, most of that waiting for things to copy, here I am blogging this, from flock, on my EeePC 900, over wireless ... you get the picture. It all just worked.

I've even gone as far as getting Compiz working fine, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the Second Life client is in the full sources set of the repositories. Installing that was quite telling: it runs a good deal faster on Mandriva than on OpenSuSE.

That's it. I'm sold. Faster AND easier? Perfect.