(Shamelessly cross-posted nyah)

Ever since my XO laptop arrived, I’ve been tinkering with it, looking for ways to make it behave more like a traditional laptop. While the hardware on this technological marvel is neat as hell, the childlike operating system quickly grew tiresome. I looked into ways to load Ubuntu onto it, but the complexity of the process, XO’s lack of a cd drive, and small amount of storage space on the internal solid-state drive made that proposition a dicey one.

However, there is a less intensive way to make your XO grow up, one that doesn’t involve wiping out the operating system or trying to boot a second one from the flash drive: namely, you can install a new graphical interface right next to the one that already exists. The Xfce desktop, being very small and lightweight, is perfect for a machine like the XO, and detailed install instructions are already readily available on the web. I followed these, and had the new desktop up and running and most of my desired software installed in about an hour and a half. Yeah, most of the config has to be done from a command line, but you can cut and paste lines in from the website, and it only needs to be done once.

When I finished, I had a tiny little laptop that could pull in a wireless signal from anywhere, browse the web in Firefox, run Open Office, and play media from an SD card or USB drive. (Although I’m still looking for a media player that will play mp3’s, since Fedora, the underlying Linux operating system, apparently doesn’t include mp3 codecs on any of its media software.) All in all, I was pretty pleased with myself…

But then I heard a certain Snarky Penguin crowing about his brand new Asus Eee, a tiny, commercially available laptop similar in design to the XO… but with a much bigger internal drive.

So now I have Eee Eeenvy.