Fedora + Eee PC = Eeedora

Red Hat Magazine has an article on installing Eeedora, a Fedora variant especially for the Asus Eee PC.

By default, the Asus Eee PC comes with a slightly modified Xandros with KDE. [Note: As pointed out by 12 in Comments, the Asus Eee PC actually uses iceWM.] Howver users not familiar with Linux will most likely not realize that it is running KDE because of the Easy Mode that hides the KDE desktop and gives the user only icons to the main apps in the system.

But one of the side effects of the Xandros install is that it uses unionfs for its filesystem, which is very common for Live CD installations. However, one of its features is that the space used by an application cannot be freed once that application is uninstalled. So, if you tried to uninstall OpenOffice to free up a few megabytes, unionfs would still report the same amount of used megabytes on your system.

So the author decided to install Eeedora instead. Eeedora is a Fedora-based live distribution created and maintained by Martin Andrews. Martin decided to create the distro for users more comfortable with Red Hat-based variants rather than Xandros, which is Debian-based.

Eeedora is based on the most current version of Fedora (8); it uses XFCE as the window manager; the live image download is currently less than 350 MB; and it gives the user full access to the yum repos for the Fedora distribution, allowing you to install the larger packages like Gimp, OpenOffice, and Thunderbird.

Eeedora in its current state works flawlessly with most of the hardware available under the Eee PC, coming up a little short still with webcam support and resume issues after a suspend.

Note Eeedora doesn’t use ext3. It uses ext2 to minimize disk use, so be aware that if devices are not unmounted properly, suspend/resume and hard shutdown could damage the install more frequently than if it was running ext3.

The complete article, including installation instructions, can be read here.