eeePC Netbook Ubuntu mod and a bit of fun

As you can see, I’ve man­aged to get Tweet­Deck installed on my lan­guish­ing eeePC 8G Netbook.

Ori­gin­ally we’d picked the eeePC up as a light web browser, but found the nat­ive Xan­dros OS a bit weak.

Time passed and we’d not had time to really explore the poten­tial of this little guy…until now.

First off, the OS needed a rework. I was con­sid­er­ing a TinyXP (stripped down) Win­dows XP install, but decided against it for a num­ber of reasons.

Then Easy Peasy was released. It’s a fork of Ubuntu Linux, optim­ized for the require­ments of the net­book’s smal­ler form factor (screen, key­board, wifi, etc).

Cut­ting to the chase, the Easy Peasy install­a­tion went per­fectly, fol­low­ing these instruc­tions.

Then, to make this refreshed net­book work for me…it needed Tweet­Deck (the ulti­mate Twit­ter cli­ent) which runs on Adobe AIR. Ubuntu and Easy Peasy don’t include AIR, but lucky for me there was a simple walk­through which I’ll sum­mar­ize here:

1. Open the Terminal
2. Down­load the file from here using the wget command:
   http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/1.5/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
3. The name of the file is AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
4. Save the file in the Home folder (Places > Home Folder)
5. Run this command:
   chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
6. Now run this command:
   sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

The nor­mal installer will open, install it. From now whenev­er you down­load a .air file, just double click it and it will be installed.

So this means we simply browse to the Tweet­Deck down­load page, click on the Linux Ver­sion, and select ‘install with Ado­beAir­Installer’ when promp­ted by the oper­at­ing system.

Poof done! Tweet­Deck now installed and the eeePC net­book can now play with Twit­ter like the big boys.