PupEee 4.31 Beta 5

I've been running the latest beta of PupEee 4.31 for two days now, and I am impressed.

In addition to cleaning out the last leftovers from SeaMonkey, the most noticeable and useful change is the fact that eee-control now is accessible from a quick launch icon on the task bar. One stop shopping for most eee-specific settings, including over-clocking if you like to burn your battery faster.

Other useful additions include a battery meter and CPU temperature gauge on the task bar... almost makes my install of pwidgets redundant, but the eye candy is soo pretty...

Overall the most important improvement of PupEee 4.32 over previous versions is the change to Chrome and pwireless2 - those two changes alone is worth the trouble of upgrading.

PupEee 4.31 is discussed in this thread at EeeUser.com, has it's own forum here, and can be downloaded from this site.

Above: Beta 5, with eee-control, powertop and chrome running

Below: The various functions on the task bar

More PupEee stuff

One of the things I discovered that I really like under PupEee is the multiple workspaces - it's almost as good as having a multi-monitor setup. In one workspace i can have my browser and IM running, in the other I can open AbiWord and get some typing done - all without cluttering the narrow task bar too much. And I can simply change between the two with a simple key-combo.

Never saw the utility of running multiple work spaces when I'm fiddling with Linux on my desktop, but on a pocket-able computer with a small screen it's a godsend.

PupEee 4.31 Beta 3

Recently i find that I do more and more of my 'serious' work under PupEee - PupEee 4.31 beta 3 to be exact. There is a number of reasons for this, firstly the rather impressive boot time (30 sec from I pick the SD card in the boot menu until the desktop is usable, 41 sec until my WiFi is connected). The change from SeaMonkey to Chrome as the browser certainly helps too - SM never felt like a modern browser to me, and since I don't download mail to my Eee the loss of the built in email client is no loss at all.

I also like that 4.31 - or at least the betas - is not downloaded as ISO files, but rather as separate files. This means that updating the beta is as simple as replacing one squash file (.sfs) with a new one and the distro is updated.

Pretty much the only addition I've done to the basic distro is adding pwidgets - useful little widgets sitting along the side of the screen giving me the basic info on the status of my Eee.

PupEee in a very '60 style

A somewhat calmer PupEee