When ASUSTek started shipping Eee PC 701, who would have thought that the concept of a little laptop with a puny processor, paltry storage, and a minuscule screen would be such a phenomenal success? Besides making computing on the move truly affordable, the rise of the netbook also gave an important boost to Linux as a viable desktop alternative and spurred a few Linux distributions designed specifically for the new platform. In this article, I'll look at how to replace the Linux distro that comes with your netbook or convert your Windows-based netbook into a Linux machine.

None of the currently available netbooks include an optical drive, so first you must figure out how to install a Linux distro. If you have an external CD/DVD burner, you can download an ISO image of the distro you like, burn it onto a CD, and install the system on your netbook. Otherwise, you can use the UNetbootin utility [1] to create a bootable USB stick with a Live Linux distro on it. The use of UNetbootin is pretty straightforward: Download the latest release of the utility and an ISO image of the Linux distro you want to install, plug a USB stick into your machine, launch UNetbootin by double-clicking on the downloaded unetbootin-linux-xxx file (you might need to make it executable with the chmod +x command), choose the Diskimage option, and select the downloaded ISO image. Then select the USB stick from the Drive drop-down list, and press OK to create a ready-to-go bootable USB stick.

To create a USB stick containing a Ubuntu-based netbook distro, such as Eeebuntu or Easy Peasy, you might want to use a utility that ships with the latest version of Ubuntu. It allows you not only to create a bootable USB disk from an ISO image, but also a persistent home for storing all your settings and changes you make to the live USB system. This can come in handy if you want to try an Ubuntu-based Linux distro without installing it on your netbook. To create a bootable USB stick with the utility, choose Preferences | Make USB Startup Disk. Select the ISO image of the distro and the target USB disk. If you want to create a persistent home, select the Store in reserved extra space option, and press the Make Startup Disk.

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