KDE4 Can Too Run on the ASUS EeePC

There are many things that the KDE desktop environment has been called, but fast is not one of them. As Linux blogger “Penguin” Pete Trbovich once commented when reviewing a distro with KDE on it, “I might as well have been sending mouse clicks by telegraph and getting the postcards of the desktop back in the Sunday mail.” But that was years ago, and Trolltech, the team behind KDE, has focused more on performance than adding eye candy in recent releases. Even Linux founder Linus Torvalds came out as preferring KDE over Gnome as recently as 2008. SO perhaps you would too, on your ASUS EeePC..

But recent reviewers have been outspoken in their amazement that a run-of-the-mill build of an ASUS EEE PC will run KDE4 out-of-the-box, with only a minimal graphics card. Using the Kubuntu variant of Ubuntu (itself no speed demon), and the “EeeUser” Wiki for instructions on how to create a USB bootloader, one may get KDE4 on the ASUS EeePC with as little hassle as you could expect.

The boot speed on ASUS EeePC is a minute or less. The desktop comes up on the Eee PC screen in all of its shiny KDE glory, with transparent menus, wobbly windows, and various whistles and bells. Keep in mind that KDE4 is still in development, up to version 4.2 as of this writing, so several tweaks and customizations may still affect the graphics on the desktop, but basically the root functionality will remain the same.

It should also be noted that if the BIOS boot order of the triple-E isn’t set up right, it won’t know to boot from a USB drive. So you have to tweak that first as well – just boot the ASUS EeePC machine and when the first screen shows (before it hits the operating system) press ‘F2′ to get to the BIOS configuration.