The evolution of my Eee continues. On Friday, I popped into what I think is MSY‘s new Sydney store and bought 2GB of memory for my Eee for $72 (this is the better quality Kingston card, I had planned to buy the $55 Transcend memory but they were out of the 2GB version). Unfortunately the version of Xandros that ASUS has installed on the Eee has a hardcoded limit of supporting 1GB, however a lovely person on the Eee forum has recompiled the source code for the Xandros linux kernel to support 2GB. Following the instructions on the Eee wiki to the letter, my Eee now happily boots in 2GB mode…and it worked first time…phew! As a side effect I now have a rescue mode should I stuff it up in the future. I’ve also added an image as my background which required creating a desktop file for the image so that Xandros would recognise it (otherwise it was lost each reboot – took a few days to work that one out).

Upgrading the kernel to support 2GB was the last step I needed to do before I could start using the Eee properly. It wasn’t a necessary step but as I like to open a lot of programs at once (not to mention lots of tabs in firefox), I figured 2Gb was probably essential, as I have run out of memory on my 1GB thinkpad. I figured installing a new kernel was the thing most likely to kill my Eee so I’ve held off doing much with it til that was done. Thankfully it’s been a painless experience and I’ve been picking up old, old, old *nix skills once more. I still need to mount the SD card properly and set it so that it doesn’t start file manager on bootup. I’m thinking that should be less nerve wracking than a kernel install.