EEE pc, Xubuntu and Compiz

So last week I decided to get rid of the default Xandros operating system on my eee. It was alright, but I felt it was a big laggy and the wireless connection always took forever to start up. For having 512MB of DDR2 RAM, and a 2GB SSD, I didn’t think the eee should have been that “laggy”. Plus nevermind that I’ve always been a fan of Ubuntu the few times I have put linux on a pc. So I decided to give it a shot and install a custom version of eeeXubuntu on my eee. (Xubuntu = Ubuntu Linux + Xfce desktop environment, and eeeXubuntu = eee pc + Xubuntu.)
First I tried installing from an external USB DVD drive that my friend lent me, but somehow, when booting up from it, my bootable cd (tested and I know works) didn’t get detected in the BIOS. I even hit esc when booting, and selected the DVD drive, but still, Mr. boot CD was not happy. So the next step, since I’ve read about it working, was to create a bootable USB thumb drive and install the OS from that. At first since the eee has only 2GB of storage, I wasn’t successful loading the OS with the default partitions that Ubuntu sets. I read that people had to delete the swap partition to install it….so I tried that and it worked! This took me 3 hours to figure out, but hey, you don’t know unless you try and persist right?! When it restarted, a nice lightweight version of linux was on the eee, and I was very happy.
How can get this any cooler you ask? Why, install Compiz of course. So I decided to follow the eee wiki to install Compiz, and tweak the settings. To my shock it actually worked on the first try (I seem to never get things right on the first shot, but I’m stubborn to get it working so it usually works out). I even have Compiz auto start up when booting the eee, and it doesn’t run poorly at all! It runs just as nicely as it does without it. To be fair, I haven’t used the eee for more than a couple of hours at a time (it’s not my main PC), but it’s still really cool that I got it to work. The wireless connects faster, nothing is “laggy”, and I still have a small bit of hard drive space to save files. My next project on the eee would be to add RAM or bluetooth (either via a hack, or just get a tiny usb adapter), but I’ll wait until I start working to do that.