The ASUS Eee 70x family of netbooks

The ASUS EeePC 70x family were the original netbook. Arriving on the market back in 2008 they were the world’s first small, affordable, portable laptops and were the beginning of an era!

I bought a 701 model as soon as I could and used it for study. I realised very quickly that the bundled Linux was fine but it was a little restricted. I installed the full blown Ubuntu onto the small 4Gb SSD but ran into a few snags. At the time Ubuntu didn’t support a lot of the hardware so I spent some time researching the problems and fixing them.

Thus was born RiceeeyTweak, a small script that enabled all the hardware on my 701 to work perfectly under a full blown Ubuntu install.

As time went on the major Linux distro creators built in the correct drivers for most of the hardware, but as more netbooks came out the major players concentrated on the newer netbooks and, somewhat, forgot about the old Eee70x. Even now a few bits are unsupported.

The latest RiceeeyTweak builds on it’s past and remains a simple way to get all your hardware, and to some extent your desktop, fully 70x compliant (as it were). Full hardware support, and a refined desktop for the Eee’s smaller than normal screen.

The last version for Ubuntu 8.10 script can be found here.

A list of ‘what it does’ and a tutorial is below (coming soon).

So, if you have a 70x netbook and want to get it fully up and running you ‘should’ need nothing more than RiceeeyTweak!

List of actions:

Tutorial: