Merry Christmas! Today I received an addition to my geek arsenal: an Asus Eee PC.
They really are telling the truth in their slogan; it is indeed “Easy to Learn, Work, and Play.” But if you’re like me and require that default-looking desktop environment to satisfy your needs, probably want to activate the Eee’s Full Mode.
So! Let’s get started with this. We need to get two packages to make Eee able to run this Full Mode.
Open a terminal (press Control+Alt+T) and type this command:
sudo apt-get update
All we’re doing here is updating our repository so that your Eee knows the latest available versions of the packages that we will be downloading right now:
sudo apt-get install ksmserver kicker
Now, reboot your Eee. Don’t be surprised if you don’t see the Full Mode on your next login, because we still need to tell our Eee that we want to use Full Mode.
Click on the power button in the lower right corner on your Eee, or press that shiny power button in front of your keyboard. There should now be an option for Full Mode. Click it, and within a minute your Full Mode will be loaded.
Booting Directly Into Full Mode
There is a fairly easy way to have your Eee PC boot directly into Full Mode so you don’t have to switch to the new mode from Easy Mode.
Open a terminal, and type these commands sequentially:
$ cd ~/
$ nano .xinitrc
Type this content into the .xinitrc file:
#Needed to get automount working
xhost + si:localuser:root
sudo rm /tmp/nologin
#Needed to get the network working
sudo /opt/xandros/bin/start_netserv &
startkde
Save the file (Ctrl+O) and exit (Ctrl+X). Reboot, and you should be given Full Mode immediately.
Enjoy your new Full-Mode-enabled Eee PC!