Ubuntu on the Asus Eee PC

In March I mentioned buying an Asus Eee PC running Xandros Linux. Today I replaced the Xandros with a special Eee version of Ubuntu, the Linux flavour that I run on my main laptop. A member of the Ubuntu Australia group kindly sent me a CD with the operating system on it (so I didn't have to download it), along with instructions for putting the program on a USB stick so I could install it (the Eee doesn't have a CD drive). This involved downloading some small programs and running them, to make the USB stick bootable and unpack the Ubuntu program files. Unfortunately, I couldn't install from my USB stick (it kept giving error messages), and I didn't have a spare one to try, so I used the same instructions to put the files on an SD card and it then installed with no problems. I'm much happier with the Eee now that it has a more familiar (to me) operating system on it, and the screen seems more readable to me, so I'm playing around with it quite a bit more than I did before. I've got an 8GB SD card in it to supplement the 4GB that comes with it. While at a science-fiction convention in Canberra over the weekend, I spotted two people with 7-inch Eee's (the model I have). One was running the supplied Linux, but the other had an alpha of Ubuntu 8.10 on it.