On having your cake and....
To "Have your cake and eat it too" is an old expression that in some ways means that you want to have it all - without compromise. For the last couple of weeks I have been playing with a Linux distribution optimized for the ASUS EeePC - my 1000H came with Windows XP and I want to keep that on the internal hard drive but be able to boot the fully installed version of Eeebuntu with out having to take the risk of setting up a dual boot arrangement. Putting it on a USB connected portable hard drive seemed to be the answer except for one problem - the installer refused to recognize the portable drive in order to install to it! Putting it on a USB drive as a form of a "Live CD" with what is called a "persistence" file to retain settings and such was possible but not satisfactory. The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple when I finally got to it. When I originally got the EeePC last fall it came with a small (80 GB) hard drive that I immediately changed out for a larger one. Since I had not been able to get Eeebuntu to install to a USB drive, I decided to change the hard drive back from the one with XP and just play with it for a few days. This morning it was time to put the drive with XP on it back - and I did so. After I put the drive with Eeebuntu on it back in its external enclosure I decided that since the EeePC allows for booting from USB devices that I would try it and see what happened. Turned the EeePC on and held down the ESC key and the alternate boot menu came up - selected the USB drive - pressed enter and held my breath. Up came the GRUB boot loader then Eeebuntu booted to the full desktop and appears to run normally if a tad bit slower than if it was on the internal hard drive. I can live with that! Who says you can't have it all?