After complaining that installing applications on an Eee PC was just too damn hard, Anthony Caruana went out and canvassed the available options. His Pocket Mojo posting is a useful guide to the basic installation choices available on the Eee, with lots of useful links for the determined expander. I'm still not keen to do anything to my Eee that might require reinstallation, but if you are looking to make your Eee more versatile, this is a good place to start.
Starting out with the Eee PC [Pocket Mojo]

The SimpleHelp weblog posts a thorough walk-through of how to create a custom Windows Vista installation disc with previously mentioned vLite. We already highlighted how to slipstream Vista Service Pack 1 with vLite, but SimpleHelp's post focuses on stripping out all the Vista features you don't need to lighten up your installation, similar to how we trimmed down Windows XP to the bare essentials. It may sound daunting, but the step-by-step post is extremely detailed and easy to follow.

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Next time you wipe your PC's hard drive clean and reinstall Windows with that old installation disc, you don't want to connect your fresh, unpatched and vulnerable system to the internet only to download 176 new updates from Microsoft. If your XP installation CD is older than 2004, once your system is online, you'll have to wait for hefty service packs to download, chained to your mouse while pushing the Next button, watching progress bars, and rebooting multiple times. Wouldn't it be better to start your installation, head out to run errands or grab coffee, and come back to an up-to-date system before your system gets online? It's possible, using some free software and a blank disc. After the jump, I'll show you how to create an automated, customised XP installation CD or DVD, that includes Microsoft's official-but-not-released Service Pack 3 for Windows XP.

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Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Create a selective backup of preference settings for your favourite Firefox extensions with OPIE, a free add-on for Firefox 2. Once you've got the Ordered Preference Import/Export extension installed, head to it in the "Tools" menu and you can choose which extensions and preferences you'd like to save and export to a .prefs file, making it easy to auto-configure all the add-ons when moving to new systems or re-installing the Fox. Not a bad extension to have around when Firefox 3 becomes official, but if you're looking to bundle up the extensions themselves, try the Firefoex Extension Backup Extension. OPIE is a free download, works wherever Firefox 2 does (Original FEBE/CLEO post).

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If you've flirted with the idea of switching your desktop operating system to Linux but never took the leap, the time is now. This week's release of Hardy Heron, an Ubuntu release that will be supported until 2011, offers a freer, more productive space for work and play than ever before. It's not easy jumping blind into a new way of thinking or working, and Ubuntu, the so-called "Linux for Humans" operating system, is no different. For all the online buzz that surrounds the increasingly popular distribution, millions of sane, regular people wonder why they'd ever give up their familiar Mac or PC to venture into something still relatively new. Today we're shining the spotlight on a few great tools and tweaks that make Heron a worthy switch. Photo by BotheredByBees.

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The Digital Inspiration blog has a timely step-by-step tutorial on creating a "slipstreamed" Vista installation DVD that has all the fixes and tweaks from Service Pack 1 included. The guide utilises the previously mentioned vLite tool, and requires a Vista installation CD—but you create the new DVD from inside your existing Vista install, so don't get too format-happy before reading through. For a similar method of creating an updated XP installation CD, check out RyanVM's Update Pack.

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Windows only: You'll often see a no-install, runs-from-its-own-executable program or utility get a special nod on this blog—and for good reason, as a jam-packed "Add/Remove" screen is not a pretty thing. But for those with a lot of one-use apps to wrangle and find, free utility ZipInstaller makes a lot of sense. It does what it sounds like—"installs" the files from their unpacked .zip archives to a dedicated spot, and makes their utilities accessible from the Start Menu (or Launchy or another favourite app-launcher). As the FreewareGenius blog points out, this has the added bonus of helping you remember you have the little guy available in the first place, rather than letting it collect dust in some corner of your Program Files folder. ZipInstaller is a free download for Windows systems only.

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As anyone who's reinstalled Windows XP knows, there have been a lot, and I mean a lot, of updates issued for the operating system, and waiting for them to install (/restart/install/restart) can be laborious, to say the least. Luckily, one helpful soul has done the good work of compiling all the patches made to Windows XP since Service Pack 2 was released and creating a tool to make an XP install CD that contains all those changes. You download the roughly 50 MB file, point a utility at your install CD's i386 directory, then wait for it to make you a new folder you can burn to disc. We've pointed out other offline updaters in the wake of the dearly departed AutoPatcher, but this one seems to grab more than just security updates and could save some serious time.

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Many, if not most, of the newest and updated Linux applications out there are crafting Ubuntu/Debian-ready .deb packages that require just a double-click to install, but many apps are still available only in the .rpm files used by Red Hat and Fedora-based distributions. The Ubuntu Unleashed blog has a quick and simple tutorial on installing the Alien conversion tool and using it to convert packages to .deb format. Once you've got Alien installed, the command is simply:

sudo alien -k name-of-rpm-file.rpm

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Few things can be as frustrating to non-expert Linux users as seeing the phrase "... or compile from source packages" on the download page of that killer app to try out (and we know that's often the case for you patient non-Ubuntu users out there). If you're looking for a nuts-and-bolts guide to installing software from those strange-looking Whatever.tar.gz files, Tuxfiles.org has a pretty good one. While the link takes you through the unpacking, compiling, installing, and cleaning up, there's a basic command line method for almost any package (replacing "package" with the appropriate downloaded file name):

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