Answering my own question...

Nothing like going out and doing it yourself, y'know.

Yesterday, I decided to take eeexubuntu out for a spin, but just to be on the safe side, I performed the following steps to save what I had on my eee (BTW, I had already successfully removed unionfs from my eee, combined the first two partitions - more about which below, and removed a heck of a lot software I have no use for. The following steps *won't* work for a straight-out-of-the-box unit.)

1. Boot from the eeexubuntu live disk. Verify that the eee "hard drive" partition was, indeed, /dev/sda1 (I prefer to use "sudo fdisk -l" for the job, though perhaps there might be something more intuitive out there).

2. Insert a 4-GB flash disk. (Micro Center had one on sale for $35). Verify the device name. In my case, it was /dev/sdd (/dev/sdb was the eeexubuntu flash drive, /dev/sdc is my SD card).

3. Invoke: sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdd1

4. The LED on the 4-GB flash drive starts to flash like crazy. Wait for the operation to complete, then remove the 4-GB drive.

After completing this step, I installed eeexubuntu. The install went well, and I like the look and feel but found enough problems with it to decide to revert back to my saved image. The procedure for that was:

1. Boot from the eeexubuntu live flash drive. Insert the 4-GB flash disk with the eee image on it. Verify device names.

2. Since the eeexubuntu install involves creating a swap partition, I had manually deleted the old /dev/sda1 partition and created a new /dev/sda1 formatted for Linux and a /dev/sda1 as a swap partition. Now that I was going back to Xandros, I deleted both of these partitions and created one /dev/sda1 partition out of them (basically reversing my steps). There's probably a better way to do this than using fdisk, but that's what I did. Make sure all changes are saved.

2. Invoke: sudo dd if=/dev/sdd1 of=/dev/sda1

3. The 4-GB LED starts flashing. Wait, but don't go away for long, because reading the data back is faster. Once the procedure is complete, the eee is ready to reboot.

NOTE: 4 GB is not always 4 GB! At the end of the restore, I got the following message:

Partition 1 has different physical/logical ends
(physical: 490, 254, 63)
(logical: 491, 145, 37)

Basically, if I understand this correctly, the USB drive is apparently just a hair larger, relatively speaking, than the space available in /dev/sda1. I have to assume that, since nothing could have been written to the "difference" between ends, that this message can be safely ignored.

Cheers...

What I didn't like about eeexubuntu...

1. Having to enter my password just about every time I wanted to do something "privileged." A minor nit, as this can be fixed.

2. Networking didn't quite work. The software kept expecting to connect to an ipv6 router (true for both the wireless connection and the network port). A major problem.

3. The default install provides support for the installation language. Attempting to add Cyrillic support using the package manager resulted in the installation of a bunch of files I didn't want (help files in Russian, which I don't care to have, and - somehow - the OpenOffice word processor!). This, too, was a show-stopper.

Cheers...

21 minutes on 12/21...

Which reminds me of a shaggy dog story about a guy whose whole life one day turns out to revolve around the number 7. He leaves the house with $77 in his pocket, catches a ride in a cab whose number is 777, arrives at 7 Seventh Avenue, and so on, eventually ending up betting his entire bank roll of $7,777.77 on the seventh horse in the seventh race. The horse comes in, of course... seventh.

Anyway, I just turned around a quick job (550 words) for my best client in 21 minutes (including setup time). Would that I could work like that all the time.

I spoke with Galina a little while ago. She is somewhere in Virginia. I'm updating my ETA to late afternoon.

Break's over! Back to the BHHR!

Cheers...