I was recently using Nokia’s N96 which is an impressive phone. The phone has a great camera, flash, a nice screen size, bluetooth, wifi, an impressive 16GB of storage space and it even plays DTV. I switched it for an Android G1.

A while ago we tended to switch phones when the hardware got better. A lighter phone, a better camera, better screen resolution / size. But, now the mobile OS war has just gotten interesting with Apple leading the new era.

One of the reasons why I don’t like iPods is the entire philosophy of having everything closed and according to the likes of Apple. But, fortunately the open source community is too awesome and have developed a firmware that we can install on several different audio devices.

Rockbox is a bit like an operating system for portable media players. You can install it on several different devices from the following manufactures: Apple, Archos, SanDisk, Toshiba, iriver, and more.

I’m glad to report back saying the attempt to install the Ubuntu Eee 8.04 was a success. Now my Eee 4G is quite a sexy machine. I’ll detail for you the steps involved in the whole installation and tweaks.

1) Install

Head over to the Ubuntu Eee Download and Install page to get the first part done. The steps listed there are pretty easy to do: download the ISO, place it on a USB drive, boot your Eee, and install. I went for the guided installation that took the full disk.

I’ve been using the eee PC for about 4 months now with the default Xandros OS. I’ve done a couple of tweaks to install some programs like Gimp and KeePass. But, I’m still not completely satisfied.

The default eee PC OS still doesn’t have the latest versions of Firefox, OpenOffice, and the hassle to update these are a bit time consuming. So, I’ve just decided to make a switch.

As I type this, my little eee PC is installing the Ubuntu EEE (an Ubuntu distro specially made for the eee PC). I’m hoping that it’ll give me a bit more flexibility on what I want on my machine, a bit more stability after all of the updated programs are installed, and improve interoperability between the different OSs that I’m running.

So far we’ve covered open source programs you can run on your computer. Most often they’re safer, lighter, and able to have you get the task done just as easily as proprietary equivalents.

Now, we’ll take it to the next level and talk about entire operating systems you can use on your machine. With an open source OS, at the maturity level of the existing projects, you will be able to make your entire computer safer, leaner, and quite often easier to manage.