Sure, we’ve seen projects like SplashTop boot a stripped Linux build quickly, but Intel engineers at the recent Linux Plumbers Conference took things a little farther last Thursday, starting up modified versions of Fedora and Intel’s own Moblin Linux on an SSD-equipped Eee PC in just five seconds. That’s all the way to an idle CPU and disk, not cheating and starting a window manager while background services thrash in the background, mind you — and it’s fast enough that the splash screen was removed from both distros. The changes are being sent back to the Moblin and Fedora trunks, but if you’re curious, a detailed overview of the changes awaits at the read link.

[Via SlashGear]

8GB of flash storage is currently the best you can hope for in a standard (though imported) Eee PC. However, if you’re industrious and determined enough, you can marry your 4GB Eee with a $150 (or so) 16GB Corsair Flash Voyager drive for a full 20GB of storage. That’s exactly what Johnx did over at eeeuser.com. He even integrated Bluetooth like we’ve seen before. Best of all though, the new NAND and Bluetooth radio are not soldered to the system. Rather, they are fitted to a pair of newly installed, internal USB ports slung off the miniPCIe connector. Thus, the system can be upgraded at any time. All hail Johnx… king of the Eees!

[Thanks, chainofcommand02]