…and I had trashed it! Never happy unless I am tinkering I made one change too many last night. I am not sure whether it was the script to shut down the device when the lid is closed or a new tool to manage the simple interface but either way it caused the EEE to constantly reboot on startup. If this had been Windows I might have been able to unpick the damage I had done but it quickly became obvious that this was not going to be possible for me under Linux. So I needed to rebuild the whole thing.
Asus kindly provide a series of tools and clear documentation on how to re-image the EEE and this all took less than a hour. What took a little longer was to reapply all the changes that I had made – less those that caused the problems. Knowing that I will probably need to do the procedure again at some point I have documented the process and backup up as much as I can.
What this has proved is that I still have much to learn before I can claim to be a Linux guru.