I got an Asus EeePC for Christmas. As a long time Linux user the pre-installed Windows XP version had a very short life, something around ten minutes to check that the hardware is working. In general installing Linux is not very hard, actually the harder part was to build the install USB stick, as the EeePC has no disk drive. But first a few sentences about the EeePC.
The device is small and looks cute so the girl acceptance level is pretty high as my personal girl acceptance level test girl confirmed. It just feels right. The weight is alright, 1.1kg is fair enough. Three USB slots, one more than my Apple Mac Book, so good too. VGA out, fine, SD card slot, alright, not that I need it but … RaLink WiFi chip, Gigabit network, built-in web cam, Bluetooth, synaptics touch pad. That’s pretty good, sounds like a complete computer, doesn’t it? The display resolution is 1024×600 – good for such a small device.
As as result of the overall size, the keyboard is of course small too. Also I’m now writing this entry on it, it takes some time to get used to it. The position of the pipe/less/greater-key is annoying as it can only be reached in combination with the fn modifier key. This is not very convenient for a programmer. The rest of the layout is more or less standard and it doesn’t take so long to not miss every key.
When I tried Bluetooth the first time, the device was not detected at all. Neither on Windows nor on Linux. But while changing other stuff I found out that the Bluetooth adapter was disabled in the BIOS. It is a nice feature to allow to hard disable some features in the BIOS but disabling anything by default seems not like the most clever idea. So please fix, Asus.
Sadly the EeePC suffers a heat problem. If you stress it a bit it gets really hot on the downside (like the Mac Books). So don’t put it on your naked thigh.
I have the model with two solid state discs which makes a total of 12GB disk space. Not very much but enough for my use cases (and I always wanted to have a SSD based device). I decided to go with Ubuntu:http://ubuntu.com also I normally prefer Gentoo because of the size. Source base distributions like Gentoo don’t differentiate between the actual packages and the header files so a complete Gentoo installations takes a lot more disk space than any binary distribution. Additionally, it was Christmas evening and I wanted something quick. While Gentoo is flexible, it is not quick to install.
Although I chose Ubuntu, I would roughly guess that Fedora or SuSE would work fine too, please leave a comment if you have an experience to share.
I chose Ubuntu mainline, not Eeebuntu because I want to have the latest and greatest Ubuntu and I can configure my panel myself.
Before you read on further make sure you understand that this is not about a dual boot installation. I completely removed the Windows system, so please make sure this is what you want too.
First of all we need a boot medium. There is an SD card slot and a number of USB ports, so the alternatives are USB disk drive, SD card, USB stick. I chose the latter but the rest should work too. Creating an USB boot stick requires a bit of manual work: download the Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (8.10) ISO image for 32bit computers (Atom CPU) then:
mkfs.vfat /dev/sdX1cat /usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin > /dev/sdXsyslinux -s /dev/sdX1mount -o loop <iso> /mnt/isomount /dev/sdX1 /mnt/stickcp /mnt/iso/.* /mnt/stickmv /mnt/stick/dists/intrepid /mnt/stick/dists/stablemv /mnt/stick/syslinux /mnt/stick/isolinuxmv /mnt/stick/isolinux/syslinux.cfg /mnt/stick/isolinux/isolinux.cfgNow the USB boot stick is ready. Just plug it in, type F1 to select the boot menu, choose the stick as the boot medium, boot from it and install Ubuntu as usual. Everything is detected and configured correctly including the synaptics touch pad, web cam and screen. The only missing components are the WiFi adapter and the specials keys. The keys generate ACPI events so it should not be hard to get them running. However, I don’t use specials keys so I don’t care.
The WiFi adapter is a RaLink RT2860 and RaLink provides a driver for it. You could download and manually compile this driver but I found it more convenient to have specific package for it.
The linux-eeepc-lean kernel from array.org works really well and includes support for the RaLink WiFI adapter. Just follow the setup instructions to install it. Then boot the new kernel and, if everything works fine, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to use the eeepc lean kernel as the default kernel. The Ubuntu installation is now done, enjoy!
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