May. 9, 2008
I’ve been looking at the sweet small Asus Eee PC’s for quite some time now. I have had a hard time deciding whether to wait for the 900-series or buy the ones that are available in stores now. Giving it some thought I decided to wait for the new ones AND buy one now 
What can I say it’s a small pink beauty and so far I love it.
I ripped out Xandros as I couldn’t stand it and installed Ubuntu 8.04 which wasn’t that much of a hassle. I decided to install a eee optimized version from here: http://ubuntu-eee.tuxfamily.org/index.php5?title=Main_Page
Apart from needing a LOT of updates taking a LOT of time to install, it all went pretty smooth. In case I would ever want to go back to the original software for any not that obvious reason I backed up the whole 4Gig device using dd using the Ubuntu live CD and an external USB harddrive.
After applying all updates I installed the following packages available from the URL above:
- http://www.x2on.de/eeepc/eeepc-acpi-module-2.6.24-16-generic.deb
- http://www.x2on.de/eeepc/eeepc-wlan_1.0-1_i386.deb
- http://www.x2on.de/eeepc/eee-osd-ubuntu-2.1.1.deb
The result was still not good enough alot of things were not working as they were supposed to do. In order to get the wireless interface running I had to disable the card in “Hardware Drivers”, rename or remove the /lib/modules/2.6.24-16-generic/volatile/ath_hal.ko as it was interferring with the drivers above. In order to get it to load at boot I had to add ath_pci into /etc/modules.
I also made a number of small fixes to fix sound etc. However this seems to be handled in the scripts available for download from here: ftp://ftp.samiux.com/public/eeepc/. I commented out building the madwifi wireless driver from source in the 700-1.3 script and then successfully ran it fixing most/all of the remaining problems such as OSD and fn-keys. There is some more useful information in this guys blog: http://samiux.wordpress.com/
I also installed a new theme called clearlooks-compact which uses the screen a bit more efficiently buy compacting buttons and texts. The clearlooks-compact theme is available from here: http://martin.ankerl.com/2007/11/04/clearlooks-compact-gnome-theme/
In order to free some disk space I ended the setup with
apt-get clean
removing any retrieved packages stored in the local repository.
