| About. |
|---|
 |
The Asus EeePC is a very small (2 pounds) mini-laptop. The instructions below are based on the model shown on the left,
the 4GB Galaxy model, released at the end of 2007.
There exists a special spin of Fedora called 'eeedora', which has
similar aims to those of this page, but also includes several things (such as drivers that aren't in the Fedora kernel),
and uses less intensive features like XFCE instead of GNOME. For something that 'just works', this may be a better option.
If however you want to take the regular Fedora, and cut it down in size a little (currently down to ~1.2G), and forego some drivers that aren't
quite ready yet, this page may be for you. |
|
| Method. |
|---|
Because of the lack of CD drive, the easiest way to get the Eee installed is to do a network install.
The rest of this page assumes you have an nfs server, loaded with an rsync'd Fedora install tree.
- Power on the eee, and hold down F2. This will take you into the BIOS.
- In the 'Boot' screen, set the 'OnBoard LAN Boot ROM' option to 'enabled'. Hit f10 to save and exit
- hold down F2 again. When you reenter the BIOS select the 'Boot Device Priority' option, and set the first item to 'Network:Atheros Boot Agent'. Hit f10 to save and exit.
- This time, whilst it boots, it will look on your network for a tftp server.
- I found it worthwhile to set up a separate PXE target, which I called 'eee'. Booting this automatically
added a ks=nfs:mynfsserver:/export/eee.ks to the kernel command line. This will load the kickstart file which contains the options to repartition, format and install your eee with a small package set.
(Edit it to change the nfs line to point to your NFS server path where you keep the Fedora packages)
- Wait. After a while, the Eee will reboot. You can now optionally go into the BIOS again with F2, and disable the network booting to speed up subsequent boots.
- default root password will be 'rootme'.
|
| Bugs. |
|---|
- The PXE ROM in the Eee has a number of bugs.
- Sometimes the Eee will claim that there's no network cable plugged in, even though there is.
For some reason the PXE ROM only enables the link detection when on battery. If something previously
disabled link detection, it never comes back up again, even after a power off/on cycle.
To work around this, power off the eee, pull out the power cord, and power up on battery.
After the PXE ROM has detected the link, you can plug the power back in.
- Quite often, when exiting the PXE ROM to boot off the disk, everything just locks up.
The only way to make it boot the disk in this case is to hit escape when it tries to acquire
a DHCP lease.
- If you're unfortunate enough to have the kernel crash and scribble over memory, sometimes
a message appears on rebooting claiming that the PXE ROM has an invalid header. Power cycling doesn't fix it.
The only way to make this go away is to remove the battery for a few minutes, then replace it
and boot up on battery, and then re-insert the power lead.
- The BIOS exports the current battery life in percentages in a field that measures in mAh.
This causes hal confusion and
pops up a warning on login about the battery having a very low capacity (1%) and possibly being
damaged. It's safe to ignore this. The battery will run for hours, despite what hal thinks.
- The card reader seems to really dislike SDHC cards. Trying to write to a 4GB card stops
around the 2GB mark.
|
| Other things of note. |
|---|
- Some people claim that you should use 'p4-clockmod' on the Eee to reduce power consumption.
This is false. This driver does *not* save any power at all. Its original purpose was to reduce
heat generation, by making workloads take longer to complete. (By inserting duty-cycles between
cycles where the CPU actually does any work). Because the workload takes longer to complete, the
CPU spends longer out of the low-power idle states that it enters when left idle for a period of time.
- The Celeron in the Eee does not support Speedstep. It can switch speed to 900MHz, but it does
so in a non-standard way. There exists a kernel module to switch the speed but it isn't part of
the mainline kernel yet. It should probably be rewritten as a cpufreq driver.
|
| Power usage. |
|---|
- Left idle, an Eee running F9 pulls 11W
|
| TODO. |
|---|
Some of the hardware isn't currently supported by the Fedora kernel.
- The webcam. (uvcvideo needs work)
- The wireless chip (ath5k needs work)
- Modem. (Not likely to be ever supported. Binary-only module exists for older kernels).
- Suspend to ram.
|
|
|
