Re: [orca-list] Installing Debian on the EEE PC

[Bram Duvigneau <bram@bramd.nl>]

Jason and others,

Jason White wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 09:39:14AM +0200, Willem van der Walt wrote:
> Different models of the EEEPC have different hardware.
> 
> The one I'm potentially interested in is the EEE-PC 1000 (the Linux version
> with the 40gb flash storage). I would be interested to know how well Orca
> performs on this hardware, especially under Debian.

Well, with Ubuntu 8.04, there's no ethernet or wireless out of the box.
In Ubuntu 8.10 ethernet works fine, but wireless doesn't. However, for
Ubuntu 8.04 there's a special eee pc kernel which supports all the hardware.

> It has a 1.5ghz x86 processor, and they're available with 1gb of RAM, which is
> what I would choose these days as a minimum.

Actually, it's 1.6 ghz and overclockable to 1.8 using one of the power
settings in the utility that comes preinstalled on the Windows model.

I just installed Ubuntu on an eee pc 901, the Windows version because
the Linux edition isn't sold here. It's a bit tricky to do and I think
it's impossible without sighted assistance. First of all I entered the
bios of the eee pc with f2 and changed the boot order to place the card
reader before the internal flashdisk. Note that the cardreader is seen
as a harddisk controller and not as removable storage in the bios. When
booting from an usb flashdisk, this step shouldn't be needed. I created
a bootable MMC card with a tool called inetbootin. Unfortunately, this
tool is inaccessible. After rebooting, I couldn't use the function keys
in the boot menu because inetbootin uses another menu then the one on
the standard install cd rom, so I coninued without accessibility
features and let someone click through the installation. I use the 4 gb
disk as my /, and the 8 gb disk as /home, no swap because I'm not sure
if that would degrade the lifetime of the ssds.

After installation I installed the eeepc kernel (sorry, can't find the
link at the moment) and was able to use ethernet and wireless. I
upgraded the system to Ubuntu 8.10.

The Inetbootin procedure should work for almost all other distributions
as well.

I don't know much about the performance yet, but if you would like to
know something specific, just ask.

Bram