Hello,
I just registered to Debian wiki. Althought I am not new to Debian (been working with it for at least 5 years), I am neither a hardware not software programmer/developer. However, I like GNU/Linux very much and I expect the following may aid those trying to setup Debian in an ASUS eeepc 1215p or any other model where the problem I had might arise. I want to post the following but I don't know where and how to make it easily available for Debian users that own an ASUS eeepc.
I installed Debian for the first time in my brand new ASUS eeepc 1215p without problem following the Debian Wiki for the model., using netinst. I couldn't dd (used OpenSuse 11.3 to create it) the iso file to a pen drive but used the unetbootin program instead. By the way, I couldn't uninstall the
firmware-brcm80211 package without losing wireless connection, although I updated linux-imagexxx as suggested. However, this is not an issue at all, since I have wireless connection providing the firmware is installed.
Here comes the problem (and how to fix it):
I had to take the machine to the local ASUS tech service because after 2 months w/o problem the machine wouldn't boot. The tech service changed both the hard drive and motherboard. Happy with that, I installed Debian again as mentioned above. However, after installing the firmware for wireless connection I couldn't connect that way. Moreover, the boot hanged once and again at some point (usually when trying to load wicd which I downloaded to have a client to configure wireless connections using wicd-gtk2 or wicd-gtk). I googled a lot without any results. Then, I said to myself... Could it be anything in the BIOS setup? And the answer is.... Right! For some
reason the onboard wireless was disabled in the BIOS. Pressing F2 to enter BIOS and enabling it solved the problem. Although I cannot uninstall the firmware while having updated the kernel I can now connect my eeepc 1215p both wired and wireless.
Hope this helps and can be added to the eeepc Debian Wiki for easy reference for other users.
Regards,
Gerardo Mirkin