Debian Eeepc

Posted by Nico Golde in
Saturday, January 26. 2008

Asus Eeepc 701 4G

Yesterday I got an Asus EeePC and I'm really impressed by it. One of the hardware pieces where I thought you get exactly what you pay for it.

So far I ripped off the Xandros installation. While it may fit some users it is a really stripped down installation, you can't actually do much with it. Instead I gave the DebianEeePC project a try. The installation was pretty straight forward like described in the wiki. Put the installer img on a USB stick together with the network driver and install

Most things are working like they are supposed to work, even the webcam and suspend works. Yay!

However some things don't work yet. For example acpi reports the remaining capacity in percentage rather than a real capacity in mAh. You just have something like 100 mAh in your proc which means 100%. This is really annoying, while it works to show the remaining percentage you can't calculate the remaining time. An additional deficit of this is that it is only capable of reporting this in steps of 10 here (until you are under 10% then it gets a bit more precise). This seems to be a BIOS or a battery firmware problem.

Another thing is that nearly all special keys do not work with unmodified acpi-support because the event ids don't match

For some strange reason asus-brn-up.sh is always executed no matter what fn key you use and even if another script like voldownbt.sh get executed as well.

Apart from this I am really happy with the device, I get a working X desktop with openbox in 25 seconds and even the often criticized small screen is not that small in my opinion. A bigger problem is the keyboard. If you have big fingers I think its not fun to type on it, the keys are extremely small.

So far, thanks to everyone for the efforts put in DebianEeepc to make this possible!

See tuxmobil for some other collected installation reports.

UPDATE: it takes like 3 hours to charge the battery while it's switched on which somehow sucks.

UPDATE: it seems like there is a very good reason to not use the default installation on the Eeepc, I did not confirm this though since I already ripped it off.

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May be you'll be intrested with eeepc-acpi (http://groups.google.com/group/linux.debian.bugs.dist/browse_thread/thread/086cc659927206af)
I haven't enough time to test it, so I'm not sure is it works fine.

#1 milosh (Homepage) on 2008-01-26 21:32 (Reply)

thanks for the pointer, i will definitely give it a try.

#2 nion on 2008-01-26 22:10 (Reply)

I don't really see any difference with it. Looks like this is mainly some polished code.

#3 nion on 2008-01-27 13:51 (Reply)

To quote the author:
2008-01-27 18:06 it's exactly the same as the asus_acpi.ko module in functionality
2008-01-27 18:06 just cleaned up the code and renamed to avoid conflicts with the "real" asus_acpi.ko

#4 nion on 2008-01-28 15:20 (Reply)

Somewhere, there was a Eee PC break-in presented with screenshots.

Scary thing, all these open-source programs are very insecure, a non-technical reader might think.

#5 Tomasz Chmielewski (Homepage) on 2008-03-06 20:13 (Reply)

fools can be found everywhere.

#5.1 nion on 2008-03-06 22:37 (Reply)

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