03 November, 2008
EeePC 901 with Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex
I have finally bought an EeePC 901, mainly to use for travelling.
I had been holding off for some weeks because I had hoped (in vain) that the Linux version with 20GB SSD and without a Windows XP license would become available here in Australia.
Anyway, I decided to try putting brand new Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on it and I must say it worked really well. Here is what I did:
I am typing this on the little keyboard of the 901 and it is actually quite usable even though I would not want to type pages and pages on it. (Somehow the Blogger editor behaves a bit funny, but I guess this has nothing to do with the hardware but if anything with Firefox 3.)
So far, I think this is an excellent little machine - it even plays Big Buck Bunny in 720p without any problems. ;-)
I had been holding off for some weeks because I had hoped (in vain) that the Linux version with 20GB SSD and without a Windows XP license would become available here in Australia.
Anyway, I decided to try putting brand new Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on it and I must say it worked really well. Here is what I did:
- Downloaded the standard Intrepid i386 Desktop CD and put it on a USB memory stick using UNetbootin.
- Installed with the following disk layout: / on 4GB SSD, 1GB swap and 7GB /home on 8GB SSD. (I setup a 1GB swap partition for hibernation and also used ext3 even though some sources say that the flash memory may die during the lifetime of the box.)
- One issue I noticed was that my static IP configuration did get lost between reboots. Eventually I created a new connection from scratch and that worked fine.
- After installation, I added the Ubuntu EeePC kernel and assorted tools which resolved the WLAN problem (even though I have not actually connected to any access points yet) and got all of the Hot Keys to work.
- I thought the screen was a bit dark, so I looked around and found that using the following command makes it much brighter: setpci -s 00:02.1 f4.b=ff. (This may fry the screen apparently, so use at own risk.)
- Also, the sound volume was very low. Appending the following to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base fixed this: options snd-hda-intel model=auto
I am typing this on the little keyboard of the 901 and it is actually quite usable even though I would not want to type pages and pages on it. (Somehow the Blogger editor behaves a bit funny, but I guess this has nothing to do with the hardware but if anything with Firefox 3.)
So far, I think this is an excellent little machine - it even plays Big Buck Bunny in 720p without any problems. ;-)
