Andree's Debian & General Musings

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:

• 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
  

Everything else is pretty much ok. Apart from smaller fonts and makingg windows go above the top panel (with: gconftool-2 --set /apps/compiz/plugins/move/allscreens/options/constrain_y --type bool 0), I have not really made any changes.

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. ;-)