Personal Computing and Development by Dag J. Nedrelid

My Eee PC 900 – Debian

I decided to install Debian (“Lenny” release) with XFCE 4 on it – worked like a charm. SSD responsive speed was not an issue anymore. I was also amazed on how far linux desktops have come the last 4-5 years. No more fiddling around with the X configuration, it just works.

I didn’t do much manual configuration at all, apt-get with its super cow powers did very well without any errors. Here are my rough notes for installing linux on the Eee 900 16gb SSD version.

Install debian base system (lenny) installer from wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePc (expert install)

add vga=788 to /boot/grub/menu.1st (kopt)

update-grub

apt-get update

apt-get install locate

apt-get install xorg xfce4

(You start xfce4 correctly with ’startxfce4′ and not ’startx’).

#BATTERY
apt-get install xfce4-battery-plugin
Right-click the panel in xfce > Add New Items
Add the Battery Monitor
Right-click plugin > Properties for the properties dialog

#WIFI
Just add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://apt.wicd.net lenny extras

You’ll also need to add the key used for signing Wicd by running the following command in a terminal:

wget -q http://apt.wicd.net/wicd.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

apt-get update and apt-get install wicd to install Wicd

Remove eth0 lines from /etc/network/interfaces

#SOUND
apt-get install alsa
run alsamixer
add volume mixer to xfce4 panel
Change the value VOLUME_LABEL to Master in /etc/default/eeepc-acpi-scripts

By now most Eee specific things seems to work, though I have not tested webcam.

Here are the instructions for Webcam from wiki.debian.org:
##########################################
Webcam (uvcvideo)

Ever since kernel version 2.6.26 there is no need to build uvc module which is now included in.

Become root and type the following command:

modprobe uvcvideo

Then test it’s working by executing:

Become root and invoke the following command:

apt-get install luvcview
As normal user you can now make use of your web cam tool
luvcview -f yuv

The camera is switched off by default after the installation. You can enable it in the BIOS, or by doing:

echo “1″ > /sys/devices/platform/eeepc/camera

You should see messages about the camera being detected if you do:

dmesg | tail

If you broke your webcam settings, use mplayer -fps 30 tv:// once to restore them.
########################################

#BROWSER
apt-get install iceweasel
1. Open “about:config” in IceWeasel’s address bar.
2. In the “Filter” box, type general.useragent.extra.firefox.
3. Where you see the word “Iceweasel”, right-click and pick “Modify”
4. Then replace the word “Iceweasel” with “Firefox”.
5. Close the page (or the tab).

#BROWSER2
Iceweasel was hard to combine with quicktime and flash, to make it simple I did:
apt-get install wine
Then you can just download windows versions of firefox, flash and quicktime(and itunes) like normal,
xfce will take care of the rest when you execute them – it will be as easy to install as in windows.
BUT – quicktime has a tendency to act up and be laggy and bug stuff up at times.

#MISC
Uncomment kernel.printk = 4 4 1 7 in /etc/sysctl.conf, then run sysctl -p
This avoids kernel spam, in my case the HAL daemon spam at boot which cluttered the login prompt.

Add ‘clear’ to /etc/rc.local (above exit 0) to have a clean login prompt at boot after all boot messages.

All done. Debian (Lenny) with Xfce4 is up and running nicely and everything seems to work – and fast! at least compared to XP. It’s very comfortable to use now and I’m rarely reminded of the slow SSD speed.

I’m still curious on how windows 2000 would run on it, as I _greatly_ improved the speed on an old laptop once by replacing XP with Win2k on it.