Tom’s Extelopedia

Gadget Views and Reviews

EEE PC 1000

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General Background

The EEE PC 1000 is a neat little machine.  It’s a lot more expensive than the original EEE PC, but it’s still cheap for a subcompact.  It ships with Xandros Linux.  That’s a good distribution for people who
want an easy-to-use machine for web browsing and word processing. However, I need LaTeX and Emacs for my work, and I haven’t been able to find a good way of installing that on Xandros.  Since I use Ubuntu
Linux everywhere else, I’m trying to install it.

Please contact me by E-mail at gmail.com (user name: tmbdev) if you…

  • know how to get standard Debian packages (emacs, pdflatex, gcc, etc.) to work on Xandros for the EEE PC 1000
  • know how to get any of the hardware listed below working

I will update the pages with any useful information you can provide.

Installing Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

Out of the box, neither the wired nor the wireless network card are supported.  It greatly simplifies software installation if you buy a small USB Ethernet or USB WiFi adapter that’s supported by Ubuntu.  You can get them for around $10.  You can then install updates and drivers over the network, and once you have installed the new drivers, you can unplug the USB interface and use the native interface.

I have the EEE PC 1000 40G SSD.  For the following, I have not installed Ubuntu on the built-in SSD drive, but instead on a 16G SDHC card. That’s easy because the SDHC card reader is just hooked up through USB internally and appears as another USB drive in the BIOS boot menu.

To start the installation, I put the Ubuntu 8.04 installation ISO on a 2G flash drive using UNetBootIn (from Sourceforge).  Then, I plugged both the flash drive and the 16G SDHC card into the machine, booted from the flash drive and installed on the SDHC card.  Installation worked nearly flawlessly, except that the grub installer got the wrong drive.

In order to fix the grub problem, I booted from the SDHC card, then selected “edit” for the boot entry and then again “edit” for the first command in the boot sequence, and changed the (hd3,0) to (hd0,0). Then, I continued with the boot.  After booting, I changed hd3 to hd0 in /boot/grub/menu.lst and ran “grub-install” again.

With this vanilla Ubuntu 8.04 installation, the following components work:

  • X11 at the correct resolution: works
  • Compiz: not tested
  • sound: works

The following components do not work out of the box:

  • wired ethernet: not recognized
  • wireless networking: not recognized
  • ACPI suspend: not working properly

Improved Installation

So, I have installed Ubuntu on the internal drive.  Here is some information:

  • ACPI 
    • sudo apt-get install module-assistant eeepc-acpi-source
sudo m-a a-i eeepc-acpi
sudo sh -c 'echo eeepc-acpi >> /etc/modules'
  • wireless networking with native Linux  driver
    • RALink provides linux drivers, and they actually work well (link to ralink)
    • be sure to enable WPA supplicant support, otherwise NetworkManager won’t see the interface (see here)
    • unfortunately, there seems to be a conflict between eeepc_acpi and the rt2860sta module; that is, with the network drivers installed, the machine won’t suspend properly; there are two workarounds: (1) use the Windows drivers with ndiswrapper, or (2) tell the ACPI installation that rt2860sta needs to be unloaded prior to suspending
  • wireless networking with ndiswrapper
    • if you install the Windows drivers with ndiswrapper, suspend/resume works and the wireless network works as well; the signal strength display appears to be wrong, however
    • to install…
      • download rt2860.sys and rt2860.inf files from the Windows driver
      • run ndisgtk and point it to rt2860.inf
      • add ndiswrapper to /etc/modules

More Info

Please let me know if you have any more information about getting the above features working.

Here are some other links:

Written by extelopedia

2008-08-06 at 189

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