rexbinary
Mod King
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join:2005-01-26
Plano, TX
 ·Verizon FIOS
1 edit | ASUS Eee PC 1000HE + Fedora 11
I finally pulled the trigger on a dark blue ASUS Eee PC 1000HE netbook.
Let me say first off that I cannot get over how nice this unit looks in person. I assumed it would be rather cheap looking. The pictures on the internet do not do it justice at all, as it's very sharp looking.
It came with Windows XP pre-installed unfortunately. I decided not to wipe it right off until I make sure I can flash the BIOS if ever necessary from Linux. So I made a bootable USB flash drive with Parted Magic on it, deleted all the partitions except for the one with XP installed and then shrunk it down. Then I installed Fedora 11 from a liveusb installation.
Everything worked right out of the box with Fedora 11 except for the wireless. It requires the rt2860 driver, and that was easily installed from the RPMFusion repo. But most of the special buttons like sound and brightness all work, suspend and hibernate work, even the built in webcam works great. Desktop Effects (aka Compiz) and Plymouth the graphical boot screen replacement work with no configuration as well.
I'm running the default desktop of Gnome but with Openbox as the window manager, and it works out really great. Openbox really speeds up Gnome and the window 'widgets' are much smaller and fit the small screen better.
Next I'll be trying out Moblin on it, and I would like to configure it to dual boot Fedora and Moblin. I'll report back how it goes with Moblin.
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Verizon FiOS subscriber since 2005 | Mac owner since 1990 | Fedora user since 2006 | CentOS user since 2007 | "Anyone who is unwilling to learn is entitled to absolutely nothing." - graysonf | EDIT: I seldom post without an edit. |
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sempergoofy
Premium
join:2001-07-06
Smyrna, GA
 ·AT&T Southeast
1 edit | Very cool. As you may have seen in another thread here, I bought an ASUS EeePC 1000HA for my mom and have been prepping it up with OpenSuSE 11.1. Like yours, it came preloaded with winblows xp. I took a slightly different tact on the repartitioning to save the xp preload. I booted a Pupeee distro from usb stick and then invoked gpartd. I shrank the C: partition down (20G), then deleted the second primary partition (D:) and left the two remaining partitions at the end (the winblows recovery and whatever is in that small (bios related?) partition alone. I made an extended partition in the newly unallocated space. Then I created a new smaller (10G) NTFS partition in that extended partition to use as the new D: for xp. Then a 70Meg /boot partiton for OpenSuSE. The rest of the unallocated space I made into an Linux LVM partition. The root filesystem, home filesystem, and swap are all LVM volumes instead of partitions. It looks like this now:
In my case everything worked after adding asus eeePC related packages from an OpenSuSE repository. All of the buttons for suspend, volume, screen brightness work. The camera works, and the wireless worked out of the box. (The 1000HA has an atheros chip and uses the ath5k module.)
How about the Bluetooth? Does that work on the 1000HE out of the box? The 1000HA does not have Bluetooth.
I haven't even tried to boot the xp yet.
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rexbinary
Mod King
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join:2005-01-26
Plano, TX | reply to rexbinary
Yes the bluetooth appears to be working, I did have a bluetooth widget in the menu bar that looked enabled. Alas I feel alseep before I could try actually pairing my bluetooth mouse to the Eee, but I will give it a try tonight. |
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dohnut
@look.ca
| reply to rexbinary
On my Acer Aspire One I preserved and shrank the XP partition to about 20 GB and preserved the Factory Recovery Partition at about 5 GB.
A trivial amount of space used out of 160 GB and that way I can set the unit back to factory specs if I ever decide to sell it or have to run a Win Utility for warranty purposes. |
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rexbinary
Mod King
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join:2005-01-26
Plano, TX
·Verizon FIOS
| reply to rexbinary
Yeah I thought about saving the recovery partition, but my Eee came with a recovery DVD. I plan on ordering an ext DVD for it as well anyway, so I figure if for any reason I need to get it back to factory install I'll just use the DVD.
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Verizon FiOS subscriber since 2005 | Mac owner since 1990 | Fedora user since 2006 | CentOS user since 2007 | "Anyone who is unwilling to learn is entitled to absolutely nothing." - graysonf | EDIT: I seldom post without an edit. |
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sempergoofy
Premium
join:2001-07-06
Smyrna, GA
·AT&T Southeast
| reply to rexbinary
I presume you have also been harvesting good info over at »forum.eeeuser.com like me?  If not, I recommend it. Lots of good info there.
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rexbinary
Mod King
Premium
join:2005-01-26
Plano, TX
·Verizon FIOS
| said by sempergoofy  :I presume you have also been harvesting good info over at » forum.eeeuser.com like me? If not, I recommend it. Lots of good info there. Umm of course I have...
/me quickly navigates to the link
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Verizon FiOS subscriber since 2005 | Mac owner since 1990 | Fedora user since 2006 | CentOS user since 2007 | "Anyone who is unwilling to learn is entitled to absolutely nothing." - graysonf | EDIT: I seldom post without an edit. |
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rexbinary
Mod King
Premium
join:2005-01-26
Plano, TX
·Verizon FIOS
1 edit | reply to rexbinary
Oh by the way, there was a 8MB partition I wiped out on my Eee. Thanks to sempergoofy 's provided link, I found out the purpose of that partition.
There is a BIOS option called 'Boot Booster'. This function speeds up the boot process by using cached information stored in that partition.
This would explain why I no longer have a Boot Booster option listed in my BIOS.
Here's the thread about Boot Booster if anyone is interested:
»forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=250500
EDIT: You can see the partition listed as /dev/sda4 in sempergoofy 's output above.
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Verizon FiOS subscriber since 2005 | Mac owner since 1990 | Fedora user since 2006 | CentOS user since 2007 | "Anyone who is unwilling to learn is entitled to absolutely nothing." - graysonf | EDIT: I seldom post without an edit. |
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sempergoofy
Premium
join:2001-07-06
Smyrna, GA
·AT&T Southeast
1 edit | Holy cow is that Boot Booster a pain in the ass when you want to boot a USB device! Maybe I can prevent you from having a headache when you first do this after starting to use the Boot Booster.
You can try all you want to be fast enough to hit F2, or try holding it down even once Boot Booster is enabled and working. You ain't gonna succeed in getting into the bios. In my case, it just kept showing my grub menu.
I found this thread on the topic:
»forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=475557
I tried what the last post says (removing the battery) but it did not work and it still was using boot booster and ignoring F2 at powerup.
Finally, I took the route of pressing and holding down the power off key as discussed in the thread, but that did not work either. My mistake here was that I was pressing and holding the power key to force the power off while the grub menu was displayed. That isn't good enough.
So I let Linux come on up after that, and then after logging in as root did an "init 1" to get as much stuff shutdown as possible without a reboot. Then I umounted the /home partition. Then I pressed and held the power button to force the power off. That did it! Upon power up, there was the bios display and my opportunity to press F2 to get in.
I disabled Boot Booster and changed the settings to boot my USB stick. All was good.
So after I get done with the operation I wanted to try, then I guess I'll turn it back on. It is nice to cut out that bios screen and memory countdown stuff. But what an unfortunate requirement to to be able to get back into the bios once using Boot Booster.
Edit: I considered altering the partition id from the running Linux if the above had not worked for me.
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rexbinary
Mod King
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join:2005-01-26
Plano, TX | reply to rexbinary
Maybe I just won't bother getting it re-enabled then lol. Thanks for the heads up. |
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sempergoofy
Premium
join:2001-07-06
Smyrna, GA
·AT&T Southeast
| Don't let me scare you off of it completely. It is nice to hit the power button and then the next thing you see in 2 or 3 seconds is the grub menu. Goodness knows my mother whom I will deliver the netbook to tomorrow won't be getting into the bios.
While speeding things up and avoiding the bios logo is one thing, having your own customized bios splash screen is a whole other matter. (There are plenty of threads on the site on that topic.)
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PA23
join:2001-12-12
East Hanover, NJ | reply to rexbinary
any of these netbooks coming with Linux pre-installed or has Micro$oft twisted enough arms to force them all to come with a WindoZe operating system?
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It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine |
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sempergoofy
Premium
join:2001-07-06
Smyrna, GA
·AT&T Southeast
| There are some models that are preloaded with Linux from Asus (and perhaps the other netbook makers, but I am not as familiar with them).
»event.asus.com/eeepc/comparison/···ison.htm
Note, however, that while I was looking for a model that was preloaded with Linux and chose one from the list that says it is available with a Linux preload, Asus did not sell that model in the USA. I discussed that in another thread here in this forum. After I reconsidered the alternative choices for models preloaded with Linux that I could actually obtain here in the USA, I just went ahead and ordered a Windows preload but dual booted the machine. (The windows partition is called "Bill Gates virus world" in the grug menu.) If you look on Amazon.com, they offer some of the Linux preload models. You need to read the product description carefully.
The distro that Asus preloads is Xandros.
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rexbinary
Mod King
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join:2005-01-26
Plano, TX
·Verizon FIOS
| reply to PA23
It's very hard to find a netbook with a hard disk pre-loaded with Linux anymore. Seems only the ones with small 4GB and 8GB SSDs come with Linux now.
Considering the fact that at one point Linux was the best selling OS on netbooks, yes I would think something happened.
»www.groklaw.net/article.php?stor···61307529
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Verizon FiOS subscriber since 2005 | Mac owner since 1990 | Fedora user since 2006 | CentOS user since 2007 | "Anyone who is unwilling to learn is entitled to absolutely nothing." - graysonf | EDIT: I seldom post without an edit. |
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rexbinary
Mod King
Premium
join:2005-01-26
Plano, TX
·Verizon FIOS
| reply to rexbinary
I tried out Moblin. It's nice and ran well, very fast even. It's just not for me though.
It just seems so limited compared to having a full Linux distribution like Fedora loaded. I think it will be great for casual users though as it focuses well on the basics.
It's something you might install for your friend that's not into computers much.
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Verizon FiOS subscriber since 2005 | Mac owner since 1990 | Fedora user since 2006 | CentOS user since 2007 | "Anyone who is unwilling to learn is entitled to absolutely nothing." - graysonf | EDIT: I seldom post without an edit. |
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rexbinary
Mod King
Premium
join:2005-01-26
Plano, TX | reply to sempergoofy
Sorry for so many replies in a row.
I just successfully paired my bluetooth mouse to the Eee. So yes bluetooth is fully functional on the Eee under Fedora. |
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sempergoofy
Premium
join:2001-07-06
Smyrna, GA
·AT&T Southeast
| said by rexbinary :I just successfully paired my bluetooth mouse to the Eee. So yes bluetooth is fully functional on the Eee under Fedora. Good to hear. Next netbook I buy is going to need to have bluetooth for that very reason.
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