Here are my notes about setup of various stuff on Eee PC to make it work better for me.

Startup

Edit /usr/bin/startsimple.sh and insert something along following lines before exec icewm

 sudo rm /tmp/nologin

 xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources
 setxkbmap hr us
 xterm &

 exec icewm

Compressed root filesystem

I don't really care much about Xandos on my Eee PC. However, I really do like idea about having read-only system filesystem (especially if your startup scripts are breakable as easy as ones on eee are). So, to improve this idea, I started to think how to compress read-only partition so I can at least save space.

As a first experiment, I copied whole flash from eee (about 3.6Gb used) and compressed it using gzip -1 (lowest possible compression level). I was quite amazed to see that resulting archive was only 1.3Gb. So, I was up to something (and additional 2Gb of free space on 4Gb eee is also nice :-)

Update 2008-01-22

squashfs 3.3 can't compress comtent of eee's /usr without hanging on flock after about ~47000 files. This is quite annoying, but 3.2 works. Since it's compiled from upstream source it doesn't include lzma compression, but is saves 1.6Gb of disk space. More details is available, but in Croatian only.

Links

Here is collection of references about this issue:

Disk images

Backup image from Eee using external USB disk

dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/A/Partition1/flash4Gb.img

Path in of may be different depending on partition on your disk.

Backup flash image from Eee PC using network

Transfer somehow whole disk image to other computer. Good way might be to use netcat with something like this:

• on Eee

sudo nc -l -p 8888 < /dev/sda

• on other computer

nc name.of.eee.pc 8888 > hda

You might want to insert compression if your network connection is slower than flash read speed (which is according to hdparm -tT /dev/hda around 21MB/sec).

Alternative is to take P701L.gz from DVD which came with machine, but it has only one partition which is factory default one.

Backup just part of image

You can also copy just parts of flash filesystem if you want (this copies just disk after partition 2):

• on eee

dd if=/dev/sda bs=512 skip=4819500 | gzip | nc -w 3 other.computer
88882995524+0 records in
2995524+0 records out
1533708288 bytes (1.5 GB) copied, 279.348 seconds, 5.5 MB/s

• on other computer

nc -l -p 8888 | gzip -cd | > /rest/tmp/hda2-4

• now, ectract beginning of disk and first partition from P701L

dd if=P701L of=hda1 bs=512 count=4819500

• and merge partition together to create full disk image

cat hda1 hda2-4 > hda

Emulation

How to create virtual Eee PC?

Example flash image

# fdisk -l hda 

Disk /backup/eee/hda: 3 GB, 3997486080 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 486 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

          Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System 
/backup/eee/hda1               1         300     2409718   83  Linux
/backup/eee/hda2             301         484     1469947   83  Linux
/backup/eee/hda3             485         485           0    c  FAT32 LBA
/backup/eee/hda4             486         486           0   ef  EFI FAT

Mount file-system

We need first file system (factory defaults) to get access to kernel and initrd image

# fdisk -u -l hda 

Disk /backup/eee/hda: 3 GB, 3997486080 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 486 cylinders, total 7807590 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

          Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System 
/backup/eee/hda1              63     4803435     2409718   83  Linux
/backup/eee/hda2         4819563     7759395     1469947   83  Linux
/backup/eee/hda3         7775523     7775460           0    c  FAT32 LBA
/backup/eee/hda4         7791588     7791525           0   ef  EFI FAT
# mkdir 1
# mount hda 1 -o loop,offset=`expr 63 \* 512`

Start emulation

qemu -m 512 -hda hda -kernel boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21.4-eeepc -initrd boot/initramfs-eeepc.img -append "rw root=/dev/sda1"

Links

So, I began looking for Eee PC last year (well, more than two weeks ago, anyway) and my original plan was to buy one while I'm in Berlin for new year. However, since there wasn't any Eees available in Germany until second week of 2008, I was in some disspair becuause we where leaving on 6th.

You can understand when I read Avian's blog post about his new Eee PC. He is in Slovenia, and I'm in Germany and he managed to buy it? How? Quick e-mail later, and he said that it's available in Building of Fun, some kind of on-line web shop in Ljubljana. Since Slovenia is so much closer to Croatia than Germany (in which I was at that time) I just postponed my purchase for better times. In meantime, Kost got interested also, and after return to Croatia he contacted them and we bought our units.

That would be happy part of story, if only one of them didn't have one constantly lit LCD pixel. Reviewing ASUS warranty, I found that I found one point:

 2. TFT LCD defect policy -- Eee PC does not provide ZBD (Zero Bright Dot) warranty for TFT LCD screens.

Yes, it's in there, one you buy the unit, that is. Since we couldn't replace it today I guess I'm out of luck. I will try some of software solutions over the night in hope that it will go away, but some more drastic measures like rubbing LCD screen gently are just too much to ask from me...

Other than that, it's a great device: designed for wifi communication, quick browsing and occasional terminal session using ctrl+alt+t. It's not designed to be primary PC, but all features are so well integrated and working seamlessly that I will have hard time reinstalling it with Debian. Until I need dwm which I got used to so much. I can probably wait for a few more hours :-)

I can't say anything about battery life, other than fact that it got half-filled in two hours while I was working on it with wifi. I will do some monitoring to see how well is battery holding on this device (there isn't acpi command, but all /proc entries are there, so it shouldn't be problem).

Form-factor is just great. Yeah, keyboard is small, but I can type on it (with my big fingers) without any problems. We did try to boot few distribution from USB stick (including Puppy and some Slackware derivative) without any problems. Well, there shouldn't be any: this is basically a palm-top size Intel box (at last!) with strange screen size of 800*480.

After first day with my Eee PC, I'm very pleased with it. To make things a bit easier now that I'm back on ThnikPad, I edited /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc to remove -nolisten tcp, restarted X using ctrl+alt+backspace, typed xhost mylaptop.lan on eeepc and then started x2x -west -to eeepc.lan:0 on my laptop and now I can pass from laptop to eeepc sitting on left with just a mouse move. Sweet.