Here are my notes about setup of various stuff on Eee PC to make it work better for me.
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
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 :-)
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.
Here is collection of references about this issue:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/media/A/Partition1/flash4Gb.img
Path in of may be different depending on partition on your disk.
Transfer somehow whole disk image to other computer. Good way might be to use netcat with something like this:
sudo nc -l -p 8888 < /dev/sda
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.
You can also copy just parts of flash filesystem if you want (this copies just disk after partition 2):
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
nc -l -p 8888 | gzip -cd | > /rest/tmp/hda2-4
dd if=P701L of=hda1 bs=512 count=4819500
cat hda1 hda2-4 > hda
How to create virtual Eee PC?
# 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
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`
qemu -m 512 -hda hda -kernel boot/vmlinuz-2.6.21.4-eeepc -initrd boot/initramfs-eeepc.img -append "rw root=/dev/sda1"