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 :-)

Links

Here is collection of references about this issue:

Emulation

How to create virtual Eee PC?

Backup flash image from Eee PC

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.

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

Start emulator

Mount first file system

# 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`

Links