Aerospace Software Ltd.

Asus Eee PC Mandriva How-to Guide

For Mandriva 2008.1 Spring

Scope

The Asus Eee PC is a delightful little toy. Finally I have a PDA that I can use for real work. Of course I am writing this guide on the Eeep, directly on the web server, over SSH.

The Eeep is based on Debian 4.0R1 (Etch). Xandros added IceWM and a custom menu system that makes the Eeep really easy to use. This guide is for the adventurous who wish to install Mandriva Linux 2008.1 (Spring) on the Eee PC.

Living with the Small Screen

One thing that is important, is to learn how to live with the small screen. That involves figuring out how to maximize applications to use the whole screen (usually F11), how to disable space grabbing toolbars (usually on the View menu), how to zoom font size (usually ctrl+ and ctrl-), copy and paste (double or triple click and then click both sides of the bar simultaneously to paste) and finally, how to drag a window around when some buttons are off screen so you can get to them (Alt left click in the window and drag it - this is best done with both hands!).

Once those things are figured out, the little machine is a breeze to use and I find the screen size quite adequate.

Install Mandriva Linux

I eventually got tired of the Xandros baby mode and installed Mandriva 2008.1.

Start off by making a bootable USB memory stick. To do that, you need a working Linux machine and then follow this guide http://forum.mandriva.com/viewtopic.php?t=63493 but since there are some unnecessary steps in that guide, simply do this:

Find a Mandriva 2008.1 mirror, eg. 'ftp.free.fr' and copy 'i586/images/all.img' to your machine.
Download some tools: 'urpmi syslinux mtools'
Create a partition on the USB stick: 'fdisk -H 255 /dev/sdx'
Make it bootable: 'syslinux /dev/sdx1'
Add the boot loader: 'dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdx'
Copy the image to the memory stick: 'dd if=all.img of=/dev/sdx1'

Modify 'sdx' and 'sdx1' to suit! When you plug the stick in, run 'dmesg' to see what it was identified as.

Now plug the schtick into the Eee PC and reboot.
Hammer on the Esc key till you get the boot menu.
Select USB boot.
Press Fn-F2, to turn the WiFi Adaptor on (Blue LED on)
Press enter at installer menu.
Select FTP install
Select Cooker
Select one of the universities close to you
etc.

The trick is to start off by installing the least amount of stuff you can get away with. A simple IceWM system will consume about 900MB, while a more flexible KDE install will consume 1.8GB and will take twice as long to install (about 4h). So if you just want to test things and get it to work and install more things later, choose IceWM only.

Right at the end of the install wizard, just before the reboot, go into the video setup again. If you futz around in there you can set the resolution to 'Automatic'. This is useful, since 800x480 isn't listed and there is no way to explicitly set a new value in this wizard - automatic will make it work.

Partitioning

Partitioning the disk drive presented me with some hearth-ache. Originally, I wished to install it in as little space as possible and partioned the SDD with a 3.5GB '/', 500MB '/swap' and 16GB '/home' partition on the SD card, with '/' formatted with Ext3. This is enough room to install a nice KDE system. You must have swap space, otherwise memory hogs like Firefox will fall over and die every so often.

I bought a 16GB SD card and stuck it into the camera card slot. It can be mounted at start-up by adding the following to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdb1 /data vfat defaults 1 2

It may be better to reformat the SD card with Ext3, since 16GB of data on an error prone disk is just looking for trouble...

Note that yoiu hould not place '/swap' on the SD card, since any SD card is 10 times slower than the 4GB built-in device.

Make a directory /data and mount it permanently with 'mount -a'

WiFi Adaptor

The Atheros MadWiFi driver would not work for me, so I took the Windows XP disk that comes with the Eee PC and searched for the Windows driver.

Copy the files in this directory: /media/cdrom/Drivers/Wireless/ndis5x/

Run the Network setup wizard and select Wireless setup and install the Windows driver with ndiswrapper. It works for me!

Windows XP in Virtualbox

Virtualization puts Windows where it belongs - in a window. So I wanted to see whether I can run Windows on the Eee PC. First I tried VMware Server 1.3 and it would not compile. So, I tried the Virtualbox package, that comes with Mandriva and it worked.

I created a 2GB virtual disk and tried to install Windows 2003 Server - the install hung, no matter what I tried. I then tried Windows XP Pro and it worked. Networking presented some heart-ache. Eventually I got it to work with the NAT ethernet option and DHCP in the Windows VM.

The biggest hassle is getting the install CD into a format that the Eee PC can handle. I copied the CD to a LEXAR USB memory stick on a desktop machine like this:

$ dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/media/LEXAR/winxp.iso

On Virtualbox, configure the CDROM to point to the USB stick and power the VM on - as simple as that.

Citadel - a Full Featured Mail System

This can cause a revolution in the server room!

Installing Citadel is very easy, except when it isn't - Mandriva 2008 presented a few annoyances to get the Citadel Easy Install script to work, due to a few missing tools. Thanks go to Mike Johnson of bsc-online.net for the inspiration to figure out the dependencies. Before you begin, you have to install these:

First check your running kernel version:
# uname -a

then install the devel package for your exact kernel version:
# urpmi kernel-laptop-devel

finally, install these missing tools:
urpmi gcc-c++
urpmi gettext
urpmi curl
urpmi libtool

Now you can go to the http://citadel.org web site and get the Easy install script:

curl http://easyinstall.citadel.org/install | sh

Accept most defaults - the only things to change are the admin login:



Enter the name of the system administrator (which is probably
you).  When an account is created with this name, it will
automatically be given administrator-level access.

This is currently set to:

Enter new value or press return to leave unchanged:
joesoap

and the Webcit port:



On which port do you want WebCit to listen for HTTP requests?

You can use the standard port (80) if you are not running another
web server (such as Apache), otherwise select another port.
This is currently set to:
2000
Enter new value or press return to leave unchanged:
80

Eventually you can log in at:

http://yourhostname

and after logging in, here is Webcit:

And now you can say goodbye to MS Exchange with its dumb 75 user and 100GB database limits and run thousands of users on a $400 toy - 'nuf sed.

Camera

I haven't got the camera to work yet, but for starters you need to enable it with:

# echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/camera

CamE complains about a font problem and Camorama cannot find the device...

La Voila!
Herman