Aerospace Software Ltd.

Asus Eee PC 701 Mandriva How-to Guide

For Mandriva 2009.1 Spring

Scope

The tiny Asus Eee PC 701 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 2009.1 (Spring) on the Eee PC.

The Eee PC is such a nice little machine, that I gave my full size laptop away to a friend in need and this little toy has been my main debug and work machine for more than a year. Granted, I have some tools running on servers and virtual machines. For example, I do my taxes using QuickTax on a WinXP VM on a server, but I connect to it using rdesktop from the Eee PC. I also have a keyboard, screen and mouse on my dining room table and use that for those times when I need more screen space or more readable fonts.

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. Now it is a year later and I upgraded to 2009.1 and I am pleased to say that it works even better. It boots up in about 60 seconds, including typing in two rather long passwords for the encrypted /home and log in.

Start off by making a bootable USB memory stick. To do that, you need a working Linux machine to download the Mandriva One ISO file and copy it to a USB memory stick:

Find a Mandriva 2009.1 mirror, eg. 'mirrors.kernel.org' URL 'http://mirrors.kernel.org/mandrake/Mandrakelinux/official/iso/2009.1/' and copy 'mandriva-linux-one-2009.1-GNOME-europe-americas-cdrom-i586.iso' to your machine.
Copy the ISO image to the memory stick: 'dd if=filename.iso of=/dev/sdX'

Modify 'sdX' to suit! When you plug the stick in, run 'dmesg' to see what it was identified as - repeat a few times to make sure. If you get it wrong then you can overwrite a hard disk drive, which would be rather disappointing...

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)
Boot the live USB stick and have fun!

Partitioning

Partitioning the disk drive presented me with some heart-ache. Even if you have 2GB RAM, 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. I selected custom partitioning during install and made a 4GB /swap and 12 GB /home partitions on the SD card, with /home formatted as Ext3 and Encrypted with AES256. Set the Boot process to Grub Text Mode, else you won't see the password prompt for the encrypted /home partition!

You got watch the boot process carefully for the /home password prompt. If you miss it, then press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and log in as root in a terminal, then type 'mount -a' to retry the mount process, before you attempt to log in at the graphical login screen, otherwise the system won't find your home directory and will complain bitterly and make some useless suggestions.

After the install was done, I had to reboot into Safe (single user mode) and fix /etc/fstab, since the install USB stick was identified as /dev/sdb and after a reboot the camera card became /dev/sdb so /home was left unmountable. - A simple fix and another reboot and all was well.

Swap File

If you encrypt your /home directory, then you should consider using a swap file so that it will also be encrypted. Here is how to make a 500MB swap file:

swapoff -a

dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/swapfile bs=1K count=500K
mkswap /home/swapfile

gedit /etc/fstab

Comment out existing swap line and add this:
# Use a swap file on /home
/home/swapfile none swap defaults 0 0

swapon -a
swapon -s

Ensure that the swap line is the LAST one in /etc/fstab - guess why?

WiFi Adaptor

The built in Atheros WiFi device worked out of the box - no more messing with ndiswrapper and Windows drivers.

Camera, Audio Quality and Video Skype

The camera works beautifully with 'Cheese' and 'Skype'. However, the Gnome Pulse Audio sound system is severely broken up. The solution is to install 'task-lxde' and use the LXDE desktop instead of Gnome.

Go to the Skype web site and download the Static OSS version. Untar it in /usr/local and make a link from the desktop to the 'skype' binary, then it works like a charm for me.

Tweaks

Audio quality is bad with Gnome. You can either uninstall Pulse and install OSS, or install LXDE.

I always disable the following useless services:

Resolvconf
Mandi
Partmon
Numlock
Avahi-daemon
At
Anacron
Shorewall

These processes don't sap much power, but I don't like having useless crud running. You don't need Shorewall if you are not running any services and even if you do it is overkill.

Note that if you are running encryption as described above, then the Suspend function won't work. An encrypted system that is unlocked and suspended is not a good idea!

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.

La Voila!
Herman