L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree

being the maunderings of an Englishman on the Côte d'Azur

01 February 2008 Blog Home : February 2008 : Permalink

Asus Eee hackery

So I've put eeeXubuntu on my eee. The process, including the swapping out of unwanted programs for wanted ones, was remarkably painless all things considered.

I say all things considered because I decided to hack around with trying to save my exisiting eee state and to also try ensuring I could restore the eee from the CD image before I trashed the original config. In the process I also had 'fun' installing the latest betas of the linux SysrescueCD on SD flash cards and USB hard drives. None of this was particularly necessary, useful or relevant. When I got down to eeeXubuntu and installing that, first on an external USB hard-drive and then on the internal SSD it was pretty straight forward. Even using SysrescueCD to copy the installed partition from the USB to the SSD was simple - just remember to edit /etc/fstab on the new partition because the UUIDs are going to be wrong unless you fix them.

The eeeXubuntu wiki page above and its follow on about customization pretty much guide you through the process (I added a few notes for spots where I thought some help would be good) and once you have done all that you have a nice Xubuntu linux install that does what you want. I particularly like the network browsing tweak for Thunar (a single /media/network mountpoint using fusesmb) that is described here.

However one tweak that isn't there (quite) is the ability to use F5 to switch between internal LCD and external monitors (and for that matter the enabling of wifi involved a good deal of hand editing). The information is sort of there but it isn't as clear as the rest and did (until now Tadaa!) require quite a lot of manual hackery. I have now fixed it so that manual hackery in both cases is reduced considerably (although not eliminated) as you will discover by visiting this page.

Other than that? well the eee and eeeXubuntu are proving to be most excellent. As is the SysrescueCD or rather the Sysrescue SD flash card. I do recommend though that you put two partitions on the flash card - a small one for the CD image (200 MB should be fine) and a larger one to mount once booted on which you can store stuff that seems useful...