Fedora 10 on the Eee PC 901/1000

[hotdog]

A compiz update:

Following the updates to xorg-x11-drv-i810, the kernel and the mesa packages (to versions 2.5.0-4, 2.6.27.7-134 and 7.2-0.14 respectively) the resume from suspend to ram with compiz enabled problem seems to have been fixed. I've just tested it and my Eee resumed successfully even with all the Desktop Effects eye candy turned on. Now the only issue with using Desktop Effects on the Eee PC is the default inability to move windows above the upper edge of the screen, which is easily fixed as described above.

Hibernating or suspending is still killing off my wireless though, which severely limits its usefulness.

[jlc]

I have a 1000 with F10 installed.

Primary 8GB SSD
/boot 200MB
/ 7.3GB ext3 encrypted

Secondary 32GB SSD
swap 2GB encrypted
/usr/share 4GB ext3 encrypted
/home 24GB ext3 encrypted

My wireless with default kernel is the "akmod-rt2860" from rpmfusion.org


[root@comatose ~]# lspci -vvv|grep -i ralink
01:00.0 Network controller: RaLink Device 0781
Subsystem: RaLink Device 2790

[jlc]

I've also added "vga=0x315" to the kernel line in grub so I have a pretty boot up

[hotdog]

I can't help but wonder why you've encrypted /, /usr/share and swap? Encrypting /home is fair enough (I've done it myself) as that's where all your personal files are kept, but / and /usr/share shouldn't contain any sensitive information and swap gets wiped every time you shut down. Unless you've got some secret custom software or source code installed in /usr/local or similar you're probably just slowing your machine down unnecessarily (encryption does slow down disc access and increase CPU load).

For your wireless you only need the akmod-rt2860 package installed. The rt2870 packages are for an external USB wireless card also from Ralink and the wl ones are for a Broadcom device.

[bluel1te]

Hi,

I just recently put F10 onto a EEE 1000H and the wired ethernet works fine however I have followed the instructions in this post to get the wireless working with no luck. The system is now detecting my wireless network but won't connect to it. It keeps prompting me for a password every few seconds. I have my password entered correctly in the RT2860STA.dat file.

I'm still a linux novice so any help would be appreciated.

[jlc]

I can't help but wonder why you've encrypted /, /usr/share and swap? Encrypting /home is fair enough (I've done it myself) as that's where all your personal files are kept, but / and /usr/share shouldn't contain any sensitive information and swap gets wiped every time you shut down. Unless you've got some secret custom software or source code installed in /usr/local or similar you're probably just slowing your machine down unnecessarily (encryption does slow down disc access and increase CPU load).

For your wireless you only need the akmod-rt2860 package installed. The rt2870 packages are for an external USB wireless card also from Ralink and the wl ones are for a Broadcom device.

I'm just playing around to see out it performs.

[StephenH]

I just tried the LiveCD on an Eee PC 900 Linux. I was very surprise to see that not only the wireless works with WPA2 flawlessly, but that the touchpad works with the two-finger scrolling.

I have been holding off on blowing away the default Xandros Linux, at least until the warranty expires. I may try an install to a 16 Gb SDHC card and see how that works in the meantime.

So, this thread could be expanded to include the 900x line as well as the 901/1000 series.

Cool! The webcam works! I just saw that Cheese was on the live CD and tried it out.

[Quasar8000]

I'm releasing two new lean kernels and a new patch today:

2.6.27.9-155.eeepc: a stable kernel which adds one main feature to the previous one I released: the wireless hotkey (Fn+F2) works out of the box. You still have to compile the driver and install it as explained in the original guide, but then you can use the hotkey to turn the WLAN on and off without problems. Bluetooth is not controlled by the key so to turn it on, you can type the following in the terminal as root:

echo 1 > /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill1/state

And to turn if off you can use the same command replacing the "1" with "0".

**UPDATE: a new version of the following kernel, with the same features, based on the official 2.6.28 can be found in post #46**
2.6.28-0.129.rc8.git2.eeepc: a release candidate of 2.6.28 which has many fixes and added features:
1. I integrated the rt2860 driver in the kernel using the gregkh staging patch, which means the WLAN works out of the box without any need to compile the driver or install it.
2. I patched the eeepc-laptop driver using these three patches (1, 2, and 3). This fixes the default states of the WLAN and Bluetooth and sets them correctly according to whatever is set in the BIOS (instead of always turning them on).
3. Elantech extensions are added to the kernel, which means all the extra functionality of the touchpad can now be exploited. To use this properly, however, you must update xorg-x11-drv-synaptics to the latest version (included in the tarball), using the following command (as root):

rpm -U xorg-x11-drv-synaptics-0.99.2-1.fc10.i386.rpm

Then in order to let the kernel know about the properties of the new touchpad, we need to create an fdi file (the modern alternative to xorg.conf), using the following command (as root):

gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/x11-elantech.fdi

In this file, paste the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
  <match key="info.product" string="ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad">
   <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">synaptics</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton1" type="string">1</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton2" type="string">2</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton3" type="string">3</merge>
  </match>
</device>
<device>
  <match key="info.linux.driver" string="psmouse">
   <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
  </match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

Restart and your touchpad should work like a charm
4. The WLAN hotkey works but not as good as it should. It can turn on wireless connectivity without problems but can't turn it off without getting a kernel failure. This seems to be due to the NetworkManager not playing nice with one of the additions in the new kernel. This problem can be easily solved by turning off the NetworkManager before turning off the WLAN

service NetworkManager stop

Then turning it on afterwards

service NetworkManager start

Bluetooth is still not supported by a specific hotkey so you can use the same instructions above to turn it on or off.

eeepc-laptop-bluetooth-fix.patch: this patch adds Bluetooth support to the eeepc-laptop driver. It can be used in case anyone would like to compile their own custom kernel.

I guess that's all for now, please let me know how everything works using these new kernels

[jlc]

Thank you, I'm testing the 2.6.28 kernel now. Just an FYI if you want to use yum instead of rpm it might be easier as far as guessing upgrades.

yum localinstall --nogpg *

Will upgrade the headers and synaptic.

People might want to edit /etc/yum.conf and change installonly_limit=5 or however many you want to keep around for testing purposes.

Wireless worked after suspend like a charm!

[jlc]

With your 2.6.28 kernel I'm getting a 27s bootup. Default Fedora kernel 2.6.27-134 it is 41s.

Thanks Quasar8000!

EDIT:Ok, I canned a bunch of services and got an 18s boot time!

[StephenH]

With the custom kernels, is the networking for the 900's hardware removed, or is it still there? Although I would like to get the function keys working, I would not like to lose the networking that is functional right now with the stock kernel on my Eee PC 900.

I installed to a 16 Gb SDHC card after using livecd-iso-to-disk program to burn the live cd to a 2 Gb SD card which I mounted in a USB SD card reader. Figuring out how to put the boot loader in the correct place was the most difficult part. I did not want to touch the internal 4 Gb or 16 Gb drives as I wanted to leave the Xandros Linux untouched. For that, I had to look at the BIOS boot options submenu of the screen where the bootloader placement was configured to select sdd instead of sda.

[Quasar8000]

With the custom kernels, is the networking for the 900's hardware removed, or is it still there?

I didn't remove ath5k or atl2 from the custom kernels in case anyone wanted to test them on the Eee PC 900, so networking should work without problems.

[pindar]

Hmm, I'd be very curious to try your experimental kernel, but it won't boot on my system. I have Fedora installed on an SDHC, and the boot message says something to the effect "failed to mount root filesystem." I looked at the initrd, but usb-storage is enabled, so I'm at a loss here (the vanilla Fedora kernel boots without problems). Any idea what might be the cause? Wireless after resume really is the one remaining problem in Fedora; I'm very satisfied with the system overall (well except for the slowness of updates; no other linux distro takes so long to apply patches).

pindar

[StephenH]

Hmm, I'd be very curious to try your experimental kernel, but it won't boot on my system. I have Fedora installed on an SDHC, and the boot message says something to the effect "failed to mount root filesystem." I looked at the initrd, but usb-storage is enabled, so I'm at a loss here (the vanilla Fedora kernel boots without problems). Any idea what might be the cause? Wireless after resume really is the one remaining problem in Fedora; I'm very satisfied with the system overall (well except for the slowness of updates; no other linux distro takes so long to apply patches).

pindar

I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the experimental kernel. I have begun to have the problem too with the stock kernel. My installation is on a 16 Gb SDHC card and I have been getting the message about not being able to mount /root filesystem. The actual message is: "mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: Invalid argument". I have taken the card to my desktop system running Fedora 10 and used GPartEd to run a check on the / partition. Once I do that, I am able to boot again.

It has happened three times already. GPartEd has been able to fix it every time so far. I am going to try to put the card in a USB card reader and boot that way to see if the problem lies with the SD card slot but I will have to run GPartEd on it first as just switching it does not make any difference.

I will probably download and install the experimental kernel on it this weekend when I have more time.

[StephenH]

Okay, I just had a successful reboot. I checked my fstab entries to make sure I didn't have a typo there. I also did an update (yum update). Last, I realize that I had neglected step 7 of the original post, so I remedied that. Hopefully, something there is the answer and it will behave now.