F9 Preview on ASUS Eee PC - Not great.

sideways · #1 25th April 2008, 08:26 PM

Asus expect 5 million of these units to ship this year, so it is not good that

1. Wifi still doesn't work by default - requires a patched madwifi driver.
2. Tapping the touchpad doesn't work!!

The first problem is known from F8 and the fix is well known, the second problem is infuriating - it is extremely annoying to have to constantly use the left-click button on a touchpad, especially on the (tiny) asus eee pc.

On top of that, while we have the great livecd to usb conversion scripts, the livecd doesn't contain any compiler tools, so you can't easily compile a wifi driver (The ethernet connection doesn't work either EDIT actually it does, just needed manual configuration for me since I'm not using dhcp)

Other than that, F9 looks quite nice and performs similarly to F8.

dmcdaniel · #2 25th April 2008, 09:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sideways

Asus expect 5 million of these units to ship this year, so it is not good that

1. Wifi still doesn't work by default - requires a patched madwifi driver.
2. Tapping the touchpad doesn't work!!

The first problem is known from F8 and the fix is well known, the second problem is infuriating - it is extremely annoying to have to constantly use the left-click button on a touchpad, especially on the (tiny) asus eee pc.

On top of that, while we have the great livecd to usb conversion scripts, the livecd doesn't contain any compiler tools, so you can't easily compile a wifi driver (The ethernet connection doesn't work either)

Other than that, F9 looks quite nice and performs similarly to F8.

Sideways,

What most people don't realize, Fedora isn't developed by a HUGE company that has unlimited resources to create drivers for Fedora. Microsoft is able to do that because they are currently the standard. Its EXPECTED when you use any Linux distro that its not going to be 100%.

Just my 2 cents worth,
dmcdaniel

sideways · #3 25th April 2008, 09:28 PM

I'm only posting info. I used to bug-test beta releases in earlier fedoras, but the kernel-devel rpm disappeared and it became a pain to compile custom modules. It's even more annoying for the Asus eee pc since the ethernet is also not supported so getting a compiler environment set up on the livecd (on a usb stick) is extremely tedious, you need to individually download about 9 separate rpms to the usb disk on an internet connected machine. I did ask for this to be made easier but got the reply that there was no space left (It requires ~20mb). Apparently 17 games are a more important inclusion on the livecd.

I'm a fan of fedora, but I'm allowed to post criticism I think.

mbokil · #4 25th April 2008, 11:49 PM

Use the prepackaged eeedora spin with Fedora 8. I use it on my asus eee and wifi and all drivers, function keys work out of the box. Granted, I will have to wait for a F9 update but that is relatively minor.
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:eeedora

Quote:

I'm a fan of fedora, but I'm allowed to post criticism I think.

Sometimes criticism is very useful. A lot of problems go unrecognized without awareness drawn to them.

stevea · #5 25th April 2008, 11:59 PM

To quantify the company sizes .. .MSFT lost about 6% of it's market cap this moring - $17.7B.usd, which is about 4.5 times more than the entire RHT market cap.

I had no idea that touchpad was problematic on the Asus.E^3 Sideways, but I sincerely appreciate the report. A wifi patch isn't a problem (for me). Was the touchpad broken on the origina; Asus/Redhat distro that comes with the Asus - or was this a problem that appeared when you installed Fedora ?

sideways · #6 26th April 2008, 12:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stevea

I had no idea that touchpad was problematic on the Asus.E^3 Sideways, but I sincerely appreciate the report. A wifi patch isn't a problem (for me). Was the touchpad broken on the origina; Asus/Redhat distro that comes with the Asus - or was this a problem that appeared when you installed Fedora ?

It's a problem in the Fedora 9 LiveCD preview release - it's almost a showstopper for me since I don't want to carry around a usb mouse. The thing about the LiveCD is that the kernel etc stays fixed for the 6 months of its release so you can put together patches which will work for the full 6 months. In F8 I released a small (20mb) download package to enable the wifi fix, but that touchpad defect in F9 will make patches a real pain to install unless you use a usb mouse.

stevea · #7 26th April 2008, 06:58 PM

Don't despair - F9 isn't released yet and a friend was still having HID device problems with F9 preview as of last week. OTOH if it work in the original or in F8, then you should be able to get the touchpad working in F9. Any idea if it's an X11 or a driver issue ?

sideways · #8 26th April 2008, 07:24 PM

I'm not sure if it's a bug in the synaptics kernel driver or a bug in Xorg. You're probably right that it can be easily fixed probably a one-liner in xorg.conf - but a fix to a problem on the LiveCD has to be rerun everytime you boot. Ah well, I guess I'll have to write a script fix and stick it on the usb drive, like I had to do for the wifi.

I'm surprised that the testers don't test on popular computers like the Asus eee, maybe I should get back into beta testing for the next release instead of moaning here

EDIT
And, yes, it was fine in the F8 LiveCD - in fact that was mostly great except for wifi/ethernet not working.

EDIT2
Apparently the tap-to-click funtionality can be enabled by seeting the "MaxTapTime" option in xorg.conf for the InputDevice Section referring to the touchpad
http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/

Unfortunately the LiveCD doesn't have an xorg.conf to edit, so I assume the problem (perhaps a deliberate feature??) is related to the latest Xorg release and the defaults it sets.