Fedora 10 on the Eee PC 901/1000

[Quasar8000]

With the official release of Fedora 10, I decided to make an updated tutorial on how to install it and configure it on the Eee PC 901/1000.

**UPDATE: Check out www.fedora-eee.com for the latest packages, and stay up to date through my Twitter account @Quasar8000**
Installing Fedora 10
1. Since the Eee PC does not have an optical drive, and the procedure I used previously for installing the full F9 on the Eee was too tedious, I decided to go for the Live CD this time. So you can start by downloading the Live CD image of your choice, then follow this simple tutorial to transfer the image to a USB Flash Drive.
2. Reboot the Eee PC and set the Flash Drive as the first booting priority using the BIOS.
3. Boot from the flash drive and install F10 on the Eee PC using the icon on the desktop.
4. I personally found the following custom partitioning scheme to be most useful:

Primary SSD (4GB):
196MB: /boot
The rest of the drive: /

Secondary SSD (16GB):
1010MB: swap
The rest of the drive: /home (Encrypted)

The encryption is naturally optional but it's much safer since the Eee PC is extremely portable
5. Reboot into your newly installed F10 and open the terminal. As root, type "gedit /etc/fstab", this should allow you to adjust the mounting settings of your local drives and partitions.
6. For each of your partitions (/, /boot, /home), add ",noatime" after "defaults". Save the file and exit. This should help reduce the number of writes the system does to the SSD which would extend its life, and should also make the system much faster.
7. Also in the terminal, type "gedit /etc/sysctl.conf", and add "vm.swappiness = 0" at the end of the file. This tells the system not to use the swap partition as swap, which has the same advantages as the previous step, and this way, we'll have a swap partition for hibernation.
8. Using F10, the wired networking works out-of-the-box, but to get the wireless networking to work, you need to download this Ralink driver, then in the terminal, as root, type:

yum install make gcc kernel-headers kernel-devel

9. Once the downloading and installation of packages are done, unzip the driver, and go to <Driver Folder>/os/linux. Open config.mk and change "HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT" and "HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT" to "y" instead of "n".
10. Using the terminal, as root, go to the driver's folder and type "make", then once done, "make install".
11. Reboot your Eee PC and you should be all set

Enhancements
F10 uses the 2.6.27 kernel which has a new driver for the Eee PC. This driver uses rfkill to control the wireless network and Bluetooth and should handle the Hotkeys without external scripts. However, at this time, the wireless toggle Hotkey does not work, there's no way to control the Bluetooth from within F10 without rebooting and using the BIOS, and NetworkManager has problems with using rfkill alone to turn off the wireless network.
For these reasons, I compiled a customized kernel for the Eee PC. This kernel is less than half the size of the standard kernel, it loads much faster, and provides the option of controlling the Bluetooth from within F10. I also wrote a little script that can be used to toggle both the Bluetooth and wireless networking on or off without any problems. The kernel, kernel-firmware, kernel-devel, kernel-headers, and script, can be downloaded using this link. Once you download the package, and extract the files, you can use (in the terminal, as root) "rpm -U" to install the kernel-firmware and kernel-headers then "rpm -i" to install the kernel and kernel-devel, and you can copy the script to any location you like.
I removed the IPv6 packages from the kernel given that the vast majority of people don't use that protocol yet. However, F10 has an IPv6 firewall that will produce booting errors if it remains enabled, so in the terminal, as root, type the following commands:

/sbin/service ip6tables stop

then

/sbin/chkconfig ip6tables off

Now you can reboot and use the new kernel without any problems. You will have to recompile the wireless driver for this kernel of course
If you'd like to use the script I included, you have to make sure it's executable. You can do that using:

chmod a+x radio_toggle.sh

You don't have to be root to execute the above command, but you need to be root to execute it. The script is executed using:

./radio_toggle.sh

The script works as follows: If neither WiFi nor Bluetooth are turned on, running the script the first time will just turn on the WiFi, running it a second time will turn the WiFi off and turn Bluetooth on, a third time will turn both on, and a fourth time will turn them back off. If you wouldn't like to use the script or would like more freedom, you can use /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/state to control the WiFi, and /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill1/state to control the Bluetooth. Unfortunately, due to some problems with the initial state of the rfkill, both WiFi and Bluetooth are always turned on at startup, so they can be turned off by running the script only once.

All this hassle should be sorted out once the 2.6.28 kernel is released, since it has many bug-fixes and improvements which should make using the Fn+F2 Hotkey much easier, but for now, i still couldn't find a way to get everything to play nicely together.

Extras
There are a couple of extras that are not necessary but I felt are important to mention since I find them very convenient.

yum install lock-keys-applet gnome-applet-netspeed

Since the Eee PC keyboard doesn't have LEDs to indicate the Caps and Num lock status, the first applet can be used as an alternative. The second applet can be used to measure the current network connection speed which I find quite practical in many cases.

I guess that's all for the time being. Any feedback on this tutorial or the kernel is much appreciated And I would like to thank all those who offered me extra tips in the first tutorial which I used to make this one better.