Updated March 16 2009
Well, I thought I would post a tutorial on how I got Lenny working on my Eee, incase people are having problems. This will loosely be based on the Debian EeePC wiki and also this blog post, so this content is not 100% from me, only what worked. Just for a note, my EeePC is a 701 4GB (with camera)
Installation
Firstly, download the EeePC installer image here: http://eeepc.debian.net/debian/images/debian-eeepc.img You will need a USB flash drive, but I'm sure a SD card will work.
Now to copy the image onto your media choice: dd if=debian-eeepc.img of=/dev/#YOUR DEVICE# sync
Now that that's done, plug your flash drive into your Eee, turn it on and hold the Escape key on bootup. Choose your flash drive and it will continue to boot. (Prior to this, I pluged in an ethernet cable; wireless is a choice but was unreliable for me).
The next few steps are self explanitory, such as filling in your country, username, password, etc. When it came to partitioning, I took out the swap parition and will add a swap file instead (read below). (Also, where it gets to the point where it asks you what packages to install, choose Standard system and Laptop then continue) After it has finished installing, remove your flash drive and boot into Lenny. Login with your username and pass.
Wireless
Now, when I first booted Lenny, wireless was not working for me. Things that I did: Turned on wireless, Function + F2 Run lsmod
and saw if ath_pci was there If not, I ran modprobe ath_pci
Still didn't work for me so I tried: rmmod ath_pci
then modprobe ath_pci
. You should now have wireless working and be able to connect to other networks.
What else? How to get the webcam working: modprobe uvcvideo
Then install: apt-get install luvcview
Make a launcher/link to point to this command: luvcview -f yuv
. For this to work, make sure 'camera' was enabled in your BIOS.
Splashy
Tired of how ugly the bootscreen is? Install Splashy! apt-get install splashy
Now to configure GRUB. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst file and add hiddenmenu
In the file, you can also change the timeout. You will then come across a commented line: # defoptions=quiet
Add this line: # defoptions=quiet splash vga=785
(788 for 800x600, 785 for 640x480) Update GRUB: update-grub
and thats it, you now have a graphical loader.
Swap
So, lets make the swap file: dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1024k count=256
That will make a 256MB swap file, fine if you have 512MB RAM. Then: mkswap /swap
Now add this to your /etc/fstab:
/swap swap swap defaults 0 0
Then sysctl -w vm.swappiness=1
Alter the last line of /etc/sysctl.conf: vm.swappiness=1
Activate it: swapon /swap
Suspend
Install µswsusp aptitude install uswsusp
To put your Eee in suspend or test it, run: s2disk
. I haven't got it to suspend when I close the lid (yet), so you can make a launcher/link for now.
Desktop Enviroment
Since I love Xfce, I chose to install it: apt-get install xfce4
.
Update: I tried LXDE and in my opinion it's faster than XFCE.
To install LXDE, use this: aptitude update aptitude install lxde
Log out and change your session to log in to Xfce or whatever your desktop preference is. Since I was running low on space, I uninstalled OpenOffice.org, Evolution, and a number of other programs using Synaptic package manager. And thats it I hope that works for anyone out there, I would of loved this tutorial before I installed Debian. Any comments or ideas are appreciated :)
Free Eee size wallpapers too: http://geekness.eu/node/50
URL to this post: http://geekness.eu/debianeee
Thanks to: http://wiki.lxde.org/en/Debian http://demenzia.net/2008/02/22/using-suspend-to-disk-with-eeexubuntu-on…