How I got Debian Lenny working on my Eee.

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


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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…

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/HowTo/Install

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