EEEPC 300EUR GNU/Linux laptop
Jaromil’s Journal of Musings
February 21, 2010
Since 2008 the EEEPC is my travelling deck, starting with my first journey in Indonesia1.
It is
also the very first brand new laptop I ever bought: this new 7“ Asus model is amazingly cheap, sold in
Singapore in for 600 SGD (˜300EUR in Dec2007), while the entry cost in Indonesia was 4 millions IDR
in Feb2008.
The best feature consists in being completely solid state: no mechanical parts moving, which means
more robust and less energy consuming. It is equipped with a Pentium M with 512 of RAM and 4GB
NAND (internal storage), has wifi modem and ether-net, an SD card slot, usb2.0, sound-card and even
a web-cam.
I place my bet this machine is going to break through the market in the coming year.
1diaries/indonesia.html
1
http://laptop1.blogbus.com/
This is trial version
www.adultpdf.com
As soon as it was out, geeks worldwide have been sporting several hardware hacks on the EEEPC2.
It comes off the shelf equipped with GNU/Linux: a user friendly installation of Xandros3 (Debian4
based) configured for a newbie or anyone used to work on M$ wind-blows.
I didn’t really kept the original system intact, instead worked on tweaks since the very first day: I’ll
share my hacks here and in the file repository on ftp://ftp.dyne.org/eeepc (for EEEPC models
701 and 900 ONLY).
0.1
Issues with hacking the EEEPC
There is one big problem in all this: unionfs is bugged, at least it was the one shipped with my
EEEPC. It is bugged so badly that, if you delete any file in your home NAND it will not free the
space.
It is a major nasty issue that everyone will face when starting hacking on the EEEPC: the unionFS
factory setup. For the Xandros recovery system they thought it was necessary to partitin the 4GB in
2 parts and let the first hold the system, while the second the modifications done to it: this way by
deleting the second partition one can go back to the initial installation.
Fresh EEEPC users will experience quite some frustrations as they’ll see their home