Tips for running Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) on an EeePC 901go [Update 2]

December 26, 2008

As I’ve written before I got an Asus EeePC 901go for Christmas and of course I’ve installed Kubuntu (8.10 / Intrepid) on it. In this post I’m going to share the tricks I used to get it running well.

• I’ve attached a USB CD drive and installed Kubuntu from the alternative CD. The kernel on this CD is not able to get any networking to work, but this is no problem. The installed kernel will get the LAN running.
• Set noatime, nodiratime for your partitions. Take also a look at this post.
• When the installation is finished you should update your system, as this didn’t work with the install kernel.
• To get all devices running you need a special kernel for your EeePC. I recommend the usage of this kernel, take a look at the installation howto. I’m using the lean kernel.
• Now you should install eeepc-config (apt-get install eeepc-config), which will allow you do en-/disable the webcam, wifi, … . Just try it out.  Press the two most right buttons above the keyboard. The Fn-Keys work now also. Cool!
• You’ll also notice that sometimes on high I/O activity the whole system will hang for seconds. This is because of the I/O scheduler, as the default one is optimized for hard disks and not for flash. This wiki page describes how you can change this. I’ve set it in /boot/grub/menu.lst and added the echo line to /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh (add the beginning of the do_start function)
• As it seems the ath5k driver for the WLAN is more or less useless. It has a real poor performance but the biggest problem is that it has a package loss between 5-10% on my WiFi. To solve this it is best to go back to the old madwifi driver. Here is the mini howto:Go do http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/ and download the newest version there. In my case I did following:wget http://snapshots.madwifi-project.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gzNow extract it:
$ tar xzf madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204.tar.gz
$ cd madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-r3879-20081204/

  Now we need some packages installed:
  sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install linux-headers-eeepc-lean

  And now the actual compiling and installation

  sudo ./madwifi-unload
sudo ./find-madwifi-modules.sh $(uname -r)
cd ..
sudo make
sudo make install


  At last we need to add blacklist ath5k to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-eeepc and append ath_pci to /etc/modules. After a reboot you should have a working WLAN.

• The UMTS card ( a Huawei E620 USB Modem) works without any problems. Take a look here for get it to work on the command line. I was not able to get it to work with the KNetworkManager. PS (For my Austrian Reader): Here is a link to a site in German with the Init Strings and User/Password combinations needed for the various Austrian providers.
• The eepc has a multi touch track-pad, you can scroll by using 2 fingers and have a middle click when you click with 3 fingers. (Thx to Meredrica for this info! )

Following items are not resolved to my satisfaction – I need to look further into these topics

• (K)Ubuntu Intrepid seems to have a poor graphics performance and rendering errors on Intel 945 systems, which is build in the 901go. The rendering errors happens most often at the start of non KDE apps like Firefox. Here is a link to the Bug Report. I’ll post here if I find a fix or workaround.
• Get the UMTS dialing working with the KNetworkManager.

I’ll add additional tips as soon as I need and find them. Please also post tips and tricks you know for the Asus EeePC 901go. Thx.

PS: I’m running KDE 4.2 Beta2 on my 901go and I really can recommend it! Get it from there.

2 Comments »

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1. the eepc has a multi touch trackpad, you can scroll by using 2 fingers and have a middle click when you click with 3 fingers

   Comment by Meredrica — January 9, 2009 #

2. […] with 8.10 (poor graphics performance and rendering errors). Please take a look at my Post about Kubuntu 8.10 on my EeePC, as most of the stuff is still valid. I’ll write in this post only what I did […]

   Pingback by Tips for running Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) on an EeePC 901go | Robert Penz Blog — April 23, 2009 #

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