Arch Linux

lilsirecho

Veteran

Registered: 2003-10-24

Posts: 5,000

Re: Arch on Eee PC

One alternative  to using the flash drive boot is to boot into RAM from the flash drive option in FaunOS.

This requires large ram.  I have 2GB in my machine and it is marginal for the system.  Some "least used" data is included in swap when thusly booted into ram.

The true use of swap includes a rather difficult  path to follow.  The basic premise is to place into swap the "least used" .  Thusly, what is written therein is not readdressed often, contrary to many opinions expressed.

The fact that swap has been provided in my flash device does not guarantee it will be used.  It can also be turned off.  In fact, my flash install is 500+mb and swap is 1.4gb and shows no activity.  One could argue that I have more ram than most systems.  The use of USB flash should indeed reduce the internal flash device use to almost nil(in the faunOS system) since the system is r/o from the flash device, perhaps USB maintenance being the major use of the internal motherboard and its flash device.

The use of external swap flash devices is also possible as an alternative to including it in the boot flash device, it would seem to be mandatory for the internal flash systems which are not removable.

I suggest that the "least used" premise for swap is a primary starting point in discussing the occurrence of swap use, especially repeated use.
EDIT: The provision for 1.4GB of swap space in my flash drive should provide for years of swap use given the nature of flash drive design.!!  All is external to the internal flash device(s).
EDIT:  My system has no HDD (flash or otherwise), no FDD, a DVD/CD burner and runs on FaunOS USB flash drive of 4GB....mobo has audio,video and ethernet...no pci modules installed, 2GB ram.

Last edited by lilsirecho (2007-11-10 02:19:20)

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Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit!     X-ray confirms Iam spineless!

bladesonfire

Member

From: California, USA

Registered: 2007-05-23

Posts: 44

Website

Re: Arch on Eee PC

Hi all,

I'm' currently in the process of creating a Wiki for this. If you're so inclined, you can help out by visiting: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … sus_EEE_PC

If you need help, hopefully the article will be useful soon

once

Member

From: Taiwan

Registered: 2006-09-12

Posts: 267

Re: Arch on Eee PC

guys, why not upgrade ram to 2G, then wont care about swap like we did in Taiwan user.

berkus

Member

From: Tallinn, Estonia

Registered: 2005-03-29

Posts: 65

Website

Re: Arch on Eee PC

guys, why not upgrade ram to 2G, then wont care about swap like we did in Taiwan user.

Running in simple mode here on 512Mb eee, the memory usage goes up to leave around 10Mb free, don't see any problems. But I usually don't run many apps at once - a couple pdfs open, firefox with 3 tabs, skype.

ps/ If I succeed installing Arch on this little box, I'll build -Os (size-optimized) packages for it. We'll see how much it saves then.

Last edited by berkus (2007-11-10 13:04:03)

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keep in touch.

plus_M

Member

Registered: 2006-10-17

Posts: 51

Re: Arch on Eee PC

once, the problem with upgrading the RAM is that Asus put the "Warranty void if seal broken" sticker over one of the screws to the RAM, so you can't upgrade it without voiding your warranty.  With the fragility of the Eee PC and the lifespan of the SSD I can't bring myself to void the warranty.

raymano

Member

Registered: 2006-10-13

Posts: 357

Website

Re: Arch on Eee PC

Hi all,

I'm' currently in the process of creating a Wiki for this. If you're so inclined, you can help out by visiting: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … sus_EEE_PC

If you need help, hopefully the article will be useful soon

We have also been talking a little about the EeePC on the FaunOS forums. Here's something that may help you down the line:

Seems like the ATH5K drivers support this and it requires some compiling from the "everything" branch of the kernel.

Here's what I found:
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drive … ckingath5k

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FaunOS: Live USB/DVD Linux Distro: http://www.faunos.com

Mr Green

Forum Fellow

From: U.K.

Registered: 2003-12-21

Posts: 5,912

Website

Re: Arch on Eee PC

/me sticks head round door...

Sorry to barge on your thread [off topic!] but I am interested in getting one...

I'll keep an eye on Wiki page and this thread

If thats ok?

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Mr Green

once

Member

From: Taiwan

Registered: 2006-09-12

Posts: 267

Re: Arch on Eee PC

once, the problem with upgrading the RAM is that Asus put the "Warranty void if seal broken" sticker over one of the screws to the RAM, so you can't upgrade it without voiding your warranty.  With the fragility of the Eee PC and the lifespan of the SSD I can't bring myself to void the warranty.

there is a little trick to tear warranty paper, and put it back with 512M & paper when go back to Ausu, the point is upgrade to 2G to save SSD lifespan in case after all, right?

bladesonfire

Member

From: California, USA

Registered: 2007-05-23

Posts: 44

Website

Re: Arch on Eee PC

raymano, Thanks for the info. I updated the wiki to reflect another option and will give this method a go probably later tonight. I think it might help to have this url handy when compiling.

dkite, any info on using the eeepc kernel? I got it up and running, but I'm still fighting to get my devices working.

plus_M

Member

Registered: 2006-10-17

Posts: 51

Re: Arch on Eee PC

Well, I finally got my 1 GB flash drive and successfully installed Arch on my Eee.  However, I'm having a hell of a time with ndiswrapper.  ndiswrapper is one of those things I've never been good at.  Could one of you guys please explain how you got ndiswrapper to work?  Thanks for all your help everyone.

lilsirecho

Veteran

Registered: 2003-10-24

Posts: 5,000

Re: Arch on Eee PC

PlusM:

Celebrom has performed the ndiswrapper successfully using modprobe ndiswrapper but in FaunOS needed to create a boot-related fix which I steered him to /etc/rc.local for the entry to enable it to work at boot.

Good luck with the 1GB!

---

Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit!     X-ray confirms Iam spineless!

berkus

Member

From: Tallinn, Estonia

Registered: 2005-03-29

Posts: 65

Website

Re: Arch on Eee PC

Well, I finally got my 1 GB flash drive and successfully installed Arch on my Eee.  However, I'm having a hell of a time with ndiswrapper.  ndiswrapper is one of those things I've never been good at.  Could one of you guys please explain how you got ndiswrapper to work?  Thanks for all your help everyone.

You grab the atheros windows driver, there are many links to it in google and eee forums and wikis, then you run "ndiswrapper -i <name of .inf file from driver zipfile>" and it installs.
Then sudo ndiswrapper -m or just modprobe ndiswrapper.
ndiswrapper -l shows installed .inf files and if there are any matching hardware devices available.

Even though ndiswrapper finds devices and installed driver fine, modprobe fails with some weird Windows driver error ("Cannot initialize hardware"). I think you need to somehow get asus_acpi to work and "echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/wlan" first, but I failed at that.

ps/ So far I tried,
* stock EEE kernel - wired works,  wireless dead - probably missing some init steps? (running /etc/acpi.d/wlan.sh(sp?) poweron didn't work)
* wireless-2.6.git kernel with ath5k driver - no worky
* separate ath5k from madwifi repository on stock Arch 2.6.23 kernel - no worky.

Anybody knows where the atl2 wired driver comes from??

Last edited by berkus (2007-11-14 11:46:15)

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keep in touch.

plus_M

Member

Registered: 2006-10-17

Posts: 51

Re: Arch on Eee PC

Ok well I finally got ndiswrapper to work with a little bit of tweaking in the network-profiles config.  berkus, you seem to have a different problem than what I had - I think I just had my "wait" variable set too low and it was timing out too soon.  modprobe ndiswrapper worked fine for me.  Also, I'm using the stock Arch kernel, which you didn't seem to mention.  Maybe you should try just doing a normal Arch installation and setting up ndiswrapper with that.

har3

Member

From: Tallinn, Estonia

Registered: 2007-10-15

Posts: 7

Re: Arch on Eee PC

Anybody knows where the atl2 wired driver comes from??

Attansic L2 driver is posted here, among with patch for kernel 2.6.22:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour … +bug/77725

Patch for 2.6.23 is here, but it doesnt apply on the original driver:

http://svn.mandriva.com/svn/packages/co … 6.23.patch

Mr Green

Forum Fellow

From: U.K.

Registered: 2003-12-21

Posts: 5,912

Website

Re: Arch on Eee PC

Hey my Eeepc just waiting for it to charge up :-)

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Mr Green

Agent69

Member

Registered: 2006-05-26

Posts: 189

Re: Arch on Eee PC

This is a very interesting thread and I will be keeping an eye on it as I will probably buy one come December.

While I wait, shouldn't it be possible to use xnest to experiment with eventual X11 setups?

har3

Member

From: Tallinn, Estonia

Registered: 2007-10-15

Posts: 7

Re: Arch on Eee PC

Here's my progress so far:
Installed Archlinux-i686-2007.08-2.core.iso (note it has a 2.6.22 kernel) with 1gig USB stick. Grabbed wired driver (see my previous post). Installed make, gcc etc. Patched, compiled and loaded the atl2 module. Got wired working. Did pacman -Syu. Kernel got upgraded to 2.6.23, wired stopped working. Found atl2 sources for 2.6.23 from eeuser, compiled and loaded that, got wired working again. Wireless has been working flawlessly with ndiswrapper. Xorg works fine with both xf86-video-intel and xf86-video-i810. If using video-intel, I had to grab the original Eee Xandros xorg.conf from eeeuser to get the correct screen resolution. video-i810 works even without xorg.conf but I had to use the 915resolution hack to get the resolution right. cpufrequtils works great with p4_clockmod, as previously stated. Battery indicator is a bit wonky but I get the general idea how much juice is left.

HOWEVER, having done all that, I'm thinking of switching back to Xandros.

I have two Eee's on my desk right now. One with Arch and other with original Xandros. In Arch, scrolling web pages with firefox is horribly jittery and laggy. Letters lag behind when typing in the address field, switching tabs is pain, etc. urxvt takes 2 seconds to load. Xandros has none of these slowdowns. Compared to Arch, it's blazing fast. And I use pekwm.

Link to atl2 for 2.6.23:
http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=21359#p21359

once

Member

From: Taiwan

Registered: 2006-09-12

Posts: 267

Re: Arch on Eee PC

hi, we have 2nd version of E3pc without webcam & minipci here, Taiwan; and shipping lower price and black color, looks more like NB.

stonecrest

Member

From: Boulder

Registered: 2005-01-22

Posts: 1,190

Re: Arch on Eee PC

har3: lo enabled? hostname in /etc/hosts?

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once

Member

From: Taiwan

Registered: 2006-09-12

Posts: 267

Re: Arch on Eee PC

ASUSTek is committed to meet the requirements of the GNU General Public License

http://eeepc.asus.com/tc/news11272007.htm

Mr Green

Forum Fellow

From: U.K.

Registered: 2003-12-21

Posts: 5,912

Website

Re: Arch on Eee PC

Right got a 4g sd card going to test out different distros on it.

Faunos runs from sd card no problem of course I need to fix wireless and shutdown issue but its a start

Going to order 2g ram upgrade :-) not for vista lol ... faunos from ram sweet

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Mr Green

berkus

Member

From: Tallinn, Estonia

Registered: 2005-03-29

Posts: 65

Website

Re: Arch on Eee PC

The biggest "problem" with arch is bootup. The arch's bootscripts sequence is definitely taking longer to load than a much simpler bootup sequence in Xandros (tuned specifically for Eee). Once we can get bootup time down, it's going to be ok.

Building firefox and other critical apps specifically for used processor model and with size optimizations might also gain some boost.

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keep in touch.

Jessehk

Member

From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2007-01-16

Posts: 152

Re: Arch on Eee PC

As someone who is less experienced, I know I'd really appreciate if the Wiki went in to more detail on how to use the Asus Kernel with Arch -- including the correct location of the specific files.

Someone in my immediate family just ordered the Eee PC.

lilsirecho

Veteran

Registered: 2003-10-24

Posts: 5,000

Re: Arch on Eee PC

Berkus;

A live flash drive of FaunOS will boot to Kde desktop in 45 secs with option to run archlinux in alternate root session.  Two systems with one boot.  Xandros not removed...three OS.  Then use another flash for puppy or DSL.

2Gb flash drive recommended.

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Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit!     X-ray confirms Iam spineless!

lilsirecho

Veteran

Registered: 2003-10-24

Posts: 5,000

Re: Arch on Eee PC

Mr Green;

Gladdaseeya!  Best of luck with the FaunOS system and the wireless-shutdown.  2G ram will be great for the system!

I have two computers with FaunOS.  The initial one has 2GB ram and the second computer has 3GB ram.  The second computer uses boot CD assist since it doesn't have USB boot bios.

Keep your batteries up.  Might checkout some of the 9.6V portable drill batteries which have a large capacity, rechargeable...for the tests you plan which take a lot of juice.

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Prediction...This year will be a very odd year!
Hard work does not kill people but why risk it: Charlie Mccarthy
A man is not complete until he is married..then..he is finished.
When ALL is lost, what can be found? Even bytes get lonely for a little bit!     X-ray confirms Iam spineless!