Arch on Eee PC

Jickel · 2008-07-13 11:44:55

puelocesar: Heh, don't worry about it, I have a bad habit of staying up tinkering with Arch 'til far too late at night and asking stupid questions the answer to which are obvious the next morning!

Otherwise I can only agree fully to everything you just said. I've only distro-hopped a little bit, but I have a hard time imagining anything beating Arch with a capable user behind the helm. And it really isn't that difficult becoming that capable user!

Good to hear you got Wine working, I finally have time to get to know menuconfig now.

Last edited by Jickel (2008-07-13 11:45:47)

JJwalker · 2008-07-13 22:17:30

Ighea i'm sorry but could you explain what should i do with this line you've posted (yeah i'm a noob)
and also a small question: what can i do to improve performance of flash video like youtube on my eee? divx files seem to do ok, but youtube is kinda sluggish

zodmaner · 2008-07-14 11:38:39

JJwalker wrote:

Ighea i'm sorry but could you explain what should i do with this line you've posted (yeah i'm a noob)
and also a small question: what can i do to improve performance of flash video like youtube on my eee? divx files seem to do ok, but youtube is kinda sluggish

For more responsive system, follow this instruction on the wiki: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ins … d_governor.

Last edited by zodmaner (2008-07-14 11:38:59)

toofishes · 2008-07-15 02:14:48

2.6.26 is out, and I've built it and pushed it out to my repository. Several patches have been removed as they have gone upstream (woohoo!). However, in other places, I had to actually patch the patches because of changing source, so I've saved a lot of you the pain of doing this if you are attempting to rebuild. Note that the webcam driver has landed in the kernel now, so we no longer need the external package. I rebuilt luvcview without the dependency so you don't get problems related to that.

Let me know of any hardware or other issues- everything seems to be working for me. The one thing I didn't work too hard at was getting the eeepc module to compile since I don't use it, and it hasn't been updated in forever. If anyone wants to locate or make a patch to get it to compile, feel free to send it my way and I'll throw it in my repository.

zodmaner · 2008-07-15 14:30:16

Thank you toofishes, the new kernel works wonder, as always.

Also, you guys might already have noticed, but I have made a major changes to the wiki (again), trying to update it to reflex the current status of Arch on Eee. Most of the changes is in the Installing Arch Linux section, where I move the old instruction on installing the network drivers out (since the kernel on our new installation media supports Eee's ethernet out of the box) made toofishes' custom kernel the "default" installation path here, instead of having users choose between using toofishes' kernel or dkite's eeemodule package. I also try to make the installation process "easier" to follows, though I'm not sure if I succeed here (feedback please! ).

As always, comment, suggestion and criticism are welcome. It would also be great if you guys could look over the changes I made and correct any mistake that I make or add some information that I miss (I'm sure there's a lot of them ).

EDIT: Oh, and thank you to everyone who have been contributing to the wiki so far, you guys are what make Arch Linux great!

Last edited by zodmaner (2008-07-15 14:57:18)

JazzplayerL9 · 2008-07-15 18:12:11

Ok so I sold my 701 and I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of a 901 I pre-ordered. Is the 901 compatible with toofishes' repository or has it even been tested yet? I haven't seen much and just did a search through this thread for "901" and all I got was a post number. I'm more than happy to be a guinea pig with arch on the 901...no other distro seems to have what I want.

Another question...who's running Awesome WM on their Eee?

Jickel · 2008-07-15 22:00:55

Jazzplayer: I'm equally interested in both, so please do try them out You seem to need to learn LUA scripting to use Awesome nowadays, but maybe it's worth it, LUA seems pretty damn neat.

Also, I built a new kernel with a different vmsplit and stuff from toofishes', under a different localversion name so I could install it in parallell. This worked, however when I'm doing the same and installing it on top of toofishes' original kernel, IE not changing localversion or anything, I keep getting segfaults. I'll try and see what happens if I first remove toofishes' original kernel with pacman and then install the new one.

ighea · 2008-07-16 03:42:19

Well, kernel-2.6.26 comes now with eeepc-laptop driver and provides everything our lovely little Eee's need to work properly... if it just would work as it is intended.
So we wouldn't need asus_acpi or asus-laptop -drivers anymore (I have tested them with eeepc-laptop and things broke quite nicely! )

eeepc-laptop: add base driver
This patch is based on Eric Cooper's work to clean the original asus_acpi
given by Asus. It's a platform driver (/sys/devices/platform/eeepc/)
wich support:
- hotkeys - wlan on/off - camera on/off - cardr on/off
eeepc-laptop: add backlight
Add backlight class support to the eeepc-laptop driver.
eeepc-laptop: add hwmon fan control
Adds an hwmon interface to control the fan.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/g … 5159487d6d
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/g … ba2706cc1d
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/g … de8e1539af

What is so bad with this driver then because I'm not jumping for joy? Well, everything works quite well (some paths need to be changed in scripts, but it's just trivial) and we even get fan-control. Sad thing is that all acpi-events become laggy and after some time ACPI get's disabled becouse of some sort of event storm. To sum everything up... it works, as long as it is not used too much (You can turn wlan on and off or put eee into sleep, but trying to use volume or brightness controll is just overkill!).

Luckily there's always a chance that I have messed something up (I really hope this is the case!), so I'd like to have you guys too check this thing out.

Here's kernel config for toofishes' kernel-eee, eeepc-laptop enabled:
http://koti.kapsi.fi/~ighea/arch/kernel … epc-laptop

Changes were something like this:
-CONFIG_ACPI_ASUS=y
+CONFIG_HWMON=y
+CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_LCD_SUPPORT=y
+CONFIG_LCD_CLASS_DEVICE=y
+CONFIG_EEEPC_LAPTOP=y

If it just could work, everything would be perfect.

Hazuki · 2008-07-16 03:59:05

Wine doesn't work with the Eee kernel. It requests a 3g/1g split. How can this be fixed?

toofishes · 2008-07-16 04:19:17

Hazuki wrote:

Wine doesn't work with the Eee kernel. It requests a 3g/1g split. How can this be fixed?

Can someone please put this in the wiki? I'm getting real sick of answering the same question.

Why on earth do so many people use wine? I had no idea.

Last edited by toofishes (2008-07-16 04:19:28)

faelar · 2008-07-16 06:07:30

Sad thing is that all acpi-events become laggy and after some time ACPI get's disabled becouse of some sort of event storm. hmm To sum everything up... it works, as long as it is not used too much (You can turn wlan on and off or put eee into sleep, but trying to use volume or brightness controll is just overkill!). smile

So it's not just my imagination
Sorry but I lack time to try your kernel-config ighea.

Why on earth do so many people use wine? I had no idea.

Photoshop ! So easy to work on your A3 pictures on the eeepc screen ! no ?
Games ! We all want to play with all the setting to high, the eeepc's keyboard is so great when it comes to FPS ! no ?
I believe people need to open f**king broken and useless .docx to work

Hazuki · 2008-07-16 06:17:33

Actually in my case it's Super Jukebox, an .spc (Super Famicom/Super Nintendo) music player. Since the solution appears to be "download eee-sources and config file, then change the memory split to 3g/1g" I'll go hunting for the source and config and do that. Is it really such a performance killer though?

Hazuki · 2008-07-16 06:21:50

Hm, come to that, where *is* the 2.6.26 source tree with eee patches? I could swear there was a download link around here somewhere...

Last edited by Hazuki (2008-07-16 06:22:26)

Jickel · 2008-07-16 07:17:09

To get the source tree, I'd install git and do a

git clone http://code.toofishes.net/gitprojects/eee.git

in the dir. where you want it.

ighea · 2008-07-16 12:53:26

Okey... it looks like it wasn't just eeepc-laptop's fault that the ACPI gets messed up... same effect can be achieved with toofishes' "vanilla" kernel v. 2.6.26.

ACPI: EC: GPE storm detected, disabling EC GPE

And so ACPI just "dies"! :I

Can you confirm this? Just keep pressing for example Fn-F3 and Fn-F4 -combos and notice that at some point it breaks. :I

scales · 2008-07-16 13:12:19

hi all. ok i have been trying to get arch on my eee for a couple days now and while i do finally have it installed, i am having serious issues with the fact that it is installed to the sd card. arch never shuts down cleanly and forces a check after every boot. also the custom kernel is unable to load some block onto hd(0,0) which may be because i have it installed to the second partition on my sd card. anyone know of a fix for this? while i am interested in arch, is it worth all this hassle?

faelar · 2008-07-16 13:41:43

Can you confirm this? Just keep pressing for example Fn-F3 and Fn-F4 -combos and notice that at some point it breaks. :I

Yes, with toofishes' kernel, acpi is broken easily.
The only thing I tried today was to unmute the sound (which obviously haven't worked).
PS : I haven't removed your package yet.

[15:39 faelar ~] pacman -Qs eee
local/acpi-eee 9-5 (eee)
    ACPI scripts and AsusOSD for the Asus Eee PC
local/eeemodules 0.0.3-4
    Kernel Modules for EEEPC
local/kernel-eee 2.6.26-1 (eee)
    The Linux Kernel and modules for the Asus Eee PC 701
local/madwifi-eee-svn 3772-1 (eee)
    Madwifi drivers for Atheros wireless chipsets built for Eee
[15:39 faelar ~] pacman -Qs acpi
local/acpi-eee 9-5 (eee)
    ACPI scripts and AsusOSD for the Asus Eee PC
local/acpid 1.0.6-1
    Utilities for using ACPI power management

ighea · 2008-07-16 13:48:08

Lets blame the kernel 2.6.26 then, because having any acpi-scripts in /etc/acpi/ or not didn't make any change (I restarted acpid, of cource). Git3 is also broken... I wonder if this only an issue with Eee's hardware.

zodmaner · 2008-07-16 15:12:51

ighea wrote:

Can you confirm this? Just keep pressing for example Fn-F3 and Fn-F4 -combos and notice that at some point it breaks. :I

Confirmed here too, I just kill ACPI while using Fn-F8 to lower sound volume.

I'm using ighea's acpi-eee package and toofishes' latest kernel and the associative packages. Hope we can find a way to fix this.

EDIT: Also, the acpi events (when it works) is now very laggy, just as you describe above, ighea.

Last edited by zodmaner (2008-07-16 15:21:52)

ighea · 2008-07-16 15:44:29

Patch "Disable GPE while query is pending" http://bugzilla.kernel.org/attachment.cgi?id=16474 from http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10724 seems to fix the Fn-Fx -problems!

toofishes: Could you consider using eeepc-laptop driver instead of asus_acpi and building UVESAFB as module instead of built-in? As far as I know UVESAFB is still not working (correctly, prove me wrong?) when built-in to kernel and eeepc-laptop would remove the need for external drivers and patches. It also provides fan-control support (Can disable the noisy trouble maker without eee-module. ). Thanks!

Edit:
I have also upgraded acpi-eee to version 9-6 with support for eeepc-laptop kernel driver.

Last edited by ighea (2008-07-16 16:56:12)

elbecko · 2008-07-16 17:56:09

toofishes wrote:

2.6.26 is out, and I've built it and pushed it out to my repository.

Thanks, toofishes. So far it looks work fine on 900 as well.

It seems that "no sound after resume/suspend" issue(*1) has been solved with new kernel. No need to use my cheap "unbind, then bind again" trick anymore. "Can't mute" problem(*2) still remains, though.

*1 http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 45#p371745
*2 http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 39#p380439

Last edited by elbecko (2008-07-17 06:05:47)

Jickel · 2008-07-16 19:05:44

ighea: How would we know if UVESAFB works or not? I have a framebuffer working finally anyway, with the last two kernels, logo and all too.

Also, I seem to have tracked down what's causing my segfaults with HIGHMEM_4G and VMSPLIT_3G, the madwifi-eee-svn drivers. The kernel under a custom version and name never had them installed (that's why I gave that up, too much hassle to edit the madwifi-eee-svn PKGBUILD to install them, at least IMO), and I never got segfaults with it. The WIFI was activated though (blue LED). On a whim, I deactivated the WIFI card in the bios and booted the kernel I kept getting segfaults with; No problems! I tried this several times, and it's always the same. Without the WIFI activated, the kernel boots and runs fine. The segfaults seem to occur just about when the Eee tries to automatically connect to the wifi, right after the daemons have finished loading, or about the time I use the login manager (SLiM, in my case).

Activating the WIFI and connecting afterwards (it's supposed to auto-connect at boot) gave all sorts of wierd errors like small screen artifacts and a slightly jerky pointer, I'm not sure I want to try that again too many times!

Does anyone have ANY idea what's going on? Are the madwifi-eee-svn drivers compiled for a certain memory mode or something, and now trying to access user memory space where there once was user memory space? I've never had any problems with the WIFI on any other distro I've had on my Eee.

Last edited by Jickel (2008-07-16 19:30:06)

ighea · 2008-07-16 19:26:14

Jickel wrote:

ighea: How would we know if UVESAFB works or not? I have a framebuffer working finally anyway, with the last two kernels, logo and all too.

Heh, you propably using just VESAFB becouse UVESAFB needs v86d userspace helper application/daemon to even work.
You may try it out, there's howto in the wiki.

Jickel · 2008-07-16 23:34:19

So, uuuh, I hear you might need to recompile drivers sometimes in Linux *ashamed*

I *got it* when I tried compiling and it asked for the kernel build src direcotry. "So that's how it gets feedback on how the kernel it's compiled against is configured!".

I was just about to uploaded my recompiled kernel and madwifi drivers, but in a fantastic show of irony, my AC adapter gave up on me. Actually it seems to have died earlier in the evening and I wasn't paying attention to the battery meter. Luckily they finally released these things in sweden just a couple of weeks ago so I'll try to get my hands on a new one tomorrow and host the files if anyone's interested.

chibacityblues · 2008-07-17 15:18:23

Hi there! First of all, thanks all of you who contributed in making Arch run on the Eee!

I got a little problem though - Wireless isn't working. I'm using toofishes' latest kernel and madwifi-eee-svn is installed too. The problem is, no ath0 interface comes up. Can anyone of you give me a hint what I missed? In other words: what are the steps required after pacman finished installing madwifi-eee-svn?

[root@eee ~]# pacman -Q kernel-eee madwifi-eee-svn && uname -a
kernel-eee 2.6.26-1
madwifi-eee-svn 3772-1
Linux eee 2.6.26eee #1 PREEMPT Mon Jul 14 20:24:08 CDT 2008 i686 Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Arch Linux

#901 2008-07-13 11:44:55

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#902 2008-07-13 22:17:30

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#903 2008-07-14 11:38:39

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#904 2008-07-15 02:14:48

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#905 2008-07-15 14:30:16

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#906 2008-07-15 18:12:11

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#907 2008-07-15 22:00:55

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#908 2008-07-16 03:42:19

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#909 2008-07-16 03:59:05

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#910 2008-07-16 04:19:17

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#911 2008-07-16 06:07:30

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#912 2008-07-16 06:17:33

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#913 2008-07-16 06:21:50

Re: Arch on Eee PC

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Re: Arch on Eee PC

#915 2008-07-16 12:53:26

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#916 2008-07-16 13:12:19

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#917 2008-07-16 13:41:43

Re: Arch on Eee PC

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Re: Arch on Eee PC

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Re: Arch on Eee PC

#920 2008-07-16 15:44:29

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#921 2008-07-16 17:56:09

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#922 2008-07-16 19:05:44

Re: Arch on Eee PC

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Re: Arch on Eee PC

#924 2008-07-16 23:34:19

Re: Arch on Eee PC

#925 2008-07-17 15:18:23

Re: Arch on Eee PC

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