[solved] Arch on Elonex Web Book

johnvoisey · 2008-09-12 19:07:39

If this is the wrong place to put this thread, feel free to speak up !

I am the proud owner of a 10.2 inch white dead brick formerly known as an elonex web book as supplied to me by Carphone Warehouse as part of a bundle. It is less than a month old. and it is quite dead.

I wanted a usb broadband stick. I was offered this mini-laptop for an extra ten quid a month. I took them up on their deal because it came with ubuntu linux preloaded and that was, to be honest, the first time I'd EVER seen ANY mainstream retailer selling ANYTHING that wasn't loaded with the spawn of mr gates.

But the package did not include any sort of factory re-install cd or instructions on how to create such an image. And you know what I am going to say now, dont you.

A couple of days ago the familiar boot prompt was absent and replaced with ominous grub bot error messages, and when I did finally manage to fund an ubuntu rescue cd and bring it up, it started wailing about lots and LOTS of disk errors, and when it had finished, I had a disk with an empty lost+found directory, and nothing else. It is, to misquote monty python, an ex-webbook. dead. stiff. etc.

A request at this point. PLEASE. No 'should have backed it up' smug posts. Not least because it was to back it up that I was booting it when it went south. And can i suggest the fewer 'why not ring the help line' posts that get made, the better ?? When you have rung a carphone Warehouse help line for anything, then you will understand.

Anyway, I wish to make something useful of this scenario.

Inspired by the selfless dedication of the techie geniuses who persevered to bring you 'linux on the toshiba libretto' in the face of a total lack of a linux compatible floppy drive on that machine (at the time) which sure presented some challenges to getting a boot and root disk image up there, I wish to attempt to bring you 'Arch Linux On The Carphone Warehouse elonex Webbook'.

I envisage this as a sort of diary as i go along of issues encountered. My goal is to have a working webbook, with arch instead of ubuntu, with the main hardware features intact, and to log the main challenges and solutions I find as I go along.

I feel the need to put this information somewhere as I meet and beat the challenges, because while I believe I am amonget the first to suffer this (by virtue of being amongst the first to have one of the machines) I do not believe I will be the last.

I am pretty convinced the main issues I face will be hardware ones which is why I chose to open this thread in the kernel and hardware issues area.

If you consider this a heinous abuse of this forum, speak up. If you think another subforum more appropriate, say so.

Otherwise, I'm off to start the process by downloading myself an arch linux boot image and I will be back to record what I find.

By the way I already know the web book won't boot the newest live cd. I reported the problem here http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 26#p414226

Last edited by johnvoisey (2008-10-05 07:14:44)

Dusty · 2008-09-12 19:21:12

Sounds like fun. I'd suggest creating a blog (as much as I hate the damn things) for it though, just from the way it sounds you're going to document your progress. It will probably be more generally useful to people searching google than if you leave it here, and you can separate different posts and the comments about them more easily. Even so, keep us posted here. ;-)

Dusty

johnvoisey · 2008-09-12 19:33:50

Well it might even make it to the arch wiki, if they'll have it, once i've assembled the answers !

dunc · 2008-09-12 21:20:02

I'll definitely be following your progress with interest. I've been severely tempted by this machine for the last month or so, all the more so since it won Micro Mart's "netbook roundup" review-fest this week. Its specs are astonishingly similar to my everyday desktop's, but it's tiny.

And obviously I'd want to install Arch on it.

(Actually, in a strange way I hope you fail miserably, because I can't really afford one. Good luck all the same.)

johnvoisey · 2008-09-15 06:12:26

Morning everyone.

I took up 'dusty's" idea. Anyone interested in nitty gritty as it goes along and / or chucking their 2p in might like to pop over to http://archwebbook.blogspot.com/ where any comment is welcome, and I WILL summarise (it might be a BIG) the success / failure in here when all is finished, if the admins and the like are ok with that. If not, speak up (!!)

johnvoisey · 2008-10-05 07:28:03

I've changed this post to solved. In fact three areas still concern me, but they belong (i think) in more specialist fora.

I have an arch web book ! It runs arch (of course) with gnome and xfce desktops, connects via its wired rj45 port or its inbuilt 2200 wlan chip. Wifi-Radar is your friend (!) My only beef is that the LED doesn't light up as it did with ubuntu and as it does on my thinkpad R50e with the 2100 series drivers. I'll live with that (!)

It runs openoffice, surfs with eiphany and firefox, runs evolution for my mail, sees my mobile phone's sd-card via a bluetooth dongle, i could go on. but in essense i have 99% of what I sought to get.

Outstanding issues :-

The webbook still won't boot from the newest boot isos either on a usb stick sd card or usb mounted cdrom drive. But it boots perfectly from a usb cdrom using the 2007 dont panic iso and from there pacman is your friend ! But it DOES boot from pendrive versions of other distros all of which use the isolinux model. I'm sure this is still an issue, but as I said it's one for more a more specialist forum.

The video display works quite nicely thank you using the default xorg video driver under gnome and xfce but the default xorg setup with twm creates a 1024x768 screen I can't seem to override. The chip manufacturer has released a new driver and I will look at it, but as with the above I think that belongs in the 'video driver' speciality forum.

And then ther's the 3G usb broadband stick. This is still a work in progress but I feel again this is something better discussed in the networking forums.

It was far easier to get where I have got than I ever dared to dream. And it'a all down to the guys who put this distro and the wiki together. My thanks to each and every one of you. Hopefully I can give back my success or failure with the 3G broadband stick as a thank-you.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-09-12 19:07:39

[solved] Arch on Elonex Web Book

#2 2008-09-12 19:21:12

Re: [solved] Arch on Elonex Web Book

#3 2008-09-12 19:33:50

Re: [solved] Arch on Elonex Web Book

#4 2008-09-12 21:20:02

Re: [solved] Arch on Elonex Web Book

#5 2008-09-15 06:12:26

Re: [solved] Arch on Elonex Web Book

#6 2008-10-05 07:28:03

Re: [solved] Arch on Elonex Web Book

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