Installing Debian on the eeepc
From Foomagic
I just got one of these little fellas for playing with and i think it'll be a great little thing for long boring plane trips. When looking at it in the shop, I knew the first thing I had to do was install my favourite linux distro on it, which of course is debian. Heres the steps needed.
There is an image available that you can dd to a usb-stick, but I decided to do it the standard way from debian installation media with a usb stick. If you want to try it the easy way, follow the instructions on the debian wiki.
Still here? good. :)
Seeing as the eee doesnt have an optical drive, and I dont have a usb cdrom, we'll have to do it the partially convoluted way. Go to the debian web site and get these four files.
http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/hd-media/initrd.gz
http://people.debian.org/~joeyh/d-i/images/daily/hd-media/vmlinuz
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/atl2-modules-2.6.22-3-686/download (chose your mirror)
Now we need to get those files onto our flash drive and load a bootloader on it so we can boot from the usb stick. I am using an empty stick with a standard fat16 file system on it. Any file system grub can understand can be used. Copy all four files over, plus your /boot/grub directory Now run grub and we have a bootable USB stick to install with. Grub commands to install to the sticks MBR are as follows.
#grub >root (hd1,0) ## i have a sata drive which is sda, so my usb drive is sdb, thus (hd1,0) adjust to suit >setup (hd1) >quit #
This should install grub into the mbr of the usb stick, now we just have to edit menu.lst so it works from the bios
title Debian Lenny Installer root (hd0,0) ##once booted from bios, usb be stick becomes hd0 and sda kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 ro initrd /initrd.gz savedefault
Once thats all done, you can boot from the usb stick (hit F2 during post) and install debian the normal way with the installer. When you partition the disk, make sure not to make a swap partition and to make your file systems ext2. Also chose noatime as a file system option. (though you can edit fstab after installation anyway) You wont be able to use the internet during install, so you will only get a base-install and have to go from there after the first boot. First thing we need to do is install the ethernet drivers that we put on the usb key earlier. Once you have booted, log in as root and run the following commands.
root@eeepc# mkdir /mnt/usb root@eeepc# mount /dev/sc1 /mnt/usb root@eeepc# dpkg -i /mnt/usb/atl2-modules-2.6.22-3-686_2.6.22+1.0.40.4-9_i386.deb root@eeepc# modprobe atl2 root@eeepc# ifconfig eth0 up root@eeepc# dhclient eth0
All should have gone well and you can now upgrade and install whatever you want. I upgraded to sid, as i am a glutten for punishment, and installed xfce4 as my desktop environment. This wasn't without a few issues, but nothing worth noting here as they will go away within a few days when new packages hit debian.
Next pressing issue is to get madwifi up and running. There is a package linked on the debian wiki for the eee, but when i tried to use module assistent to build it, m-a upgraded to the latest unpatched madwifi-source package. This wasn't much help, so I thought I would just get the patched madwifi tarball. I had also installed a 2.6.24 kernel by then, and of course this wouldn't build on that. Even editing the makefiles wouldn't help. (it would build, but get a heap of errors and backtraces when the module loit:aded) So I tried patching the latest madwifi-source from debian with the binary hal patch. This was also a spectacular failure. After an hour or so mucking about with this, I didn'thave much choice but to downgrade back to the 2.6.23 kernel, get the headers and compile the madwifi tarball.
Edit: Just updated the wiki, the above information will be deleted soon. The madwifi-source package thats available on the wiki will work with sid, and a 2.6.24 kernel, you just need to use 'm-a build' instead of m-a a-i' to stop it checking for the newer version of madwifi-source. Then the deb it creates in /usr/src can be installed manually. You will need to have madwifi-tools installed also.
