Just two days ago, I got my shiny white Asus Eee PC 901! I've been waiting a long time for this, and although it's the 12 GB WinXP model (lol Ausfailia), I've managed to set it up with Arch Linux and the GNOME DE.

I know there are plenty of netbooks coming out with either lower prices or bigger (and arguably better) specs, but I chose the Eee PC anyway for it's superior community support. Having gone through the installation process, I made the right choice.

The results

Before I talk about what I've been through, here's what's working:

• Arch Linux (duh)
• GNOME
• Wired and wireless networking
• Power button for shutdown
• Fn+F3 / Fn+F4 for brightness adjustment
• Vertical two-finger scrolling

Here's what isn't (haven't bothered or couldn't do):

• Sleep and suspend (falls back onto screen blanking/locking)
• i810 X video driver for compositing and video playing in harmony (no cube effect or true transparency for me ;_;)
• Horizontal two-finger scrolling (can't be arsed, just a line in xorg.conf anyway)
• Fn+F2 for toggling wireless
• Fn+F5 (looks like it switches displays)
• Fn+F6 (whatever that does)
• Fn+F7 / Fn+F8 / Fn+F9 for volume adjustment

I'm not sure about:

• Four buttons at the top-left (not sure what they do anyway)
• Webcam (haven't tried it)
• Microphone (ditto)

Stuff I'd recommend knowing

Arch? An "expert" distro? You should know about these:

• Shell prompt navigation (ls et al.)
• Shell prompt file management (cp, mv, etc.)
• Disk partitioning (ordering, naming and types)
• Mounting and unmounting disks/USB Flash drives
• A spare Internet-connected computer
• The ability to read Arch wiki pages
• The ability to follow instructions
• The ability to read short error messages
• Some iota of independent judgement

That's all I had when I jumped into this.

Helpful links

• Arch Linux Beginners Guide - standard installation procedure
• Installing Arch Linux on the Asus Eee PC - stuff for Arch on the Eee PC in general
• Arch on Asus EEE 901 - link to ighea's Eee 901 kernel

The Arch Wiki also had many helpful pages I used for setting things up.

Getting Arch Linux

I downloaded the core USB Flash image and dumped it on my spare 1 GB stick. In retrospect, with the amount I had to download, I probably would've been better off with the FTP version. Oh well.

Booting from the Arch USB Flash stick

I pressed ESC at the blue Asus Eee PC screen to bring up the menu. Pretty obvious which menu option was my stick, so I chose it, and I was off.

Disk partitioning

Followed the instructions in the Beginners Guide, and heeded the caveats in the Arch-on-Eee page to use ext2 as my filesystem. I used the 4 GB drive as /, and the 8 GB drive for /home.

cfdisk had a list of partition types. The Linux (83) one is fine. I got confused, since there was no "ext2" option, but after much deliberation, I found that that was set in the next step, setting mount points. orz

Selecting and installing packages

Pretty damn fast. Probably because the only package group for selection was the "base". There's meant to be five groups... maybe it was due to my choice of "core" on my USB Flash stick rather than FTP?

Choosing FTP install wouldn't have helped anyway: my wired networking wasn't working. Yet.

Configuring

This stage is just editing a bunch of text files. I used VIM for this (which is launched by vi). Fairly easy: just follow the instructions on the wiki, or in that virtual terminal with the beginners guide opened with the less pager.

Restart

I didn't want to restart with the stick still in, since I thought that it would attempt to boot from the stick. Later, I remembered that ESC needs to be explicitly pressed for booting from USB.

Anyway, I wanted to shutdown, to pull out the stick, and power on again. I typed shutdown now, and there was a prompt for maintenance. When prompted, I dumbly entered the password, rather than pressing Ctrl-D to continue. I tried the command again, and BOO! The thing locked up on me.

Whoops.

I held down the power button to turn the thing off, but when I booted up, my un-journalled ext2 partitions were uncleanly unmounted, so I ran fsck.ext2 on /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1. Things worked out okay, and I was back on track.

The correct command to turn off the netbook in future is:

poweroff

That's what I get for not reading man pages.

Hello terminal prompt!

At this point, Arch Linux was officially installed. A shiny prompt, VIM... what more could I want?

Wired networking

The stock kernel didn't pick up my wired network with my blue CAT5 cable plugged in. I spent a lot of time trying to get the suggested toofish Eee custom kernel installed via pacman, but ultimately it didn't work out.

I jumped over to ighea's custom Eee 901 kernel, and wired networking worked like a charm.

Of course, I got these over to the netbook using my MP3 player, which doubles as a USB Flash stick. Arch in its current state didn't auto-mount, so I added a vfat entry for /dev/sdc1 in my /etc/fstab, and manually mount'ed and umount'ed the thing.

Kernel panic!

Installing ighea's kernel was one thing, but the Grub menu didn't like me mimicking its items. Specifically, it couldn't find the disk UUID that I'd swiped from the other boot menu entries there. Changing the kernel root= parameter to /dev/sda1 worked fine though.

I'm guessing that the UUIDs were worked out in the initial ramdisk (the initrd line) those other entries had.

Incidentally, I also suspect all those automatically-added entries to the /etc/rc.conf MODULES array were also in the initial ramdisk, because they'd come up with "not found" messages on start up. I commented the whole line out because those messages bugged me.

To the cutting edge

Updates time!

pacman -Syu

About 100 MB of updates. I got the 2008.06 version of Arch Linux. Australian internets is slow, so I ran the updates while watching Hidamari Sketch x365 (Miyako is <3).

Setting up X

Installing Xorg by the wiki instructions turned out fine. But I wanted to get compositing working, if only for the desktop switching cube effect, and true application transparency.

The Arch-on-Eee page suggested the old i810 video driver plus 915resolution to get compositing to play well with video. This bit didn't go so well. I tried countless xorg.conf files and adjustments, but the main deal was that the thing worked with the "vesa" driver, but the "i810" driver just refused to "find a screen". The xorg.conf on the Asus-on-Eee page wasn't much use: it was for the 70x models anyway, which run at 800x480 resolution. I figured 915resolution wasn't needed, but when I ran into problems, trying it out and loading it up at startup didn't do a thing.

I gave up on i810 and compositing, and installed the "intel" video driver, which is what I'm using right now.

GNOME

Over 300 MB of downloads. Damn dude, I'm in Australia, take it easy on me. Hooked it up to my router instead of hijacking my desktop's connection like I was before, since I hungered for internets.

I came back a couple of hours later, and the poor thing shut down on me mid-install. After that 300+ MB download, and it fails, on my lap, at the install. Son of a crap. Had to recover by switching it off, running fsck.ext2 on the disks (there were inconsistencies), and force-installing the same packages using pacman again (forced, because some things were half-installed, and the regular installation wouldn't cooperate.)

Despite the interruption set-back, things seemed to be okay.

HUGE TEXT MODE

Everything is JUMBO SIZE. I had to crank down the fonts to point size 6 in the GNOME appearance settings. I played around with ~/.gtkrc-2.0, but I'm not sure if it made a difference, to be honest. Login screen was as ugly as sin.

Power button to power off

The Arch-on-Eee page had a little tip to get the power button to switch the machine off. I had sudo set up, so that was pretty easy.

BTW, the boot up time is just shy of 30 seconds. It's no stock Xandros, but it's a refreshing change from my older computers.

GNOME menu icons

They weren't visible at first, but I found that toggling the icons in menus from on to off and on again made them appear.

Keyboard and mouse quirks

Now was about the time I noticed that:

• the keyboard didn't repeat keys, and
• the touch pad was intolerably sensitive.

First, the keyboard. I found that, like the menu icons, just playing with the settings would have some effect. Unfortunately, it would cause the keys to double up; really nasty. Turning the repeat delay way up solved this, even though it was at a moderate position before. Weird.

Then the mouse, or rather, the touch pad, needed adjustment. I was not going to tweak the xorg.conf and constantly restart: I liked being in GNOME. At first, playing with the mouse settings worked okay. When I restarted and played with them some more, however, they became WAY TOO SLOW.

I resorted to launching gconf-editor via Alt-F2, keyboard navigating to /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse and playing with the 'motion_' settings. I have:

• motion_acceleration = 1.5
• motion_threshold = 7

And they work fine.

Lid closing

Lid closing causes the display to turn off. According to some Arch Linux forum posts, it's meant to be suspend to RAM on battery, and blank (lock) screen on power. Opening the lid works fine and doesn't lock anything up, which was a relief.

Closing the lid does have the odd effect of making the netbook play this "ringing" sound. I don't know what's causing it or how to change it. Playing around with GNOME's system sound settings didn't accomplish much: pressing the "Test" buttons doesn't play anything anyway. Maybe the cause is elsewhere?

Tomboy notes

Awesome app. Single-handedly got me a few high distinctions for uni courses over the past years.

This version highlighted every single word I typed as incorrect, so I suspected that the dictionary wasn't set up right. The almightly Google couldn't find anything with regards to a non-set/non-working dictionary with Tomboy, so in the end I just turned off spell-checking.

I never used it anyway. With the sort of stuff I deal with, every fifth word is a "misspelling", making the system effectively useless.

Time and date

Unlike in Ubuntu Linux, right-clicking on the clock in the corner doesn't let you set the time, date and timezone. I had to use the date program, and a bit of experimentation, to get both the time and the timezone correct. Several reboots later, and things were set right.

No background?

At this time, I noticed that GNOME had no background, no matter what I tried to set it to. The desktop background thumbnail was showing the image, so it couldn't be any missing image libraries. Then what?

A quick Google later revealed that there's a gconf setting that enables the desktop background image:

/desktop/gnome/background

Putting a draw_background boolean setting there to 'true' made the background instantly appear. Hooray!

Theming time!

With my newly-acquired background, my thirst for a non-ugly theme quickly rose to the surface. I got most of my stuff from GNOME-Look:

• GDM theme: SimplyFree
• GUI theme: Murrine Colors (Murrine Brave)
• Icon theme: GNOME Colors (Brave again)
• Cursor theme: DMZ

Had to copy that last one into /usr/share/icons.

LCD subpixel hinting

I wasn't sure if the GNOME setting already had it, but just to be on the safe side, I decided to follow the Arch wiki instructions on setting up fonts for LCDs. It's just uninstalling libxft and cairo, and installing the "-lcd" equivalents, plus fontconfig-lcd.

I think one of those was from the community repos, so I installed yaourt to gain easy access to it. Unlike pacman, yaourt recommends that you run it as a regular user, which tripped me up the first time.

Making auto-mount work

I installed HAL and had it launch as a daemon in my /etc/rc.conf DAEMONS line, so I couldn't work out why plugging in my MP3 player didn't work. Turns out I had to add myself to the 'hal' user group.

gpasswd -a tung hal

Reboot, and problem solved!

Post-install

At this point, everything I wanted was working, so I started installing the usual applications: Firefox, Emacs, SBCL, Flash, Java runtime, codecs, LaTeX.

But I don't have wireless at home, so I couldn't test it. Or could I?

Wireless setup

ighea's custom Eee kernel has wireless support built-in, which is awesome. But how I was I going to test it?

Before I installed Arch, I had Windows XP. It played some odd music while I slugged through the initial setup routine, and then I was at the desktop. I've never owned a laptop/desktop with wireless and been in the vicinity of an access point before, so I had no idea how to set up or use wireless.

This WinXP set up had a tray icon with some radio wave lines, so right clicking on that brought up a list of access points, in this case, just my neighbour's. It was protected, of course, but the fact that it was picked up at all would be fine for my setup plans.

Back to my Arch install, I was able to run stuff like ifconfig and iwconfig to detect and bring up/down my wireless card, and even list my neighbour's access point from before, which was a very positive sign. Thank you ighea for your awesome kernel!

Anyway, running terminal commands to connect/disconnect/check for wireless access wasn't going to be practical in GNOME, so I opted to set up NetworkManager. The wiki makes the whole process very easy.

When I rebooted, the network icon was there. Left clicking on it listed my neighbour's access point. Success!

Conclusion

Hmm... Arch Linux, not actually that hard to set up or use. I've only ever used Ubuntu and it's kin in the past, tried out Mandriva (at the time, Mandrake), dabbled with Fedora, flirted with openSUSE, tried (and failed) with Debian.

Arch is nice. It starts minimalist, and you add the stuff you want. I'm proof that you don't need to be a hardcore terminal wizard to set up Arch, so long as you have the online support and Google. Looks like /g/ wasn't trolling me after all.

Oh, and if I didn't make it clear yet, my Asus Eee PC 901 is awesome! I checked the unofficial forums, and it's the kind with a ZIF connector (EEEPC901-W005X), so even when the 4 GB + 8 GB combo wears down on me, I can grab a ZIF cable and a 1.8" ZIF-compatible drive, and plug it in. It also means that I finally have a laptop that's light enough to bring to university. Yeah, laugh if you want at the prospect of using a computer in class for anything other than goofing off, but I'm not that unfocused.