eeePC: Making it work
I’ve already written about Debian GNU/Linux on the Asus EeePC and how to Upgrade Debian on the eeePC to Squeeze, but this weekend, the power supply of my workstation died, and I had to work exclusively on the eeePC. These are the lessons.
My eeePC 701 is heavily space-constrained, I’ve partitioned it with 2.5GB for system, and 1.5GB for /home. Apart from performance, space was the major consideration.
No Gnome, no KDE
I decided earlier to only not to use gnome, and only to install KDE. Both come with about the same footprint in packages and libraries. As it turns out, KDE wasn’t a good idea either. With Akonadi and Nepomuk it tried to fill up my /home, and it generally proved to be a ressource-hog. I decided to get rid of it, and to replace all remaining KDE-software, mainly Kmail, Kaddressbook, Kopete, Kword and Kspread.
Dead Firefox
If you haven’t noticed, the firefox/iceweasel still delivered with Debian “squeeze”, 3.5.16, is dead. Dead like in “there are no more extensions which can be installed”. Like AdBlock Plus. You’ll need a Mozilla Backport, thankfully provied by the Debian Mozilla Team.
Embedded Debian
Use it. It saves about 25% to 30% of harddisk-space, solely by not installing documentation and translations, and by sometimes not having as many dependencies as the normal debian packages. The packages are binary-compatible with the normal debian-packages, so all you have to do is to add their repositories to your system:
deb http://www.emdebian.org/grip/ squeeze main dev debug java doc
deb-src http://www.emdebian.org/grip/ squeeze main dev debug java doc
As said, they integrate seamlessly, but due to their “em1” suffixed to the package-version, they will get preference (and some 2/3 of all packages will automatically be upgraded). You could control that with apt-pinning, of course, but I saw no need yet.
Big Screen
Since I had screen, mouse and keyboard available, I connected those to the eeePC. The monitor wouldn’t work at first, until I deleted /etc/X11/xorg.conf as the easiest thing to do. Also, it was unusable at 1920×1080 at 60Hz, so I calculated some modelines and made a small script for xrandr, to use 59.8Hz.
xrandr --newmode 1920x1080_59.80 172.50 1920 2048 2248 2576 1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync
xrandr --addmode VGA1 1920x1080_59.80
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080_59.80
Applications
Now the applications I installed.
- Desktop Xfce4
- Mail Claws. Small and fast, and does a lot
- Jabber Psi. I also have mcabber, but this is more comfortable.
- Word-Processor abiword. Which I only did because with the emdebian-packages, it didn’t pull in the whole of gnome
- Spreadsheet gnumeric. Same as with abiword
- E-Reader fbreader
- PDF-Reader xpdf
- Movie-Player smplayer
- Editor tea. Apart from mcedit which does all my editing needs on the console, you sometimes need a graphical one.
- Terminal xfterm and rxvt-unicode. These took a lot of time to decide on. The first one is pretty basic, well-integrated into xfce and has tabs. The latter supports font-resizing, does utf-8, and generally does everything right that aterm, wterm, Eterm and mlterm do wrong.