{"id":411,"date":"2012-02-13T17:42:03","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T16:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"\/Blog\/?p=411"},"modified":"2012-02-14T10:16:14","modified_gmt":"2012-02-14T09:16:14","slug":"eeepc-making-it-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/eeepc-making-it-work\/","title":{"rendered":"eeePC: Making it work"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nI’ve already written about Debian GNU\/Linux on the Asus EeePC<\/a> and how to Upgrade Debian on the eeePC to Squeeze<\/a>, but this weekend, the power supply of my workstation died, and I had to work exclusively on the eeePC. These are the lessons.\n<\/p>\n

\nMy 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.\n<\/p>\n

No Gnome, no KDE<\/h2>\n

\nI 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.\n<\/p>\n

Dead Firefox<\/h2>\n

\nIf 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<\/a>, thankfully provied by the Debian Mozilla Team.\n<\/p>\n

Embedded Debian<\/h2>\n

\nUse 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:\n<\/p>\n


\ndeb http:\/\/www.emdebian.org\/grip\/ squeeze main dev debug java doc
\ndeb-src http:\/\/www.emdebian.org\/grip\/ squeeze main dev debug java doc
\n<\/code><\/p>\n

\nAs 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.\n<\/p>\n

Big Screen<\/h2>\n

\nSince 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.\n<\/p>\n


\nxrandr --newmode 1920x1080_59.80 172.50 1920 2048 2248 2576 1080 1083 1088 1120 -hsync +vsync
\nxrandr --addmode VGA1 1920x1080_59.80
\nxrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1920x1080_59.80
\n<\/code><\/p>\n

Applications<\/h2>\n

Now the applications I installed. <\/p>\n

    \n
  • Desktop<\/b> Xfce4<\/li>\n
  • Mail<\/b> Claws. Small and fast, and does a lot<\/li>\n
  • Jabber<\/b> Psi. I also have mcabber, but this is more comfortable.<\/li>\n
  • Word-Processor<\/b> abiword. Which I only did because with the emdebian-packages, it didn’t pull in the whole of gnome<\/li>\n
  • Spreadsheet<\/b> gnumeric. Same as with abiword<\/li>\n
  • E-Reader<\/b> fbreader<\/li>\n
  • PDF-Reader<\/b> xpdf<\/li>\n
  • Movie-Player<\/b> smplayer<\/li>\n
  • Editor<\/b> tea. Apart from mcedit which does all my editing needs on the console, you sometimes need a graphical one.<\/li>\n
  • Terminal<\/b> 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":415,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411\/revisions\/415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seegras.discordia.ch\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}