January « 2009 « Bigmauler’s Blog

eeePC 1000 funtoo

Posted in Uncategorized by bigmauler on January 15, 2009

Gentoo using Funtoo on the eee-pc 1000

First of some history : I bought the eee-1000 (not H or HA) for my wife’s birthday, she didn’t like the pre-installed xandros so we blew it off and put ubuntu-eee on it. Boot times were slow and she didn’t like it too much. She asked if I’d help her put Gentoo on it.

Lets get down to it. The specs.Newegg described it as “ASUS Eee PC 1000 40G – Fine Ebony NetBook Intel Atom 10.0″ Wide SVGA 1GB Memory 40GB SSD “

Don’t be fooled though, it has an 8 GB SSD and a 32GB Flash drive.

Specs:

Intel atom processor N270 2.6GHz

Wireless card Ralink RA2860 Works great**

see network section, needs third party drivers

Integrated SD card works great

1GB of ram, expandable to 2 GB, works fine

Screen resolution of 1024×600, works fine with no extra configuration needed in xorg.conf

SSD hard drive and flash drives works fine

I have / on the SSD drive and /home on the Flash drive

make sure to add elevator=noop to your kernel boot parameters in your grub.conf

Webcam

in progress

bluetooth

in progress

SD cardslot

works fine

Installation

Funtoo?
- My choice to use the funtoo image is because I don’t want to compile so much when I install. The funtoo pentium4 image is ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~x86″ so I get a prebuilt system that’s the latest for my needs, emerging packages on the eee-pc does take sometime. I do however use a standard portage snapshot.
Suspend? Hibernate? Not for me.
- I’ve never cared much for suspend or hibernate as they ususally cause random problems and since I’m using funtoo by default, I’m using openrc which helps decrease boot times. I also use fluxbox with wbar for an app launcher and conky for some system monitoring, my boot times from cold boot are 10s, which is quick enough for me.

First grab yourself a bootcd from http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

At this time the gentoo minimal boot cd dosen’t detect enough of the hardware for it to be usefull so that’s why I’m using system rescue cd.

Since the eee-pc doesn’t have a cdrom drive you will need to create a bootable usb stick. Directions are on the site, I won’t discuss them here.

So now we have a bootable usbstick, check the bios for some options, use the right key to force boot the usbstick.

Before you boot up you might want to head over to funtoo.org and grab the latest ~pentium4 stage 3 build and put it on the usbstick. Also you can grab a portage snapshot from somewhere perhaps here . This step isn’t absolutely necessary but it easier now than using the text webbrowser on the bootcd.

I had some trouble getting my usbstick to boot so I disabled both hard drives from the boot list in the BIOS and that helped a lot, just re-enable them later.

Hard disks
- I simply partitioned the whole SSD as /dev/sda1. Then I formatted it as ext3. There is a lot out there about journals and wearing down the ssd but its not worth the risk, I think, to not use a journaling fs.
- I partitioned the whole flashdrive as sdb1 and I formatted it as ext3. Then I mount it as /home Later in my make.conf I use /home/distfiles as the location for downloaded programs cache for gentoo

continue as your normally would with the install following the gentoo handbook. When it is time to reboot don’t forget to set your root password.

One problem I have run into (and it may be fixed by now) is that since we are using funtoo and it has openrc by default, it seems to fail to setup the /dev properly so before you exit your chroot do the following rc-update add devfs sysinit && rc-update add udev sysinit

Network

wireless

NOTE: As of the linux kernel 2.6.29-rc1 the driver for this wireless card is included in the stageing drivers section, I haven’t tested it yet

There is no opensource driver right now for this card, the card has a good driver from ralink however. Go to this link and grab the latest driver its the link starting with “RT2860PCI/mPCI/PCIe…”Read the readme if you need to but for me, all i needed to do was to edit os/linux/config.mk

and set
'HAS_WPA_SUPPLICANT=y' and 'HAS_NATIVE_WPA_SUPPLICANT_SUPPORT=y'

since i run network manager, if you don’t run it then don’t bother.
Now go into the main dir of the drive and do “make” and “make install”. then reboot, modprobe rt2860sta and see if iwconfig lists the link ra0
Network manager can do the rest from there, as I use nm-applet in the system tray to configure the wireless.

wired-network

To get the rj45 port working all you need to do in your kernel config for 2.6.28 is:

set experimental drivers to yes

General setup —>

(Y) Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers

Then

-> Device Drivers
│ -> Network device support (NETDEVICES [=y])
│ -> Ethernet (1000 Mbit) (NETDEV_1000 [=y])

Yes to Atheros L1E

Config files

Here are some of the config files I have created on this funtoo laptop. I welcome feedback.

make.conf
FEATURES="parallel-fetch distlocks sandbox userpriv usersandbox" ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-Os -march=prescott -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" MAKEOPTS="-j2" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://gentoo.osuosl.org/ "

SYNC=”rsync://rsync.namerica.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage”
USE=”gtk -gnome -kde -qt3 -qt3support -sqlite -qt4 alsa dvd -cdr wifi ipv6 -berkdb -cups \
X networkmanager samba wireless bz2 xml lzo unicode laptop dri drm rar \
tiff gif png jpeg win32codecs mpeg mp3 mp4 divx libcaca intel opengl \
svg dbus hal -esd -eds -ldap -fam mmx sse v4l2 sse2 ssse3 pni xvid xvmc”
VIDEO_CARDS=”intel vesa”
AUDIO_CARDS=”intel-hd”
LINGUAS=”en_US en”
DISTDIR=”/home/distfiles”
PORTDIR_OVERLAY=”/usr/local/portage”

A note about my use flags: I am using fluxbox and therefore don’t need kde,qt or gnome, gtk by default. Your intended setup may differ

fstab

# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.
/dev/sdb1 /home ext3 noatime 0 0
/dev/sda1 / ext3 noatime 0 1
/dev/sda5 none swap sw 0 0
#/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,ro 0 0
#/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto 0 0
shm /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0

Done

now reboot and enojy your system. I’ll add some software titles that I use later, such as eee-control. Please give me feedback, I intend this article as a starting point and it should change overtime as more gets tested and optimized.

Hardware/software problems