Installing debian on eeepc instead of Xandros

It's been a while since I wrote - a lot of things happening, a very busy RL, no time for SL, and broken ADSL at home which I have no time to fix for now. But thought to write up something to show I am still alive :-)

As I've already wrote, I think - I've got a shiny new eeepc a few months ago. All well, but its internal flash (which they call "solid state disk") broke at some point - giving the hardware errors. The failure happened at a very distinct moment in time - I left the eeepc on for a few days, and then - whoops. I do not suspect the FUDed "flash wear" - because there were even the read errors. Much more a possible overheating causing it to fail. So, since I do not believe in warranty (And the warranty on this item would've caused more pain anyway), I decided to buy a SD card and use it as a main storage - the experiments showed that the built-in flash was dead only in some selected range, so the first few dozen megabytes were usable.

My favourite Gentoo was out of question immediately - it'd be a madness to compile everything on a system with a smaller CPU and a very slow flash-backed storage. So, I've evaluated a few others and finally settled on Debian - since it was apparently the only one who was ok with my SDHC 4Gb card that I bought.

There was not much to an install - just follow the instructions here and I got a working system.

However, at first when I tried to just use SDHC, it failed to boot from it - complaining that the cylinder number is larger than the one supported by BIOS (notably, after the boot the SDHC card appears to work fine).

So, in the end I made the following: boot into installer from the external USB memory stick, then blow away the default partition table on the internal "Hard Disk" and create two partitions on it - the first one will be the root partition, the second one is the exact copy of the installer USB stick image.

Using the same trick that GRUB uses to boot windows, I can force the installer to boot - so I have a way to recover the system in case something goes wrong. (I think it's pretty hard to install grub from the installer itself - I used the root filesystem that was previously installed - so technically I went through the install procedure twice).

The side benefit of such a setup is that now internally I have only the grub/kernel - and everything else is on the SDHC card - so in theory if I unplug that one, I can have an alternative setup (and in the case of the external HDD it can be even Gentoo).

New toys for the human :-)

I've been quite silent for a couple of weeks - mainly because of the human's RL trip to the US. Of course, this had a side of visiting some local gadget shops... And with the euro being expensive as it is... the human has gone slightly bananas and forgot that there was common sense. One of the nicest acquisitions was the Eeepc. In folded state it is quite exact to the A5 size - so it is really no bigger than most of the books - which proved to be a huge advantage in the airplane - alongside with the almost 3.5 hours of battery life. And in addition to the formfactor, the goodness one gets for approximately 350 euros (if all the math is right) is 1G of RAM, 8G of flash, wireless/ethernet, and the camera.

Now, here's the coolest part - it comes with Xandros linux preinstalled. So, even though the default desktop seemed kind of cute, the first thing indeed that was apt-gotten, was the fluxbox, gcc, git, openssl&co, and other practically pointless things. And i did not have to wipe out the whatever-other-OS-that-was-there-before and fiddle with the basics (kernel configure/compile is exciting only the first twenty times or so)

The first usage experiment shown that the human needs to compartmentalize the motoric memory responsible for typing (as now I tend to hit "F1" instead of "Esc"), and that the fingers are a bit too fat.

As a nice bonus, the beast auto-starts Amarok when it sees the iPod Nano connected to it. As a not-so-nice bonus the Amarok's song layout does not get recognized by iPod Nano, the only way I've solved that is by using the "standard means" aka iTunes on Windows.

The CPU is not a demon (only 600Mhz), and graphics seems to be not accelerated (so no SL, even though there's no point to run it as it would have been too slow) but having a familiar architecture in a size of a pocket book is very pleasing.