[Debian-eeepc-devel] denbian lenny on asus 1101ha

[Juha Heinanen]

i installed yesterday debian lenny on asus 1101ha.  here is a few notes
on what i did:

- i used normal lenny installation from usb memory stick by placing the
  files on the stick as instructed in 

  http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s03.html.en

- because wired ethernet and wlan hardware is not supported by lenny, i
  attached an usb wlan adapted to another usb port and then booted
  the installer from the stick in another usb port.

- i had a bit trouble with my usb wlan adapter, because it was not
  supported by lenny installer either.  this problem i got solved by
  placing zd1211-firmware_2.21.0.0-0.1_all.deb on a second memory stick
  and then installed the package with udpkg -i when lenny installer
  started to complain about missing network hardware driver.

- forgot to mention that i started the installer in expert mode and
  selected wireless tools to be included in the installation.  that
  allowed me to use iwconfig command to configure wlan essid.  after
  that, i brought wlan0 interface up with 'ip link set wlan0 up'
  followed by 'dhclient wlan0'.

- after that i returned to installer and continued normally, but skipped
  network configuration.  if i remember correctly, i didn't need to do
  anything else special during the installation and lenny rebooted
  itself fine from hard disk.

- at this point i had lenny running on 1101ha without any native network
  connectivity.  i had to correct hostname and include lo interface due
  to skipping network configuration during installation,

- wired ethernet i got working by compiling and installing atl1c module 
  from source AR81Family-linux-v1.0.0.10.tar.gz, which is available on
  Atheros web site.

- wlan interface started to work, when i upgraded kernel to 2.6.30 from
  lenny backport packages on backports.org.

- x11 i got working in 1366x768 mode by following instructions on this
  page:

  http://lists.debian.org/debian-laptop/2009/08/msg00031.html

  but i didn't patch anything.  instead, i installed grub2 packages from
  debian unstable distribution, where 915resolution patches are already
  included.

- alsa sound (including internal mic) i got working by installing
  version 1.0.20 of alsa packages from debian testing.

that is how far i have got.  i haven't had time to check function keys
or camera yet.  i'm pretty satisfied with the result, because i didn't
need to force dpkg to do anything.

i realize that vesa based x11 is not efficient, but at this writing i
haven't heard of any clean way to install native GMA 500 (poulsbo)
xserver driver in lenny.

-- juha