[TriLUG] [SUCCESS] [eee] post-install, grub OK from external stick but not from internal SSD

Alan Porter porter at trilug.org
Sat Apr 26 14:44:50 EDT 2008


 > <note on how I got here: The eee's factory Xandros boots quickly, but
 > is crippleware. e.g. no `ifconfig`, supwdat? eeeXubuntu is a real
 > distro, but I'm not yet ready to install it to the internal SSD...

Hi Tom...

The eee's default Xandros-based distro is not quite as crippled as
you let on.  It has ifconfig.  It's in /sbin, which is probably not
in your path by default.

STOCK EEE SOFTWARE

 From what I could tell, the Xandros-based distro is pretty hot.  It
boots fast and it looks sweet, whether you're using the "simple" UI
or the "advanced" KDE desktop.  I have trouble calling any distro
with KDE in it "crippled" (although some might joke otherwise).

In fact, I'd say their distro is wide open.  If you add the Xandros
repositories to your sources.list, you can get pretty much whatever
you want.

There are, however, a couple of downsides:

(1) They format the SSD as two partitions: a read-only "factory"
partition and a read-write "user" partition.  These are mounted using
unionfs.  It's great if you want to revert to factory defaults, but
it stinks if you want to do "apt-get dist-upgrade".  When I tried
that, I was left with only 500MB of the original 4GB flash free.
That's because any updated packages are effectively stored twice:
the original copy in the factory partition and the updated copy in
the user partition.

(2) Their kernel is compiled with a memory limit of 1GB of RAM.  I
installed 2GB of RAM and I wanted to use it.  Replacing the kernel
is tricky, because if you write it to /boot, it gets installed in
the user partition, and is never seen at boot time.  You have to
write it directly to the factory partition, which is tricky.

(3) They also neglected to compile all of the modules that you might
want.  For me, the stickler was dm-crypt.  I have encrypted USB flash
drives and I need to read/write them.  Without those modules, I am
stuck.  The suggested solution was to download the kernel sources and
recompile the kernel.  I am not sure whether I could have just built
the modules and then "insmod" them in their running kernel which was
built with those options as (N)o instead of (M)odule.  <-- Question
for the LUG.

UBUNTU

So like you, I experimented with alternative distros.  However, I
chose to try stock Ubuntu 7.10 instead of eeeXubuntu.  It installed
smoothly.  The only tricky part was the atheros wifi driver, and
there is source code with a patch that can easily solve that problem.
Download, make, make install, done.  There were a handful of other
minor tweaks, and these were documented very well on the Ubuntu wiki.

With a mainstream distro, the choices are endless.  And there are lots
of utilities that help make life with a small screen a little easier.

So, with Ubuntu happily running on my eee, I decided to experiment some
more.

EEEXUBUNTU

This weekend, I looked closely at eeeXubuntu.  I liked the idea that
all of their "tweaks" were packaged up into standard .deb files.  This
is closer to The Debian Way, and it helps prevent some future update
from clobbering what I might have changed.

However, after looking over their web site, I quickly decided against
eeeXubuntu.  Most of the things that were listed as "works in progress"
are working just fine for me under Gutsy Gibbon (7.10), so why change?

SUMMARY

Tom, I'm not knocking your choice to install eeeXubuntu.  However, I
did want to provide a clarification about the stock eee software, and
also another perspective on hacking the eee.  It's a pretty sweet box.

I am following your progress on eeeXubuntu... once you get it installed,
either to the SD card or to the internal SSD, perhaps you can prove my
doubts to be unfounded.  And I'll be happy to show you mine... whatever
distro I happen to be running then.


Alan








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