Installing Slackware 13 on Asus EEE PC 900A
Last updated: 27 January 2010

General Hardware Specifications of Asus Eee PC 900A:
Hardware Components

Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz
8.9" TFT Display 1024x600
Intel 945GME Video Card
2GB DDR RAM (Upgraded from 1GB standard)
4GB SATA Solid State Drive Hard Drive
Built-in SD Card Reader
Atheros PCI-E Ethernet Card
Atheros AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter
3-Cell Battery
Intel HD Audio Card
Intel 82801G Chipset (ICH7) and USB 2.0 Controllers
(Has 3 USB ports)

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.32.6

Basic Installation of Slackware Linux:

* Why to use Slackware Linux: because it is very easily customized, is stable, and is not bloated full of features (very important for Netbooks in general). I did not like the Xandros Linux that came on this laptop one bit. In general, it was too slow. It worked, though, so please don't think I'm bashing Xandros. I can just customize Slackware much more to my liking. I did, however, back up the Xandros on it. I also compile my own packages for Slackware (only due to using this machine to test various things like compiling for size, see below).
* Obtaining Slackware Linux: go here.
* Installing Slackware Linux: here's where it got a bit difficult. Due to either my BIOS being out of date or just not very friendly to the Slackware USB Installer script made by Eric Hameleers, I had to boot a USB stick with the USB boot image for installing that came with the Slackware Linux install media, then copy the slackware directory on this media to another (ext2) USB stick. It works, but be aware it's not perfect. I don't have the USB optical drive so I had no choice but to install via USB stick. Those with the optical drive are probably going to have a much easier time installing Slackware Linux.
* Post-Install modifications/tweaks: lots. First off, I am totally new to trying to install Slackware Linux to this small a machine. I decided to skip KDE altogether and go with only Xfce4. Xfce is very user friendly and very capable (and very customizeable too). I found that you can remove basically all of the d/ software series except for python (needed for wicd) and cxxlibs and gcc (needed for FireFox). I had about 671MB to spare but had the machine set up with no games, no movie players, and very few other applications other than what I know I am going to use. However, please note that I was setting this machine up specifically to be a travel internet/irc/yahoo/skype/music/picture machine. I did not plan to use email through Kontact (which is my preferred application for email), and I did not plan on playing any movies with it (yet). This is subject to change, as I am still learning.


Setting up additional features for Slackware Linux:

* Suspend to RAM works great on this machine. However, to use Suspend to Disk (aka "Hibernate") you must have at least more swap file than your RAM. Since I have 2GB RAM and a 256MB swap partition on this machine, obviously that is out of the question. However, please note that one could use the SD Card Reader to expand the storage of the machine (especially using LVM and maybe LUKS also), but that would take up the SD card slot (i.e. now you can't remove the SD card!).
* The touchpad worked out of the box. The only thing to note is that the left mouse button is configured as something else (not sure what yet). In Xandros it did something other than left mouse click, so get used to tap-to-click or get an external mouse.
* I recompiled a number of packages in Slackware 13 with -march=i686 -mtune=i686 -Os (i.e. target architecture generig 686, tune for generic 686, and compile for optimum (small) binary size). This helped shave a small amount of disk space off what I was using, but not much. Mostly I targeted big packages like gimp, xfce, and seamonkey.

Unresolved issues

* Do NOT kill the wireless using the keyboard and expect it to work when you come out of suspend. I ran into that issue once. I recommend just leaving it on.
* The onboard SSD does not support power saving modes using hdparm, but this isn't much of an issue.

Configuration Files

* Note, xorg.conf is no longer needed with Slackware 13.
* Output of df -h with a list of packages that were installed at the time.
* Output of lspci.


Contact Information

Links:

* Slackware Linux
* Asus Eee PC 900A (right now this link appears broken)
* Linux on Laptops