Asus Eee PC 1000HA

[edit] General Installation Options

In general, you can follow the the installation guide in the Gentoo Handbook, but it is advised that you read this HOWTO thoroughly before proceeding with the installation in order to be aware of any particular changes from the standard process that will be necessary.

There are two hurdles to overcome when installing gentoo on a EEE PC. The first things you may notice about your Eee PC is that they do not have an optical drive built in. The second problem is that drivers for both the wired and wireless network adapter aren't included in the Gentoo 2008.0 install for the EEE 1000, 1000H, or the 1000HA. There are, however, several ways you can circumvent these issue in order to install Gentoo on your Eee PC. For ease of understanding we will address the network driver issue first.

[edit] Overcoming the lack of network driver support

Gentoo is heavily depending on network support to download its software packages (including drivers), without network access things can be a bit tricky. To get around this however we have several options (listed from easiest to hardest):

• Use a USB to Ethernet Adapter - I used a linksys brand adapter that uses the USBNET driver (you can find a list of supported adapters here) This method has worked with every distro I have tried so far.}}
• Install From a Different Distro - Boot and install from a distribution that does include the appropriate network driver(s)
• Install The Driver Manually - Download the needed network drivers on a working PC (possibly by using emerge --fetchonly or by downloading the full LiveCD) and install them once the gentoo install medium has booted.

[edit] Overcoming the install media

• Boot From a Live USB Drive - The simplest option is to make a bootable Gentoo USB flash drive with the LiveCD image. The Gentoo Linux LiveUSB HOWTO is a comprehensive guide about how to do this.

• Use a USB External Optical Drive - A simple way around the lack of an optical drive is to go out and buy one. External optical drives (using USB) are readily available in the marketplace. If you acquire one, you can boot the Gentoo LiveCD and proceed normally.

• Network Installation with PXE -

[edit] Performance Tweaks and Suggestions

Depending on how much stuff you plan on adding to your Gentoo system above and beyond the base install you may want to try out some/all of the following tips to make things go faster.

• Speeding up emerge with tmpfs
• Ccache - Compiler Cache
• Distcc - Distribute compilation tasks among several hosts.
  

  Gentoo has an official article on:

  Distcc

[edit] Installing the Gentoo Base System

[edit] Drive Partitioning

There are four filesystems on the Eee PC 1000HA's hard drive by default. The first two are for user files and the last two are for the system restore function and Asus's software tweaks to make the system boot faster, respectively. Deleting them will not prevent the machine from working, but it will make the system restore and the bootup tweaks unusable. It is your decision whether you want those features intact or want to reclaim the hard drive space that they take up.

The bootup tweaks themselves can be disabled manually in the BIOS setup utility. If you delete the partitions that the tweaks are stored on, the tweaks will automatically disappear from the BIOS setup and you will (of course) not be able to enable them again.

The Eee PC 1000 is equipped with two SSDs: an 8GB and a slower 32GB. It is recommended to use the 8GB for the root and swap partitions, and the 32GB for user data.

[edit] Kernel Selection

The Eee PC 1000HA has some weird hardware, similar to the other Eee PC models. While this hardware is currently supported in Linux, you will need to use a kernel whose vanilla version is at least 2.6.27.7 or newer to get some of the components to work properly. Three kernels which are known to work with the Eee PC 1000HA are gentoo-sources, hardened-sources and vanilla-sources.

[edit] Configuring Your Kernel

As of kernel 2.6.28-r2, many of the Eee 1000 hardware drivers are still "experimental" and will not appear at all without setting the appropriate kernel option.

General Setup  --->
     [*] Prompt for development and/or incomplete code/drivers

[edit] Processor Options

The Eee PC 1000 series uses the Intel Atom processor with the exception of the 1000HD which has a Celeron M.

In the kernel 2.6.28 configuration, there is no processor option for the Atom, and plenty of controversy regarding which of the existing options is the best approximation. The Core 2 is reported to work fine (although the Atom is more closely related to the original Core), and some users recommend the i686 and Pentium M as well, but most often the Pentium 4 is the suggested choice. Also, since the Atom supports HyperThreading, be sure to turn on Symmetric multi-processing and SMT scheduler support.

Processor type and features  --->
     [*] Symmetric multi-processing support
         Processor family (Pentium-4/Celeron(P4-based)/Pentium-4 M/older Xeon)  ---> 
     (2) Maximum number of CPUs (2-512)
     [*] SMT (Hyperthreading) scheduler support 

[edit] ACPI (Power Management)

The Eee PC 1000HA has support for ACPI, through the eeepc_laptop module. The description of the eeepc_laptop is a bit deceptive in the 2.6.27.7 kernel, as it implies that it only works for the hotkeys. However, it does in fact provide full ACPI support on the 1000HA and should be used if you want any sort of power management.

Power management options  --->
     [*] ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) Support  --->
           <*> AC Adapter
           <*> Battery
           <*> Button
           <*> Fan
           <*> Dock
           <*> Processor
                 <*> Thermal Zone 
Device Drivers  --->
     [*] Misc devices  --->
           <*> Eee PC Hotkey Driver (EXPERIMENTAL)

[edit] Wired Networking

The Eee PC 1000, 1000H, and 1000HA require the atl1e driver for its wired networking. If you run lspci you might be inclined to think that you actually need atl1 (Attansic L1 Gigabit Ethernet) as Attansic is the manufacturer of the NIC. Nonetheless, you do in fact need atl1e and not atl1.

Device Drivers  --->
     [*] Network device support  --->
           [*] Ethernet (1000 Mbit)  --->
                 <*>   Atheros L1E Gigabit Ethernet support (EXPERIMENTAL)

[edit] Wireless Networking

For Eee PC 1000HA, see the Atheros 5xxx article.

For Eee PC 1000/1000H, see the Ralink RT2860 article.

[edit] Sound

To make the Realtek ALC269 (lspci: Intel 82801G) work, enable:

[*]   PCI sound devices  --->
     <M>   Intel HD Audio
          [*]     Build Realtek HD-audio codec support

[edit] Webcam

The Chicony CNF7129 works with UVC:

Multimedia devices  --->
     <M> Video For Linux
     [*]   Enable Video For Linux API 1 compatible Layer
     [*] Video capture adapters  --->
          [*]   V4L USB devices  --->
               <M>   USB Video Class (UVC)
               [*]     UVC input events device support

More info on the Webcam page.