Nathan Coulson

EeePC Tweaks

Asus came out with the EeePC, a small linux compatible 900Mhz laptop. with a 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB SSD. This page highlights some of the software modifications that can be done to a linux system, Basically a broad crosssection of performance tweaks, reducing SSD writes, and how to use this laptop to it's fullest. My base system is built using the Linux from Scratch project, which means the instructions below should be relatively distro independant. Keep in mind that your distribution may already use some of these tools, and that these changes would have to be modified to fit what your distribution does.

Kernel:

Untar the madwifi snapshop & linux kernel
patch the linux kernel with the atl2 Wired Ethernet patch
patch the kernel with the eeepc_ata_piix_fix-1 patch
patch the linux kernel with the eeepc platform drivers
copy and rename the config file to .config, and place in the linux kernel directory
run the kernel patch program from within the madwi directory
Compile the linux kernel

Kernel parameters

Power reduction optimizations

lesswatts.org is a webpage maintained by intel, that helps to reduce the power usage of computers while idle. Most of the optimizations listed here were taken from this resource. This is also the home of a utility called PowerTop, a handy tool that can be used to determine what processes are preventing linux from staying in the C3 state.

Enabling support for the hotkeys

The ACPI Daemon is a basic utility that listens for events from /proc/acpi/event, matches them up with a event from /etc/acpi/event, and runs the shell script. Each file in the /proc/acpi/event folder has 2 lines.
event=
action=

Please note that as of 2.6.26-rc1 (or the above patches in my kernel section), the files in /proc/acpi/asus/ have been moved to /sys/devices/platform/eeepc/.

The following events are the ones that acpid can respond to:

800x480 / 1024x600resolution in the console

Getting the 800x480 resolution working in the console takes some effort. You have to set the kernel to use (via vga=) one of the modes listed in the videobios. 800x480 is not one of the valid choices. 915resolution was designed for this purpose, but the intelfb driver only supports changing the resolution with a VGA monitor. All others have to select a mode (via the vga= argument) at boottime.

Grub2 915resolution

Enabling BootBooster

BootBooster allows a system to start [with a 1/2 second delay] the MBR of the harddrive. To enable this feature, you must create a partition for it to use, and change the type to 0xEF. The bios can still be reached by hitting F2 as it starts. This partition seems to be used to cache the results of the bios post, as well as containing a copy of the bios & video bios [seen by using strings on the partition]. As far as I can tell, this partition has nothing to do with Intel's EFI (Especially since it is populated by the bios), and just reuses the EFI partition id. Thanks to [mbm] on the eeepc freenode irc channel for your help.

The fileformat of this partition appears to be a memory dump (Probably created right after the bios post has been complete). This memorydump starts at the 0x200 address.

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