Installing Debian Lenny on Asus eeePC 901

I recently purchased an eeePC 901 and decided to replace the pre-installed operating system, which in many ways did not suit me with a full-fledged Debian Lenny. The installation process was quite simple and took quite a bit of time.

The necessary information.

First of all, I decided to look on the Internet about the experience of other people in installing this distribution on the eeePC. When I typed the phrase “debian eee pc” in Google’s search box, the very first result I received was a link to the official debian wiki dedicated to this issue - http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC .

Getting the installer.

The first step is to get the debian installer. For eeePC developed its own installer, which includes all the necessary network device drivers and spelled the necessary additional distribution.
You can download the installer here , it takes about 16Mb.
Now you need to write the installer to the USB flash drive so that you can easily boot from it (the eeePC does not have a CD / DVD drive, so booting from the USB flash drive is the easiest way).
We need a very small flash drive for the installer. The data and file system on the flash drive will be destroyed, so you must first make a backup copy of it (if you have something to save). To write a bootloader to a USB flash drive, you don’t need to format it yourself and don’t need to mount it.
The bootloader is copied to the USB flash drive using the dd command. To do this, run the following command:

dd if=debian-eeepc.img of=/dev/<->
sync

Now we have to boot from the prepared flash drive.
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Installation

Before installation, it is recommended to turn on all devices in the BIOS, since in some cases they may not be recognized during installation.
Debian installation is quite standard, but if you wish you can make a full backup of the system over the network in the process :) This is done so after the installer detects network devices and embedded cards, press Alt + F2 and get into the console. On the computer that will receive the backup, we get the address and run nc to listen on port 9000:

nc -l -p 9000 | gzip -1 -c > ./eeepc.img.gz

On eeePC, execute the following command:

dd if=/dev/sda | nc -w 5 ___ 9000

We wait a bit and repeat the same for the second card, naturally specifying another file to save.
To restore the system (if you ever need it) you need to run the following commands. On eeePC:

nc -l -p 9000 | dd of=/dev/sda

And on the computer in disk images:

zcat ./eeepc.img.gz | nc <_eeePC> 9000

For the second flash drive, the address will be / dev / sdb and, accordingly, another image name.
After creating the backup, we quietly finish the installation as usual.
A couple of syllables can be said about disk breakdown. Given the limited resource of flash drives and a sufficient amount of RAM, I decided not to create a swap partition and gave the first flash drive to the system, and the second to the home directory. The file system I chose ext3. At the same time on the first flash drive, you must leave a small section of 32 MB, which is used by the BIOS for the BootBooster function. If you delete it, it will not work.

Customization

After the installation was completed, all the devices I have earned out of the box. But nevertheless it was necessary to pick a little in configs.
First, I decided to extend the life of memory cards:

1. In /etc/sysctl.conf, I set the vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs option to 1500. As a result, writing to the memory card is done every 15 seconds, instead of 5.
2. Enabled tmpfs for directories that don't have to be stored when rebooting or shutting down:
   
   • added the entry "tmpfs / tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0" in / etc / fstab;
   • set the options RAMRUN = yes and RAMLOCK = yes in / etc / default / rcS.
3. added the noatime option for file systems, thereby blocking the update of the last access time to files or directories

Another big bunch of tips on extending the life of a flash drive is listed here .

Conclusion

Configuring the GUI and application programs may be described in the following articles.