jd:/dev/blog - eeepc

ATL1E support in 2.6.26-1

jd — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 11:59:00 +0200

Ben Armstrong opened an ITP for the ATL1E NIC driver, which is found on some Asus EeePC laptops. So, as suggested by Maximilian Attems, I provided a clean patch for this driver, made from a cherry-pick from the linux-netdev 2.6.27 tree. It has been commited into the 2.6.26-1 Debian kernel, which will be furnished with Lenny.

What's fun, is that in the mean time, I got a new computer at work. Wait, it's not fun yet. Because what I did not know is that it's made of an Asus P5Q motherboard which runs a NIC needing the ATL1E driver (and now you see it's fun).

So I've just upgraded to 2.6.26-1-amd64 and I'm glad that my own work is useful to me (and will be probably be to others as well).

Testing out GRUB 2

jd — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:13:00 +0100

After reading Jordi post about GRUB 2, I decided to give it a try on my EeePC.

I've just installed the grub-pc package, answered the questions, and that was it. I tested it with the chainload method from GRUB legacy, and it worked. I just had to rerun grub-install to replace the legacy with the new one. And I've a nice Debian background in the menu now!

What seems amazing is that GRUB now see my... LVM logical volumes! So this seems to be really cool, because this means no more /boot-without-lvm-ext3-formatted partitions because my-boot-loader-sucks-a-bit.

New laptop: EeePC!

jd — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:56:00 +0100

This morning, the snail mail brought me a new toy! A brand new EeePC!

It's a very very nice device. I did not test the Xandros system more than 5 minutes, but it looks fine for dummy users. I've plugged an USB key into it, booted on the Debian installer (provided on the Debian wiki) and installed it in a few minutes.

The hardest part was adding wifi support, since I needed to grab madwifi svn version, added a patch, and compiled it. It was not so hard after all, just don't expect to use Debian packages for now.

It even boot in less than one minute! The hardest part is to type on a such tiny keyboard.

Plectrum as reference size