Installing Debian Lenny on Asus eeePC 901

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

Necessary information.

First of all, I decided to look on the Internet about the experience of other people in installing this distribution on eeePC. Having typed the phrase “debian eee pc” in the Google search line, the first result I got a link to the official debian wiki dedicated to this problem - 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 drivers for network devices and prescribed the necessary additional distribution.
You can download the installer here , it takes about 16Mb.
Now you need to write the installer to a USB flash drive so that you can easily boot from it (eeePC does not have a CD / DVD drive, so downloading from a 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 the bootloader to a USB flash drive, you do not need to format it yourself and do not need to mount it.
The bootloader is copied to the USB flash drive using the dd command. To do this, run the following command: Now we just have to boot from the prepared flash drive.

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

Installation

Before installation, it is recommended to turn on all devices in the BIOS, as in some cases they may not be recognized during installation.
The debian is installed quite standardly, but if you wish, you can make a full backup of the system on the network in the process :) This is done after the installer determines the network devices and built-in cards, press Alt + F2 and get to the console. On the computer that will receive the backup, we get the address and run nc to listen on the 9000th port:

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

On eeePC, execute the following command:

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

Wait a bit and repeat the same for the second card, naturally specifying another file to save.
To restore the system (if ever needed), you must 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 <адрес_eeePC> 9000

For the second flash drive, the address will be / dev / sdb and, accordingly, a different image name.
After creating the backup, we calmly finish the installation in normal mode.
A couple of syllables can be said about the breakdown of disks. 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 need to leave a small 32 MB partition, which is used by the BIOS for the BootBooster function. If you remove it, it will not work.

Customization

After installation is complete, all the devices I have earned out of the box. But still I had to dig deeper into the configs.
Firstly, 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, I write to the memory card once every 15 seconds, instead of 5.
2. Involved tmpfs for directories that do not have to be stored on reboot or shutdown:
   
   • added the entry “tmpfs / tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0” to / etc / fstab;
   • set the RAMRUN = yes and RAMLOCK = yes options to / etc / default / rcS.
3. added the noatime option for file systems, thus prohibiting updating the time of the last access to files or directories

An even greater bunch of tips on extending the life of a flash drive are given here .

Conclusion

Customization of the graphical interface and applications may be described in the following articles.