There is a pretty comprehensive guide to installing Arch on the EEE which I followed for the most part. Between that and the beginners guide, the installation and initial configuration were relatively straightforward. I installed from the 2009.02 FTP USB image, using a wired ethernet connection to download the required packages during the installation phase, but the EEE wireless card was supported “out of the box” on the first boot (after selecting the wireless-tools and netcfg packages).

The base installation was simple enough after a bit of reading. However, configuring Xorg almost drove me mad! After spending most of the day reading through the ArchWiki Xorg article, I finally came upon the (partial) solution of ignoring the xorg.conf file completely and relying instead on the startx command and the hal daemon.  This left me with a couple of problems related to the keyboard layout, but did give me an X11 environment capable of supporting Gnome.

Installing Gnome was as simple as typing pacman -S gnome, but I’d recommend installing the gnome-extra package too while you’re at it, as the gnome package is pretty minimal to say the least!

I had no problems with sound or the internal microphone, and following the ACPI section of the guide enabled the hotkeys, OSD and power button to function correctly.

I’m still tweaking my setup here and there, but the system seems stable so far. It was a lot more work than simply installing Ubuntu or Fedora, but I think it was worth it to get a smaller, faster system running on the EEE’s (quite limited) hardware.

I’ve reinstalled from a USB stick and everything seems to work as it did before. The only loss appears to be my GPG private key.

I have a copy of it on a machine at home, but it’s not accessible over the ‘net, so I’ve decided to create a new keypair.

My new public key is on the MIT keyserver (and probably others by now).

Fingerprint: 6F0B A2DC 2CF8 12A1 4695 5A00 A4D0 7E58 8424 7B1B

There are a couple of reasons why I don’t like online poker. The first is an issue of trust. Between bots, collusion, and poor security, I just don’t believe that all the players in a game are on an equal footing. The second reason is that I think of poker as a social game. I like to be able to see the people I’m playing against!

PokerTH is a cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X & Linux) Texas Hold ‘em poker application, released under the GPL. It includes the option of a local game against AI opponents, as well as a free online setting, allowing the player to join a public table or create a private one to play with friends. I still can’t see the other people at the table, but it’s a great way to learn the game or just play for fun!

My only complaint so far is that the minimum window size is too big for the Eee 701. It’s easy to get around by moving the window every so often, but it would be nice to have the ability to scale the window down for smaller screens.

Download PokerTH (Currently version 0.62)

PokerTH version 0.60 is currently available in the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories.

The hardware support is pretty good “out of the box”, but there are still a number of issues with the initial installation. Thankfully eee.ricey.co.uk have made a shell script available to take care of almost everything automatically. After running the script most of the hotkeys (Volume, screen brightness, sleep) work correctly, but the WiFi one does not.

To enable the WiFi hotkey functionality (Fn + F2) add the following line to /etc/modules

pciehp pciehp_debug=1 pciehp_force=1

Then create the file /etc/acpi/actions/wireless-toggle.sh containing the following

#!/bin/sh

wlan_control=/proc/acpi/asus/wlan
WLANSTATE=$(cat $wlan_control)

case $WLANSTATE in
  1)
    ifconfig ath0 down
    modprobe -r ath_pci
    echo 0 > $wlan_control
    modprobe -r pciehp
  ;;

  0)
    modprobe pciehp pciehp_force=1 pciehp_debug=1
    echo 1 > $wlan_control
    modprobe ath_pci
    echo 0 > $wlan_control
    echo 1 > $wlan_control
  ;;
esac
 

Make the file executable chmod a+x /etc/acpi/actions/wireless-toggle.sh

After a reboot you should be able to toggle the internal wireless card by using the hotkey.