I installed Debian Lenny onto my eeePC yesterday, completely removing the default Xandros-based OS shipped with the Linux-flavoured eeePC that I had grown annoyed with.

This is a brief explanation of how I did it, and what steps I have taken (so far) to iron out some of the (very minor) glitches. Overall the installation was incredibly straightforward. I've never installed Debian onto anything other than a desktop box or server, so something smaller and a little different (SSD) was fun. Next step: mp3 player, mobile phone, toaster...

Anyway, first I downloaded the eeepc Debian Lenny image that was very conveniently built by the DebianEeePC developers (I assume). I did all this directly on the eee.

wget http://eeepc.debian.net/images/debian-eeepc.img

I had a USB stick plugged in. It was known to the system as /dev/sdc

Then I put the image onto the disk like so:

dd if=debian-eeepc.img of=/dev/sdc

That's it! Rebooted, and as BIOS loaded, hit ESC multiple times to get a boot menu. Chose the USB stick to boot from instead of the SSD, and I was presented instantly with the standard Debian installer.
Proceed as normal with a Debian install!
Apparently WEP is the only working encryption understood by the wireless ath0, so during install if you choose to do a netinstall using wireless, be aware that if your wireless network is using WPA, you may run into trouble. Ours does, but I didn't bother with the fuss and just plugged in an ethernet cable and used eth0.

I chose only 'Standard System' during tasksel. This gave me just a command line with no GUI, but you can go ahead and install KDE / Gnome / XfCE / Fluxbox / whatever from there. I chose KDE. However I didn't install the entire KDE suite, because there's a lot of fluff there that I'll never use that takes up a lot of space. Just the ksmserver, kwin, kicker, kdm, etc. Then I proceeded to install my regular apps.

Tweaks

These are some of the tweaks I made to get some other stuff working the way I wanted.

• Wireless: apt-get install network-manager-kde. Assuming you're using KDE anyway. This grabbed the necessary apps I needed to use a decent wireless GUI to connect to wireless network. I had no problems using WPA encryption after this installed (although I didn't try without it first! If you run into more bad luck with wireless than I did, check out http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/HowTo/Wifi )
  Another thing I noticed, although this is not eeepc specific, is that when using knetworkmanager, by default you aren't able to connect to networks unless you run the app as root (kdesu knetworkmanager). After reading the documentation, turns out I need to be a member of the 'netdev' group:

  adduser yourusername netdev

  Now I can connect to networks without having to run as root.

• Webcam: had to compile the driver, but it was painless:
  

  apt-get install linux-uvc-source luvcview
  m-a a-i linux-uvc
  modprobe uvcvideo

• Vertical scrolling on touchpad: A simple Xorg.conf edit fixed, to add in the Synaptics touchpad functionality. Add this to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart X:
  

  Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
  Driver "synaptics"
  Option "CorePointer"
  Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
  Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
  Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
  EndSection
  Section "Server Layout"
  Identifier "Default Layout"
  Screen "Default Screen"
  InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
  InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
  EndSection

  Some people like horizontal scrolling, for me it's annoying. See here for more.

• eee wouldn't shutdown completely when halted: I noticed after halting, that the lightbulb led on the eee was still glowing, which meant to me that it wasn't completely shut down despite everything else apparently being off. It didn't seem to cool down either. Apparently an issue with an intel kernel module. The solution:
  added rmmod snd_hda_intel to /etc/default/halt
• Clock errors: My clock wouldn't set to the right time, and after I manually changed it, a reboot would put it back to the wrong time again. I also noticed errors like this during boot / shutdown:
  select() to /dev/rtc to wait for clock tick timed out

  Fixed by blacklisting one module and adding another:

  echo "blacklist rtc" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
  echo "genrtc" >> /etc/modules

  After a reboot, the error messages were gone and my clock would stay correct.

• Remove 'Recently Used Applications' from KDE menu: Another 'not really eeepc related' one, and only for KDE users. Due to the small resolution of the eeePC, the dynamically growing 'recently used applications' list at the top of the KDE menu causes a mess when the list gets too big. The menu ends up taking over most of the screen. Quickly fixed: right-click on your panel, choose 'Configure', open the 'Menus' area from the list on the left, and change 'Show the applications most frequently used' from '5' to '0' and they're gone for good.

That's it really! Sound 'just worked'. Nothing to say here. :) Function keys seem to work fine (Fn and down / up arrows for page up/down, etc)



The wiki for Debian and eeePC is really incredibly helpful, much more so than anything else I've ever found in the wiki :) The team has done a fantastic job. I have only listed here what I needed to do to get my system working the way I wanted. There are lots of other configuration tweaks, troubleshooting and alternate methods at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC.

Good luck!