[Novalug] Connecting an EeePC with F8

[Paul Bohme]

Beartooth wrote:
>
>     I've been trying to get a 4 GB ASUS EeePC to run any sort of linux 
> other than Xandros usably, and failing miserable; some I can't get to 
> install, and those that do run into other troubles.
>
>     At 
> http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/02/14/fedora-eee-pc-eeedora/#comment-55444 
> I found somebody saying he'd installed plain F8. So I got out my live 
> CD and tried that.
>
>       F8 installed fine, but won't connect. By ethernet, I plugged two 
> different cables into it, both of which had been working fine with 
> other machines, and "service network restart" gets an error saying 
> SIOCSIFFLAGS is an invalid argument.
>
>       If I turn on the wireless access in my router, it doesn't help. 
> If I then disconnect the cable, it still doesn't.
>

Mine's at work right now, but I'll check it when I get there.  It uses a 
whack of stuff that's going to give most distros fits, so putting a 
customized Linux on it is a bit sticky, to say the least.  Am running 
Arch Linux on mine (personal distro of choice for just about everything) 
and it was a good bit of work to get going.

It uses the  atl2 driver, which either isn't in the mainline kernel 
until very recently or needs to be patched in (I don't remember) before 
you'll have ethernet.  Wifi is stickier - you can opt to use ndiswrapper 
and the windows driver, or something less kludgy and go madwifi with a 
native driver.  In either case, you're looking at more hand-work.

In short, it's not really hardware that's going to work 'out of the box' 
on too many distros.  I think a fellow I work with picked up an Eee for 
some hardware hacking, will see if he's still on the stock distro or not.

In any event, check out eeeuser.com and especially their forums - was a 
goldmine when hacking on mine a few months ago.

  -P