Interested in Fedora on Smaller Machines?

[jeff]

Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 12:50 -0300, jeff wrote:
>> Jeremy Katz wrote:
>>> Smaller form-factor machines such as the Asus eeePC have gotten a fair
>>> bit of the tech press spotlight of late.  Have you bought one with the
>>> idea of running Fedora on it?  Or have you thought about doing so?
>> I've done a few different draft images for the Asus EeePC model 900 that can be 
>> put on a USB pen drive then booted and optionally installed. I used 
>> livecd-tools to build them.
> 
> My goal is that we should be able to run on the systems with stock
> Fedora.  Having to do a special spin limits users who get given cds, etc
> at trade shows or the like.

For the eee 701/900 i think just about everything is supported in stock 
f9-updates kernel except wifi. On the 900 with 1 gig of RAM something as large 
as gnome runs well, but something more lightweight is preferable of course. 
Once the ath5k driver is there, using NetworkManager is a treat and *really* 
"just works".

The install requires a USB cdrom or converting a livecd image. I'm doing a 
somewhat inefficient process of `livecd-creator` --> livecd-iso-to-disk.sh 
(using git version that can write to /dev/loop) --> `dd` the image onto a USB 
pendrive then run the anaconda installer from there in livecd mode.

A better way to install on them would be great, I'm just not sure what that is 
yet.

>> These are based on BLAG 90k which is based on Fedora 9. The kernel (-libre + 
>> -rt) supports all hardware on the EeePC 701/900 using *only* free software. 
>> This includes wifi with the ath5k driver. It is based on -libre and -rt plus 
>> various other patches.
> 
> Luckily, wifi should be in for 2.6.27, although I need to actually try a
> newer image on my ar2425 based box.  I'll probably do that when I get
> home (since that's where it is)

ar2425 support is in 2.6.27, but I haven't seen the extra patches that are 
needed for the eee 701/900 (ath5k) arrive there yet. mickflemms' patchset-8 
applies without too much hassle.

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/mickflemm/patch-series-8.tar.bz2


The Eee 901 and 1000 use a different wifi chip. I haven't seen anything support 
it other than this from ralink:

http://www.ralinktech.com.tw/data/drivers/2008_0708_RT2860_Linux_STA_v1.7.0.0.tar.bz2

There is a small blob in there, but it doesn't appear to actually get loaded so 
  it may not be needed. I haven't heard of any patches for this heading 
upstream yet.

Thanks,

-Jeff