Interested in Fedora on Smaller Machines?

[Jarod Wilson]

On Tuesday 12 August 2008 15:51:51 jeff wrote:
> 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?

My own Acer Aspire One arrived two days ago. Its got rawhide on it now. 
Needless to say, we don't boot quite as fast as the stock Linpus Linux Lite, 
but I definitely prefer a full-fledged Fedora install.

> 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".
[...]
> > 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.

The AR2425 in the AAO works quite nicely with current rawhide kernels. I've 
been able to connect it to both WPA2- and WEP-protected base stations just 
fine. That said, I think I'm still going to yank it out in favor of a spare 
iwl5350 I have laying about when I crack the thing open to put more memory in 
tonight.

The only things I've noticed that are a bit quirky are some video artifacts 
when running an external monitor and some dmesg spew about interrupts from the 
jmb38x_ms driver when using SD cards (haven't tried any other type), but both 
do still function.

Suspend and resume works w/o a hitch as well.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at redhat.com