carbon.hexxeh.net/chromiumos

Chrome OS builds by Hexxeh

www.thechromedaily.com

The Chrome Daily

After downloading the chromium.img file, it is easy to put on a usb stick (under OSX)

1. open Terminal

2. diskutil list (gives ID for your usb disk - e.g., X)

3. diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX

4. sudo dd if=/path_to_your_image/chromium.img of=/dev/diskX (this takes awhile)

5. diskutil eject /dev/diskX

Ready to put the freshly created, bootable Chrome OS usb disk into the EeePC!

The EeePC 900 boots fine the Chrome OS build, even the wifi is working, hurray!

Chrome OS Login

Chrome OS

Nice looking, functional, beta…

Check out the Chromium development channel at Google Groups.

…and since I have a family license (5 pcs) for Leopard I decided to try. In my opinion the so called retail install is a much more elegant way of installing OSX on not Apple computer (still the legality is questionable), but the EeePC 900 has a Celeron processor and retail install disk just simple does not work.

The most important thing to note is that the wifi card in the 900 is less then supported, so it is a good idea to swap it for a real Apple Airport wifi card.

Other than that the machine works fine (also the os needs to be installed onto the secondary 16 GB SSD, because the primary is only 4 GB), unfortunately the 16 GB SSD is way slower that the 4 GB. It is really a good idea to upgrade it to a bigger and foremost faster SSD (RunCore seems to be a good choice).

The installation:

1. Grab the iDeneb installation disk (it is available thorough the net, but if you decide to keep the installation, please go to Apple and buy a Leopard install disk), I tried the iDeneb v1.4, 10.5.6

2. Install OSX onto a removable media (external HD) booting in a real Mac or as I did in EeePC 901 (which has a supported Atom processor)

3. Select the following on the installation screen:

- Under kernel, select Voodoo kernel (suitable for EeePC 900)

- Under video, select GMA900 (again for the 900)

- Under chipset, select ICHx Fixed

- Under FIX, select ACPI_SMC_FIX, Seatbelt FIX, Battery Manager, PowerOFF_OH

- Under System Utilities, select GenericCPUPowerManagementControl

- Under applications, select Betterzip, Kexthelper, Menumeters, OSx86 Tools, Pacifist.

5. Install iDeneb (just to emphasize, installation is done on a supported computer, not on the EeePC 900 itself, and the install media is an external drive, e.g., external hard disk)

Note that I did not install neither sound, nor ethernet drivers during install)

6. After the installation it is time to plug in the freshly installed external HD into the EeePC and boot from it.

7. Meanwhile on a different computer download the needed kext files for sound and ethernet and two addition softwares for transferring (Carbon Copy) the iDeneb onto the 2nd SSD of the EeePC and making it bootable.

8. Once the iDeneb booted, start Carbon Copy and “clone” the image from the external disk onto the 16 GB second SSD of the EeePC. Take a walk, go to a good caffe, read a book, this take almost an hour.

9. Start the Uinstaller (select PC_EFI v9 Chameleon as option, nothing else), this will make the freshly imaged install on your EeePC bootable.

10. Reboot the EeePC and hope that it will boot from the 16 GB SSD. It should.

11. Start KextHelper application and install the kext for sound and ethernet. Reboot.

12. Enjoy!

Few remarks:

- I did not play with the original Atheros wifi card (some says it kinda works), you should really swap it to an Apple Airport Card.

- Webcam does not seem to be working (but I admit, I don’t pay attention to this at all).

Finally the credit goes to some nice people, who wrote installation instructions:

Siewwaihung

DanB

And a final note:

You will realize the performance is not the best (due to the slow SSD). While it is a nice experiment, I would not recommend it to use this installation for daily work. Especially because the legality of the installation is questionable even if you have a proper Leopard license, as I do. Try it, play with it, then delete it and install a decent Linux distro on the EeePC.

Until I actually write a longer post about Haiku running on the EeePC 900, here are some screenshots:

Battery Applet:

Battery info:

And of course I posted from Haiku, sitting in the garden, connected with wifi and carefully watching the battery applet showing still 20% left.

Updated software after installation of the OS:
Firefox 3.5.2

Yes, with latest Flash at present:

Thunderbird:

KTorrent in action (with dock integration):

Newly installed software in Internet Tab:

Installing gFTP:

According to the source of information, the iso could be downloaded from here. Look for EeePC_1.7-2009-01-20_09-52.iso

I decided to try it on the EeePC 900, which I barely use anymore. Created an installable usb image from the iso with unetbootin, and installed the 1.7 beta.

Interestingly enough it seems to support a wast amount of different EeePC versions (from 700 upto S101, including my 900 as well).

First I tried the uncompressed installation but it did not boot, so I went for the compressed image (which is a but slower according to the install information)

And it works…

The default “skin” of the 1.7 build is nice:

And the very nice thing is that finally it has Firefox 3… (ok, still only 3.04)

So far it seems to be stable fro browsing via wifi connection. Worth to try.

Also, upgrading Firefox to the latest 3.5.2 was much easier than before. just downloaded Linux binary and extracted into the XandrOS firefox install directory under /opt (carefully without the plugin directory which was actually a link).

Final note on tweaking, the keyboard: since I use a localized hungarian keyboard, the xorg.conf file needs to be modified. simple.
Edit: the tweaking was unnecessary… The is a nice GUI to add/remove additional keyboard languages:

One small annoyance, as I wanted to set some settings for the touchpad, as soon as I hit the Touchpad icon under settings, the mouse cursor stopped responding. After some trial and error, I found out that one line needs to be changed in xorg.conf in order to function (in InputDevice section for synaptic)
     Option   “SHMConfig”  “false”
originally it was value “true”
The Touchpad utility does not work, but the mouse (including side scrolling) does.

As posted some time ago, this device works excellent with any derivative of ubuntu, so I expected a fast setup.

Well… following the good old How-To posted at www.pharscape.org did not disappoint me… quickly…

After the install procedure the S101 connected to the net but after some minutes unexpectedly the machine was hard locked… no mouse, keyboard, whatsoever…

Looked like a nasty module, which froze the tiny EeePC… and it was easy to guess that something was wrong with the hso.ko module, which supposed to make the Option icon225 modem talk to the internet…

After some google homework I found out the stock ubuntu 8.10 does already contain the hso.ko module (apparently version 1.2) and I installed v 1.6

Something was dead wrong…

I discovered, that for some funny reason the original hso.ko module was in

…/kernel/drivers/net/usb/

while the newly compiled and installed v 1.6 was put into:

…/kernel/drivers/net/wwan/

Interesting… and the v 1.2 loaded and locked down the machine… So I removed the old one and run depmod… started again the HSOconnect program and waited some minutes… No lockup…

The good: the new HSOconnect does include already Hungarian localization…

Since I got rid of my 1000H, and the only EeePC left in the house is my trustworthy 901, I “deeecided” to get the new EeePC S101, the black version. It came with Windows preinstalled, but MS did not survive long in my house. After unpacking, I connected my external DVD drive and soon enough ubuntu 8.10 installation screen  was welcoming me from the lcd.

I’ve read the Linux install experiences on the web, so I expected that it will be an cool ride, but man… this process was the easiest in my life… Simply plug and play… Really…

Everything works just out of the box. No need to install additional drivers, tweaking the software whatsoever.

Wifi, bluetooth, sleep and resume, wide screen… all work just fine… amazing… Seems that the good engineers at Asus put together a very Linux friendly hardware. Big thanks boys! Excellent work!

So not much really to talk about the ubuntu installation procedure…

Otherwise the little machine performs excellent. Around 4 hrs battery life (which is excellent taking into account that it has a quite tiny 4 cell battery).

All in all, it make a wonderful little ubuntu laptop… or netbook… or whatever it is called these days… Perhaps a little wonder is the best to describe..

Get one! Now!

Shall the default OS stay on my 901 now???

I very seldom need to read CDs or DVDs with a laptop, and even more rarely to write any, but still it is a nice option to have it at hand.

after a careful search I came to the conclusion (recommended by a few people at eeeuser.com forums), that the LG GSAE50L is the one I am looking for.

apart from the fact that it is a damn sexy piece of device, it also has all the features I might ever need on the road.

- DVD+R/RW, DVD+R DL, DVD-R/RW, DVD-R DL, DVD-RAM, CD-R/RW

- Double Layer DVD+R (8.5GB) and dual layer DVD-R (8.5GB) recording supported

- and… lightscribe…

well… lightscribe seems the most unnecessary feature for a CD/DVD burner, true, but it isn’t it nice to have a fancy picture on your freshly burnt DVD?

the device itself just work fine as expected under ubuntueee (EeePC) if you install the necessary packages for disk burning support.

sudo apt-get install brasero
sudo apt-get install gnomebaker

this will install two CD/DVD writer application, Brasero and GnomeBaker, whichever you prefer.

both of the programs work as expected, choosing between them is really just a matter of preference for the graphical interface.

so back to lighscribe…

Linux IS supported… nice… from the download page we need the system software and a program to create and “print” the labels to the CD/DVD.

searching a little bit more in depth for ubuntu support I found the files needed specifically for ubuntu (hence ubuntueee as well)…

everything is clearly explaned in the README file, so do not hesitate to read it…

the installation is very straightforward…

sudo dkpg -i lightscribe-1.10.13.1-linux-2.6-intel.deb
sudo dpkg -i lightscribeApplications-1.10.13.1-linux-2.6-intel.deb
sudo dpkg -i 4l_1.0-r6_i386.deb

the first one is the supporting system software, while the later two are different labeler programs (my personal preference goes to the 4L from Lacie).

UPDATE (19/10/2008). update for the system software from lightscribe.com

unfortunatelly you need to start the labeler software from a terminal (or create a desktop link or menu entry, if you wish)

sudo GL-gui

(this needs to be started as root)

works… that’s all…

since nothing is different from hardware point of view, it must be some powersaving options with ubuntueee, which prevents saving battery life.

after some googleing I found an old (2005) post, which helped anyway.

sudo apt-get install cpufrequtils

cpufreq-info

I could see that now cpu is working at 800MHz (which is good, since the max is 1.6 GHz)

after enabling cpu throttling, the next task was to get the applet in the ubuntueee, gnome taskbar.

unfortunately by default, the ubuntuee taskbar is locked for adding new applets (simply there is no empty area where one can right click and select “add panel”).

the solution is to “move” on of the applets a bit to create some empty space, hence right click and adding a new applet is possible.

so, the new panel looks like this:

not only the cpus (one cpu, but due to hyperthreating it seems like two), but I also added the temperature applet to monitor the temp of the processor.

looks much better and now it is estimated to reach around 5 hrs…

the only question remains, why it does not come as default on the ubuntueee distro?