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Somewhere I had still an old EeePC 901 from somewhere around 2010 lying around. This machine with its Atom processor has never been fast, not even when it was new. However, it is still a solid little machine with a great battery life (even now), and both my youngest daughter and me were thinking that it would be nice to get it back to work. It'd be in its way a contribution ot the fight against obsolence and could be our green deed of the day.
The Ubuntu 12 that was still running on it had definitively outlived its use-by date. Since my normal laptop is running under Arch Linux and those of the other kids under Manjaro, going for Arch Linux sounded like a logical idea. I like Manjaro, but with its many defaults I fear it might be a bit heavy for the EeePC, so we decided on plain-vanilla Arch Linux.
On one level this is a very standard Arch Linux installation, so following the normal Arch Linux installation guide step by step will bring you a long way (cf. below for the link). I'll highlight here only the pitfalls we encountered on our way to a working installation:
the Eee PC 901 has still a 32-bit CPU, so we need the Archlinux32 fork
the Eee PC has its quirks with the BIOS and the boot sequence to be taken on board
my usually preferred Gnome desktop environment seems a bit too heavy for the machine's Atom processor, so, I decided to go with Xfce4 instead
keyboard handling on Xfce4 trips me up each time
Of course, these are my pitfalls and my decisions - caveat emptor.
Archlinux 32 works exactly like the normal 64-bit edition. Even the installation guide applies step by step, so nothing particular to signal here.
If you have valuable data on the EeePC, it goes without saying that it's a good idea to save them first on some suitable backup medium, as fdisk will erase the disks.
For me - and judging by the web also a few others - got tripped up by some quirks in the BIOS which seems to somewhat randomly shift device numbers around when applying changes in the BIOS.
The following images show the BIOS settings:
Grub is my boot manager of choice
pacman -S grub grub-install --recheck /dev/sda grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
Nothing really particular to signal here except that you need to install the full set up packages. I combined this with the lxdm display manager:
pacman -S xorg xorg-server xorg-apps xfce4 lxdm
The next steps are enabling the lxdm service and configure in /etc/lxdm/lxdm.conf
session=/user/bin/startxfce4
Getting a choice of keyboards to work under Xfce4 trips me up each and every time. I regularly use a number of keyboard layouts, so this ensures the choice:
localectl set-x11-keymap de,us,gr
In addition, the xfce4-xkb-plugin helps to see which keyboard is active at any one time.
An additional goody is the xkb-switch with is an AUR package - I learned of this useful tool and the trick with the xflock4 from an article on coderwall (link below):
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/xkb-switch.git cd xkb-switch/ makepgk -si
Save the following script as /usr/local/bin/xflock4.
#!/bin/bash xkb-switch -s de /usr/bin/xflock4
Especially my daughter also needs USB keys to be recognised automatically:
Important in practical terms is the automatic handling of
pacman -S udiskie, ntfs-3g
Since the standard tip to include udiskie& in ~/.xinitrc did not work for me, I configured udiskie as one of applications to autostart in Settings -> Settings manager -> Session and startup. This works nicely.
In turn more for me than for my daughter, I've also installed keychain and configured it in .bashrc, especially to facilitate the interaction with
/usr/bin/keychain --quiet --agents ssh /usr/bin/keychain --eval --quiet $key1
Sound is as usual assured by pulseaudio:
pacman -S pulseaudio pavucontrol mplayer pulseaudio --start
use pavucontrol to activate the sound
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