vuxu.org: Tinkerbell

Tinkerbell

Tinkerbell is an Asus EEE PC running grml-medium.
Though sometimes ill-behaved and vindictive, at other times she is helpful and kind to Peter (for whom she apparently has romantic feelings). The extremes in her personality are explained in-story by the fact that a fairy's size prevents her from holding more than one feeling at a time.
Preparing grml
1. Since grml was made as a Live CD, we need to create a bootable USB version first. Unfortunately, I only run OS X, so I had to jump through some hooks to do this. But read yourself.
2. Preliminaries: You need Parallels (5582 works) and a USB stick with 256 MB or more.
3. Download grml-medium. I used 0.1-rc1.
4. Plug in the USB stick.
5. If you wish to keep the data on the stick, now is the time to do an image with help of Disk Utility. All data will be erased soon.
6. Setup a new Parallels instance to run Debian Linux, don't add a hard disk but boot from the ISO.
7. Unmount the USB stick in OS X.
8. Boot grml giving this to the loader: linux26 irqpoll
9. Activate the USB stick in Parallels when you got into a shell.
10. (I assume the stick is /dev/sda1, PLEASE DOUBLECHECK with dmesg.)
11. Make a FAT16 filesystem: mkfs.vfat -F 16 -v /dev/sda1
12. Mount the stick: mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/external1
13. Copy the image: cp -a /live/image/* /mnt/external1
14. Place the bootloader: mv /mnt/external1/boot/isolinux/* /mnt/external1
15. umount /mnt/external1
16. Install the bootloader: syslinux /dev/sda1
17. Install the mbr: dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda (NOT sda1!)
18. Make the partition bootable: fdisk /dev/sda, a, 1, w.
19. Shut down grml: halt
20. Close Parallels.
21. Grab the atl2 package at http://deb.grml.org/pool/main/a/atl2/ and put it somewhere on the stick.
22. Unmount the USB stick in OS X again.
Installing grml on the EEE PC
1. Warning: Your current EEE installation will be erased.
2. Plug in the USB stick, press ESC while booting the EEE PC and select it.
3. Get into a shell and run cfdisk /dev/hdc. Partition your disk, I just made one big Linux partition.
4. Run grml2hd, select /dev/hdc1 as target disk.
5. Install the bootloader to /dev/hdc.
6. Format as ext3 (or ext2 if you are paranoid about your SSD. However, I don't buy it).
7. Configure the boot parameters to include hdc=noprobe hdc=none. The SSD will be very slow else!
8. Use grub.
9. Reboot into your fresh grml.
Configuring grml for the EEE PC
1. Run grml-x -force fluxbox as root once to auto-configure X11.
2. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, uncomment the keyboard section and adjust your keyboard layout.
3. Ethernet
  1. Enable Ethernet by installing the atl2 package downloaded above with dpkg -i. Run modprobe atl2 && dhclient.
4. Wifi
  1. apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r) wget -c http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz KERNELHEADERS=/usr/src/linux-headers-$(uname -r) make install modprobe ath_pci modprobe wlan_scan_sta
  2. If you don't like that, read http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=47421#p47421 to see how to build a Debian package.
  3. For WPA, I configured wpasupplicant manually. See http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/HowTo/Wifi.
5. Upgrade the system: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
6. Set the timezone: dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
7. Adjust /etc/grml/autoconfig.
8. Webcam
  1. apt-get install module-assistant luvcview m-a update RELAX_CC_CHECK=1 m-a a-i linux-uvc modprobe uvcvideo
9. Sound
  1. Create a file with contents options snd-hda-indel model=3stack-dig in /etc/modprobe.d.
10. ACPI
  1. TBD
11. General tricks
  1. Read http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/HowTo/Install and http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/TipsAndTricks, most of it applies.
  2. In /etc/sysctl.conf, set
    ...
  3. In /etc/fstab, set / to noatime,commit=30,errors=remount-ro. Don't forget to disable grml-rebuildfstab in /etc/grml/autoconfig!
12. DWM
  1. http://github.com/chneukirchen/dwm-chris2/tree/master