vuxu.org: Tinkerbell

As of July 2010, Tinkerbell runs Arch Linux now. No special configuration was required.

Tinkerbell runs as a small home server now. I use

stat_busy "Adjusting fans"
echo 1 >/sys/class/hwmon/hwmon1/pwm1_enable
echo 58 >/sys/class/hwmon/hwmon1/pwm1
stat_done

in /etc/rc.local to silence the fan to half-speed which makes it inaudible.

Tinkerbell is an Asus EEE PC running grml-medium.

The naming

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.

Benchmarks

• Power Usage (without battery)
  • Idle: ~13 W, Peak: 15 W

Preparing grml

• 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.

• Preliminaries: You need Parallels (5582 works) and a USB stick with 256 MB or more.

• Download grml-medium. I used 0.1-rc1.

• Plug in the USB stick.

• 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.

• Setup a new Parallels instance to run Debian Linux, don’t add a hard disk but boot from the ISO.

• Unmount the USB stick in OS X.

• Boot grml giving this to the loader: linux26 irqpoll

• Activate the USB stick in Parallels when you got into a shell.

• (I assume the stick is /dev/sda1, PLEASE DOUBLECHECK with dmesg.)

• Make a FAT16 filesystem: mkfs.vfat -F 16 -v /dev/sda1

• Mount the stick: mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/external1

• Copy the image: cp -a /live/image/* /mnt/external1

• Place the bootloader: mv /mnt/external1/boot/isolinux/* /mnt/external1

• umount /mnt/external1

• Install the bootloader: syslinux /dev/sda1

• Install the mbr: dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda (NOT sda1!)

• Make the partition bootable: fdisk /dev/sda, a, 1, w.

• Shut down grml: halt

• Close Parallels.

• Grab the atl2 package at http://deb.grml.org/pool/main/a/atl2/ and put it somewhere on the stick.

• Unmount the USB stick in OS X again.

Installing grml on the EEE PC

• Warning: Your current EEE installation will be erased.

• Plug in the USB stick, press ESC while booting the EEE PC and select it.

• Get into a shell and run cfdisk /dev/hdc. Partition your disk, I just made one big Linux partition.

• Run grml2hd, select /dev/hdc1 as target disk.

• Install the bootloader to /dev/hdc.

• Format as ext3 (or ext2 if you are paranoid about your SSD. However, I don’t buy it).

• Configure the boot parameters to include hdc=noprobe hdc=none. The SSD will be very slow else!

• Use grub.

• Reboot into your fresh grml.

Configuring grml for the EEE PC

• Run grml-x -force fluxbox as root once to auto-configure X11.

• Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, uncomment the keyboard section and adjust your keyboard layout.

• Ethernet

  • Enable Ethernet by installing the atl2 package downloaded above with dpkg -i. Run modprobe atl2 && dhclient.

• Wifi

  • Run:

    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
    

  • If you don’t like that, read http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?pid=47421#p47421 to see how to build a Debian package.

  • For WPA, I configured wpasupplicant manually. See http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/HowTo/Wifi.

• Upgrade the system: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

• Set the timezone: dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

• Adjust /etc/grml/autoconfig.

• Webcam

  • Run:

    apt-get install module-assistant luvcview
    m-a update
    RELAX_CC_CHECK=1 m-a a-i linux-uvc
    modprobe uvcvideo
    

• Sound

  • Create a file with contents options snd-hda-indel model=3stack-dig in /etc/modprobe.d.

• ACPI

  • TBD

• General tricks

  • Read http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/HowTo/Install and http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/TipsAndTricks, most of it applies.

  • In /etc/sysctl.conf, set:

    vm.swappiness = 0
    vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs = 1500
    

  • In /etc/fstab, set / to noatime,commit=30,errors=remount-ro. Don’t forget to disable grml-rebuildfstab in /etc/grml/autoconfig!

  • DWM

    • http://github.com/chneukirchen/dwm-chris2/tree/master