After working with the original EEEPC 701 (a.k.a. 4G) for a couple of months, I decided it would be worth it to upgrade to the EEEPC 900HD. The 900HD solves some of the major issues of the 4G models:
- A screen that actually fits the lid (form factor is almost identical to the 4G)
- A non-draining battery (see this thread for reference)
- A large multi-touch touchpad
- A large harddisk drive instead of the original SSD. I wasn’t too sure about this feature, as the SSD of the 4G is quite fast and large enough for basic use (i.e. Debian + applications and documents).
Like I said, the hardware form factor of the 900HD is very similar to the 4G. Major differences include the screen and the touchpad. Furthermore, the casing is made of a different (smooth, but not shiny) type of black plastic.
Several of the internal components however have been updated. This post presents some of the details for configuring Debian (Lenny) on the EEEPC 900HD.
Wireless Networking
The wireless network card changed to a Realtek RTL8187SE card, as reported by lspci. Recent kernels provide the rtl8187se experimental module, which works perfectly here. With older kernels, rtl8180 is supplied but this didn’t work for me. Alternatively, you can use these modules to get it up and running on older kernels.
X Performance
Improve X performance by using XAA for 2D rendering. In /etc/X11/xorg.conf, edit your ‘Device’ section:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "intel"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "on"
Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
Option "AccelDFS" "true"
Option "DynamicClocks" "on"
Option "ColorTiling" "on"
Option "FBTexPercent" "95"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "true"
EndSection
Overall, this provides reasonable performance. However, after upgrading GLUT, X.org and the Intel drivers a couple of weeks ago, the graphics performance (3D particularly) decreased. Several posts report similar problems. Hopefully some future patch will fix the problems. I tried reverting to old drivers, but this didn’t help a lot. If you feel like reading (a lot), check this post.
CPU Scaling
Use a CPU frequency scaling daemon, available in Debian repositories. cpufreqd is a very useful option, also allowing you to automatically scale the CPU depending on AC/DC status. If you’re using GNOME, you may try the CPU frequency applet. You’ll need to do this as root:
dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets
This opens an applet configuration tool, allowing the applet to control the CPU frequency.
Other Tweaks
I haven’t really looked into the webcam yet, but it basically works with the stkwebcam module. However, it has to be activated in the BIOS, or by using:
echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/eeepc/camera
After activation and module loading, the camera is available as /dev/video0. MPlayer picks it up ok. Cheese, unfortunately, does not.
Interesting stuff
The 900 being a Celeron thing actually attracts me; Celerons have more grunt than those Atoms everyone uses for netbook hardware. And 900′s must be cheap these days – perhaps i’d go buy one, just for fun.
Anyways – thanks for linking to my site.
Posted by Martin | November 12, 2009, 19:27