Hendrik van Hees
August 9, 2009
I just got an ASUS Eee PC 1005HA as my newest toy. In short, it works great with openSuSE 11.1, but some struggle in the beginning is necessary since both the wired and the wireless network don't work out of the box.
So, I just downloaded the whole DVD image from
and put it on an 8GB USB-memory stick, made bootable with the DVD image. How this can be done, I've learnt from
http://en.opensuse.org/SuSE_install_from_USB_drive
On th Eee PC make sure to set your BIOS to boot from the USB disk first, then reboot with the USB stick plugged in.
Since I wanted to keep the Windows XP on dual boot and for some reason the partitions could not be shrinked in the usual way (defragmentation didn't help in this respect), I kept the first Windows partition, containing the Windows XP system and formated the second (practically empty) partition as an ext3-linux partition. For the swap partition I used another around 4 GB large partition. This is of course a bit large (given 1 GB RAM), but since I couldn't change it, I left it this way. I don't know what these two partitions really contained, but so far I have no trouble running both Linux and Windows. Anyway, as a result, my partition table looks as follows:
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 9407 75561696 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 * 9408 18807 75505500 83 Linux /dev/sda3 18814 19451 5124735 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda4 19452 19457 48195 ef EFI (FAT-12/16/32)
Don't ask, what /dev/sda4 might be :-).
As a first step, I just installed the software with SuSE's package choice, using the good old kde 3.5 desktop.
The next step is to get the wired networking running. The network device is a
Atheros AR8132 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller #2
To get this running, your have to install the kernel-devel package with the kernel sources (contained on the DVD image on the USB stick). Then download the driver from
http://www.chipdrivers.com/download-get/786/191/36/
Unpack it in a new directory and build the kernel module as described in the README file. Instead of insmod I had to use modprobe, but then everything went fine. Doing a rcnetwork restart went fine, and I just connected with the knetworkmanager via DHCP to my ISP.
The wireless is more tricky, but fortunately after a lot of trouble, trying to compile the module for the
Atheros AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter
I found out that there's already a precompiled hack as the package
compat-wireless-kmp-pae
which you easily find in the openSuSE software search
http://packages.opensuse-community.org
I'm now working with the netbook for two days, and so far have no serious issues. The only thing which does not work perfectly is hibernate to memory. When you wake up the netbook again the wireless networking is not working anymore, and one has to reboot. However, hibernate to disk works perfectly well, and everything comes up again without any trouble, including ACPI.
I haven't checked the connection to an external monitor (projector) yet. So I can't say, whether this works out of the box yet.
The author is not responsible for any damage to your computer or loss of data, when you are using this information to set up your own system! Use it at your own risk!