Installing Slackware 13.37-rc3+ on Asus EEE PC 900A

Last updated: 7 April 2011

General Hardware Specifications of Asus Eee PC 900A:

Hardware Components	Status under Linux	Notes
Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz	Works
8.9" TFT Display 1024x600	Works
Intel 945GME Video Card	Works
2GB DDR RAM	Works	Upgraded from 1GB standard
16GB SATA Solid State Drive Hard Drive	Works	Upgraded from 4GB standard
Built-in SD Card Reader	Works
Atheros PCI-E Ethernet Card	Works
Atheros AR5001 Wireless Network Adapter	Works
3-Cell Battery 4400 mAh	Works	Gets 3.5~4 hours of life in Linux
Intel HD Audio Card	Works
Intel 82801G Chipset (ICH7) and USB 2.0 Controllers	Works	Has 3 USB ports
Onboard Touchpad	Works	Understands double-finger scrolling and interprets as mouse wheel.

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.37.5

Introduction:

Let me start off by saying that this is an excellent product, especially for the price. There are a lot, and I mean a lot of reviews out there that are downright negative and horribly exaggerated. First, it's not designed for extreme performance, so any review you see that is upset because it can't play their favorite game is worthless. Second, this netbook is designed for a specific purpose: to be portable, light, small, and have long battery life. It does the job on all four of those, so Asus is not some horrible company, nor is this netbook worthless. I bought mine refurbished for $170. The memory and hard drive are upgradeable.
Also, there are a lot of websites out there that say Slackware Linux has no package repository. That is an outright lie, and only demonstrates the ignorance of the Linux community gone after the fool's quest for a perfect Linux distribution. There is no such thing. Slackware Linux has had SlackBuilds.org for some time now (including sbopkg which is a program that can grab the necessary info to compile whatever program(s) you want on your Slackware computer). There are also two primary "-contrib" or contributed package repositories in existence, from two main developers in Slackware Linux. Please see the links below for Robby Workman's and Eric Hameleer's package repositories, as well as for SlackBuilds.org (SBo).

Basic Installation of Slackware Linux:

Why to use Slackware Linux: because it is stable, which is the main thing anyone wants. A computer is merely a tool to do work with, in my opinion (though games are fun) and as such it needs to work properly before it tries to impress you with eye candy and cool features. Slackware Linux is the most stable Linux distribution I've ever used, and while I can't say that my experience means your experience will be the same, that's why I use it. That and the development concept is much easier to understand (because there's only one man in charge, not committees like in Debian), they only release it when it's stable and ready (not like Microsoft who releases on schedules), and everything on it is as un-modified as possible (which makes compiling and adding software to it much easier; unlike other distributions where to remove pulse audio, for example, is impossible).
Obtaining Slackware Linux: go here.
Installing Slackware Linux: if you don't have an optical drive, you can install over USB with one USB device as the boot media (the image is on the install DVD/CD) and another USB drive as the packages (using any filesystem Linux is capable of reading). If you have an external optical drive you can also install the "traditional" way.
Post-Install modifications/tweaks when installing to a small hard drive: When I first got this netbook, the 4GB standard onboard SSD hard drive was small for me, and I was totally new to trying to install Slackware Linux to this small a machine. At the time, I decided to skip KDE altogether and go with only Xfce4. Xfce is very user friendly and very capable (and very customizeable too). I found that you can remove basically all of the d/ software series except for python (needed for wicd), cxxlibs and gcc (needed for FireFox), and Java Runtime Environment (jre; needed for OpenOffice). When I was using the 4GB drive, I had about 500MB to spare but had the machine set up with no games, no movie players, and very few other applications other than what I know I am going to use. However, please note that I was setting this machine up specifically to be a travel internet/irc/yahoo/skype/music/picture machine. I did not plan to use email through Kontact (which is my preferred application for email), and I did not plan on playing any movies with it (yet). Now that I have a 16GB (32GB and 64GB models also exist but make sure they are single sided and compatible with this netbook), I can do a full install of Slackware, though I still remove what I don't need or can't use (like all the Firewire software, PCMCIA stuff, tape backup software, parallel and serial port utilities, etc, because this netbook don't have any of these items).
To me the more important part is the data I am putting on the machine. I have some scripts (netbook_music.sh and netbook_picture.sh) I put on my other laptop so that if I want to put something on this machine, in Thunar (after adding them as custom actions, see the link for Xfce customizing above) I just right-click the image or music I want to send to it and it gets either re-encoded as MP3 from FLAC (since I archive all my music as FLAC) or the image gets scaled to 1024x600 to fit the screen on this machine. This saves me a lot of time and disk space on this laptop. This is important because I can fit more of my stuff on the 16GB SD HC card and 16GB internal SSD drive (both of which work fine with LUKS/LVM2).

Setting up additional features for Slackware Linux:

Console Mode Setting: if you're like me, you don't like how small the text is when you boot up. This is because the console system chose your max resolution (you're using an LCD monitor). To change this to whatever you want, using video=640x480 or whatever should work when added to the append="" line in your LILO config (/etc/lilo.conf). My eyes tend to like 640x480 but feel free to experiment.
Suspend to RAM works great on this machine. However, to use Suspend to Disk (aka "Hibernate") you must have at least more swap file than your RAM. If you are using the 4GB internal SSD drive, obviously that would be out of the question. However, please note that one could use the SD Card Reader to expand the storage of the machine (especially using LVM and maybe LUKS also), but that would take up the SD card slot (i.e. now you can't remove the SD card when in use). On this machine, now that I have 16GB onboard SSD hard drive and 16GB SD card (LUKS), I have enough space and set up enough swap space to use hibernate, and it works great! Just make sure that if you do LUKS/LVM2 like I do, that you make the LUKS big enough so that your swap and /home fit on it.
The only reason to compile a new kernel with Slackware 13.1 is to update to the newest kernel, but I'd recommend sticking to the 2.6.31.x family. You can specify USB autosuspend by adding "usbcore.autosuspend=1" to the LILO append statement, and now that Slackware 13.1 and after include PowerTop, you're good to go. When and if I compile a new kernel, I specify my CPU, configure it to compile for size, disable Generic x86, enable SPI and SPI devices, and disable FireWire, PCMCIA, serial and parallel ports (since this machine doesn't have any of those devices). You can get a very lean small kernel easily this way, which is important because this is a lean small netbook (no sense in having support for hardware you don't have or features you either don't need or will never use). This is also important because the Atom N270 processor, while a good processor when you're using the netbook, is not going to compile a kernel that fast, so the bigger your kernel config, the longer it will take. Note: now I mostly use the generic-smp kernel that's included with Slackware on machines with proprietary drivers such as ATI and nVidia.
I used to recompile a number of packages in Slackware 13 with -march=i686 -mtune=i686 -Os when I had a smaller (4GB) SSD hard drive. That changed when I upgraded to 16GB: now I just install almost all of Slackware Linux. Honestly there is no reason to go recompile all of Slackware Linux just to try to optimize for Atom because 1) Slackware tunes for 686 already, 2) it takes too long, 3) you run into snags that, if you're not someone who knows how to resolve them, will only frustrate you further.

Unresolved issues

The onboard SSD does not support power saving modes using hdparm, but this isn't much of an issue since it doesn't use much electricity, and I still get 3.5~4 hours of life out of the machine (more if I dim the display in low light). There are some power-friendly settings you can also use, like making /tmp tmpfs (so that it's not actually writing to hard drive when writing to that directory).

Configuration Files

Note, xorg.conf is no longer needed with Slackware 13.
The kernel config I use on this machine (2.6.33): here.
(Applies to 4GB internal SSD only) Output of df -h with a list of packages that were installed at the time.
Output of lspci.

Performance

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