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Installing debian on EeePC 1201HA: the synaptics touchpad

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:21:08 +0100

As usual debian’s wiki is a great resource, look it’s page about Synaptics Touchpad and most of the configuration is done.

So here I got the finger tap to work, but is spite of my efforts, the two finger scroll would not work. Well actually it did work using synclient but it was lost by next restart… And the hint was on the wiki but on Elantech Touchpad‘s page, near the end, in “GUI assistance” section: “Beware that they can override the global X settings in xorg.conf.”

So if you’re using gnome, look at the Mouse setting in gnome menu. You can also try gsynaptics, but while gnome mouse settings are reloaded each time you switch VT or suspend the computer, gsynaptics has to be reloaded manually.

Gnome didn’t let me check the two finger scroll option, so I opened gconf-editor searched for the touchpad key and found it as /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad and changed scroll_method to 2. It’s still grey in the menu, but it’s checked an it works!

There is one remaining issue with gnome, if you want a different button for 2 finger tap than button 3, you can’t! I first fell on the fedora bug report about it which lead me to gnome’s one. So as of today, there is a patch, but not integrated in gnome, and I did not test it.

So I was tempted to switch to my old wm fluxbox, but didn’t take the time to configure it yet. Also reading Who-T’s blog, and especially this post xmodmap keyboard deconfiguration made me think that configuring one’s desktop trough Gnome and the like is going to be “the right way” in near future. As fluxbox session is just a plain bash script, we’ll need more working CLI tools for the hotplug configuration…

Well to come back, the touchpad is not going to be hotplug so a plain old config file like xorg.conf should in my opinion remain a valid choice (especially now that it does no goes through some other xml stuff as with hal). But then, the desktop configuration (ie Gnome) shouldn’t mess with it as it’s doing now!

Installing debian on EeePC 1201HA: the grub 2 trick

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:35:37 +0100

As already stated in the previous post update I’m now using the method described on debian eeepc wiki for booting in native resolution, so I’m no longer using the IEGD driver (nor my xserver by the way).

I find it a lot more stable !

I no longer have the issues with the mouse cursor jumping randomly to the lower right corner.

I even configured the touchpad to use the tap to click mode and the two finger scroll mode. (This will be the subject of a following post)

One more thing about using 915resolution in grub2, if like me you find that windows no longer want to boot, then only load 915resolution.mod before loading the linux kernel and not at grub startup.
You can do that by adding the following lines in /etc/grub.d/10_linux.

	echo insmod 915resolution
	echo 915resolution 58 1366 768 32

Instead of creating the /etc/grub.d/01_915resolution file.

I did place it at the end of the if block testing the GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX variable.

Hope this will help some of you !

Installing debian on EeePC 1201HA

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:53:59 +0100

The first reference for installing debian on an Eee PC is The Debian Eee PC project. However it says on
its models page that it does not fully support 1201HA, because it uses the Poulsbo chipset. The reason is that it’s not supported by mainstream debian: see #533450 for details…

However installing debian Squeeze (testing) using the debian installer snapshot was fearly easy. Read DebianEeePC/HowTo/InstallUsingStandardInstaller for details.

The only noticeable issues I had was with partitioning where the partition table was not reloaded by the kernel; and grub that installed itself on my installation USB Key instead of the primary drive.

A good point is that network and wifi worked out of the box. So then I needed X to work with the native resolution.

Reading the above bugreport and a few other website showed that there are two drivers out there. One poulsbo driver (that seams to come from ubuntu) and the intel IEGD driver. Nobody seams to maintain the first one, and the second is proprietary but at least works. However none work with the 1.7 version of xserver. So the first step is to get an older xserver.

Lenny has and old one but downgrading all X related packages (including gnome ones) was a pain, so I quickly switched to an other solution:
Rebuilding and xserver 1.6 package.

See next post for details on building the xserver 1.6 packages.

This solution worked fine with the IEDG 10.3 driver.
I’m still experiencing some X freeze from time to time (which are solved only by rebooting). The touchpad does not have the multifinger features I was used to, and sometime the cursor jump to the lower right corner, but I didn’t really tried to investigate this anyway.

Update
As Steve McIntyre pointed out there is an other way to get the native resolution, using grub2 and fbdev, see http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/Model/1101HA for details.
I just updated to this configuration and it works !

déménagement … serveur compris

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:09:02 +0100

En fait ce serveur est hébergé à la maison, sur notre ligne ADSL, donc il a déménagé avec le reste !

Ceci explique la semaine d’interruption il y a deux semaine environ, si toutefois quelqu’un l’a remarqué (mis à part google).

Le déménagement à pris pas mal de mon temps, j’ai du tout emballer, en particulier mes bricolages électronique donc le projet n’a pas beaucoup avancé…

De plus je me suis offert un EeePC 1201HA, je voulais un écran 12 pouces pour avoir quelque chose d’un peu plus utilisable que le 701p. Il est livré avec Windows 7 et le chipset est un GMA500 (poulsbo) ce qui ne facilite pas l’installation de linux, mais bon j’ai installé debian (il reste encore à faire, mais ça sera le sujet d’un autre billet).