Mint LXDE on Asus Eee 701 4G, overclocking and network share

[anqquri]

Hokay, I've browsed around the forums and googled, but I haven't seen a topic for this.
I have a Asus Eeepc 701 4G netbook and I'm fed up with the original Xandros Linux (Only Firefox 3, some strange Flash 10 beta, self-breaking file system, can't install anything modern without breaking all dependencies etc).

Basically I'm looking for a visually windows-like distro with Firefox 4+ and current Flash player, VLC player and ability to access network shares. Linux Mint with LXDE seems to fill all the requirements.

Now, I've used Mint 9 LXDE through USB and there are a couple of questions. Firstly, I installed and used version 9 which is LTS version. It comes with Firefox 3 and a bit older Flash player but can I upgrade those to newer versions or do I need to install newer distribution versions?

Hardware-wise everything seems to work out-of-box, wireless with ath5k, display and sound, even the webcam can be used! However, stock clock frecuency is only 630 MHz (9 x 70) and it's really sluggish at that point. On Xandros, I've used a script which has source code here: http://code.google.com/p/eeepc-linux/ . If I get this linux-thing correctly, I just download the source and compile it and it should work? In the repo there is the Eeectl-application but I haven't been able to get it to work on the USB-LiveCD-version. I suppose if it would work it would be needed to be installed completely? Is there a need to fetch another type of kernel to this netbook?

The last thing I haven't got to work is network sharing. I have a network drive which Xandros and Windowses have been able to access, it has no passwords. However, pyNeighbourhood is not able to scan the network at all, but if I enter the IP address of the share, it acknoledges the share but I can't mount it. Is this another thing that LiveCD enviroment can't do or am I doing something wrong?

I've backed up the current OS so I think I will go on installing this on the SSD tomorrow, but if you recommend anohter version of the LXDE distribution I can change it. Hopefully by the end of this week I'm running Mint LXDE on the laptop!

[nunol]

I have installed Mint 10 LXDE and Mint 11 LXDE on a Asus Eeepc 701 4G without any problem and everything worked but I don't overclock the CPU so I don't know how you can do that.

If you are going to install go for Mint 11 LXDE as it has 1 year left of support while Mint 10 LXDE only has more 6 months. Mint 9 LXDE is also a good option but it ships older software. I think it's better to reinstall a new OS than upgrade.

Because the screen resolution is very small I change the autostart file by adding this line so I can compress the screen and see more at the same time:

Code: Select all

xrandr --output LVDS1 --scale 1.3x1.3

[anqquri]

Thanks for the advice, I'll stick with the 9 and upgrade the software I need. Now, how did you format the SSD drive? Did you just install it per LXDE installation instructions?
I've upgraded RAM to 1 gb so I shouldn't need swap (or a very small swap) and I'm trying to do the same as on Xandros that I make a ramdisk and store temporary files and firefox cache there.

Anyone have info on the network share thingie? I'm going to install Mint 9 later today.

[nunol]

I use ext2 and did not use swap because I don't use that much RAM.

You don't need to use a ramdisk, try to use "dev/shm": http://superuser.com/questions/45342/wh ... -i-use-tmp

[anqquri]

Welp,
After almost borking the current Xandros installation on restore (what's CRC error precious?) I've returned to Xandros.

After installing LXDE everything else worked except mentioned issues: overclock and network share. While I was unable to check the network share issue, overclocking did not work. I successfully compiled the script and when I found that the necessary i2c_i801 was blacklisted and unlisted it, the script kind-of worked in that it reported the FSB correctly and seemed to update it. However when checked by running geekbench, I got similar results with 630 and "900" MHz, around 580 points.
Using Cpufreq (and p4-clockmod), the processor was running at 900 MHz and when the frecuency was lowered the results got lower too. Except that the 900 MHz results were similar to ones measured at 630 MHz before initiating p4-clockmod. Apparently p4-clockmod (and cpufreq) expect that the cpu is already at 900 MHz and when lowering the frecuency to 675 MHz, it's actually 675*(630/900)= 473 MHz.

I'm posting this to the hardware forum as well!