I passed the weekend but it was really worth it. I mostly followed the indications on the Arch Wiki for the installation part (using dkite’s modules and patched acpid) except that I used the latest intel Xorg driver package from testing instead of i810 and its ugly 915resolution hack. I also had some problems with partitioning my usb key (cfdisk was borking on the partition table) but a quick override of the table with parted seemed to resolve them.
So Vache is now powered by Linux 2.6.23, latest Xorg and Openbox 3.4.5 (will update to the, recently released, 3.4.6 version later). I made a sort-of desktop using xfce4-panel (I found out that AWN depends on too much gnome libs for my taste), xcompmgr for some compositing goodness like drop-shadow and window transitions (works pretty well apart from some odd painting behaviors in Firefox) and feh for the background handling. I also use other softwares from XFCE4 like Thunar (file manager), Terminal, Mousepad etc… for my everyday use. Media playback is assured by good-old MPlayer, networking is handled by Network Manager (if only it could drop some gnome dependencies too), Abiword for word-processing and of course Mono & Monodevelop for the geeky stuff 
. My autostart.sh is here if someone is interested.
Thanks to dkite’s acpid and kernel packages, everything works as well as on the default OS of the EEE (even the different state popups for sound, WiFi and all). Overall I’m very pleased with my setup : it’s fast, lightweight and do its job. The only culprit so far is memory when using Flash (which notoriously leak memory) and Firefox after some heavy browsing time. Moreover the shared-memory nature of the Intel graphic chipset cause the memory usage to go up when playing things like Youtube videos. I somehow fixed the former by using the FlashBlock addon and improved the latter by tuning some of the about:config keys. Guess that replacing the current RAM with a 2gb one will make everyone happy.
Comments 2
I too installed arch on my eee over the weekend. I installed filoketes modified kernel as well as dkite’s modules and patched acpi. I’m not sure if they are conflicting in some way but my volume controls are not working (strangely the brightness ones do but without the popups).
I am currently using the 915hack but would like to replace it with what you suggest. How did you install the Xorg driver package from testing?
Regarding memory leaks in firefox, you might want to check out Opera. Thanks!
Posted 05 fév 2008 at 5 h 02 min ¶Well you have to choose between filoketes kernel and dkite’s modules (i.e. it depends if you boot on the 2.6.24 or 2.6.23 kernel at grub stage). If you are using the latter make sure that ‘asus_acpi’ is in the MODULES array of your rc.conf and add asusosd to your startup programs (for Openbox add ‘(sleep 6 && /usr/local/bin/asusosd) &’ in ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh »
The popups should appear.
The latest driver is in the testing repository. If you don’t want to add the whole repository you can only download the driver from one of the mirror (http://mir.archlinux.fr/testing/os/i686/xf86-video-intel-2.2.0-2-i686.pkg.tar.gz for example) then remove xf86-video-i810 (pacman -R xf86-video-i810) and install intel (pacman -U xf86-video-intel-2.2.0-2-i686.pkg.tar.gz). Then just change ‘i810′ to ‘intel’ in your xorg.conf and restart Xorg.
>Regarding memory leaks in firefox, you might want to check out Opera.
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Posted 05 fév 2008 at 7 h 37 min ¶Thanks, I will try that
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