A little while ago I got 4 4Gb EeePC Sub Notebook, The Wide screen Advent Laptop I have is great for presentations or watching dvds, but its too large to carry about for the odd occasion I need a portable network machine.
Like most, I had plans to replace the xandros linux with one I am more familiar with. To my surprise, the simple control panel is fine for navigating the built in apps, they all work (for me) very well, and the EeePC connect to the internet via both my wifi network and 3g phones.
If I need exta software, its mostly command line stuff and that can be run very easily using a chrooted memory stick or external hard disk.
After being disapointed with Ubuntu‘s handling of various media on the web, I was reluctant to throw out the EeePC‘s Xandros, especially when it connected to the net using both wifi and (with a little tinkering) both of the 3g phones I currently own. It also played the beeb iPlayer streaming video out of the box – something that proved to be a bit hit and miss with Ubuntu.
For the rest of the software I may need, most are command line such as the openwrt build system for compiling the router software, apache, mysql and php to do a bit of web development, these can all be installed into a minimal linux (Ubuntu) install on another system and copied to a large memory stick or portable hard drive (ext2 formatted).
Then just plug it in. The eeepc will see the the memory stick or hard drive and offer to open it.
Call up a terminal window (Ctrl-Alt-T).
‘ls /media’ to see where the stick has been mounted, (usualy related to the manufacturer name of the memory stick/drive).
and then
‘sudo su – ‘
followed by ‘mount –bind /dev /media/memorystick/partition1/dev’
and ‘mount –bind /proc /media/memorystick/partition1/proc’
finally ‘chroot /media/memorystick/partition1′
You will then get a root prompt for the operating system located inside the memory stick/hard drive. As the /dev and /proc have been bound to the corresponding directories in the chrooted memory stick/hard drive, it will be able to access the system devices and status of the eeepc host.
If the /etc/resolve.conf file is pointing to a different nameserver, you will have to edit it (or copy it using another Terminal window) to be the same as the one in the eeepc.
After that, you should be able to ‘apt-get’ any software you need -remember that the ram is short, your sharing it with the eeepc, so anything that usually requires large amounts of ram or swap will probably fail – if you are using an external hard drive, a swap file can be created and used from the xandros side, swap files on memory sticks should be avoided.
If you have some windowed software that needs Xserver to run – I perfer to use synaptic to locate and install software, as long as it will run without the full gnome or kde system, apt-get the application, apt will also drag down any required bits and pieces.
In a regular Terminal window, ‘sudo su -’ followed by ‘xhost localhost’ to allow connections from the local machine, on the chrooted Terminal, ‘export DISPLAY=localhost:0′ before running the program.
Providing you keep track of the terminals and only add or remove software in the chrooted one and your not using any hardware related apps, if it all goes wrong, just re-format the memory stick or external hard drive and try again – no harm to the eeepc.