Translations: [:DebianEeePCGerman/Model/900:German]

?TableOfContents

Asus EEE PC 900

This page is intented to be a central repository of information regarding Debian on this specific model

Fixable items

Volume keys

The package eeepc-acpi-scripts comes with a configuartion for the mixer device at /etc/default/eeepc-acpi-scripts that does not work with 900 model. Change the value to Master mixer:

VOLUME_LABEL='Master'

and it shall work just fine.

Broken things

Touchpad

See ["DebianEeePC/HowTo/ElantechTouchpad"].

Battery

GNOME Power Manager will complain that the battery has only 1% capacity. AFAIK, this is an ACPI driver bug, which returns "bizarre" values. You should not bother about it, since the value is wrong. My EEE PC 900 lasts 3:15 battery life.

GNOME Power Manager won't warn or shutdown when the battery runs out. It might be related to the buggy driver, however, there might be a way to tweak the configuration in order to make it work. Still needs more research.

Sound

The sound driver (ALSA 1.0.17, as described above) exhibits some sound glitches when the system is under moderate load. For example, simply switching the workplace at GNOME will make the sound break for a couple of miliseconds. One major problem of this, is HAL, which will spend high peaks of CPU from time to time (a couple of seconds) and every time that happens, a small sound glitch can he heard. It was also reported that if you use CPU scaling, at low frequencies, it will make the sound to break also. Sometimes such glitches will lead the sound with that "robotic effect", which can only be restored, by pausing / resuming sound playback (mplayer specific).

It still needs to be tested whether Asus patched kernel 2.6.24.1 which came with the Xandros exhibits the same issue in order to try to find a fix for that.

Wireless

After the system is suspended, the wireless won't work (no network is detected, although it seems to be OK). The solution is to disable / enable it via the Ctrl+F2 key combination.

One way to automate this (if using pm-utils) is to configure pm-utils to unload/reload the module when suspending/resuming. Add the following variable to any file in /etc/pm/config.d/ (you may need to create one):  SUSPEND_MODULES="ath_pci" 

This seems to cause a delay while suspending and occasional problems with network-manager. Another way that seems to work better instead is to create a file /etc/pm/sleep.d/66wireless.sh:

case $1 in
  hibernate|suspend)
    ;;
  thaw|resume)
    ifconfig ath0 down
    modprobe -r ath_pci
    modprobe ath_pci
    ifconfig ath0 up
    ;;
  help)
    echo "$( basename $0 ): Reinitializes wireless (ath_pci module) after a suspend"
    ;;
  *)
    echo "$( basename $0 ): called wrong"
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

If you want to live on the edge and install the latest driver available upstream for the Atheros wifi chipset used in this model, see [:DebianEeePC/HowTo/UseUpstreamAtherosModules].