Asus EEE PC 900

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

Fixable items

Microphone

Sound playback works just out of the box with kernel 2.6.25-2-686. However microphone simply does not work. This is due to the fact that Asus has patched the snd-hda-intel kernel alsa driver in order to make EEE PC 900 sound hardware work and such changes were not (yet, I hope) ported into vanilla kernels. Thus, only default Xandros from Asus contain the patches. The stand alone alsa modules were also patched, so, to make the microphone work with Debian (and basically all other distos) it is needed to compile the alsa modules yourself. In theory, a simple:

m-a a-i alsa

would do the trick. However, current alsa-source 1.0.16-2 can not be compiled with current kernel 2.6.25-2-686 (see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=490710). One possible temporary solution would be to compile alsa directly from http://www.alsa-project.org/, however it would not be into APT...

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

The Synaptics device is not recognized by the xorg driver:

(II) Synaptics touchpad driver version 0.14.6 (1406)
Synaptics0 no synaptics event device found
(**) Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
(**) Option "SHMConfig" "true"
(**) Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "1"
Query no Synaptics: 6003C8

It can still be used, as it behaves as a standard PS/2 mouse. However, it is not possible to make any specific device configuration, such as horizontal scrolling.

At Asus' default Xandros, it works good. It is possible that Asus has patched either the xorg driver or the kernel to make it work.

Camera

The cheese application won't work, complaining something via stderr about some overlay problem. Possible an intel driver configuration problem, still to check. Camera not tested on other applications.