Asus EeePC 900A
The 900A is a kind of crossing between a 900 and a 901. It's Atom-based but shares a lot of devices with the 900.
GRUB-Problem
Installing from an USB-memory-stick with the eeePC-installer and ethernet, went except for the grub-install which installed to the wrong disk (the USB-stick) leaving an unbootable system and an corrupt installer-image. The problem was that the USB-stick became sda and the internal SSD sdb when booting the installer-image and the installer installed GRUB to the first harddisk.
So when the installer is asking if it should install GRUB to the first harddisk take a look at your devices: Change to console two [Alt-F2] and determine what is mounted on /target (df -a). If it is /dev/sda1 you will be O.K. if it is /dev/sdb1 you have some work to do:
Say: “No”. and enter “/dev/sdb”
After the reboot at the end of the installation you have to edit the GRUB-entries to get the system up again: Edit the grub entry [e]
root (hd0,0) kernel … root=/dev/sda1
and boot [b].
Then login as root and edit /grub/menu.lst
# groot=(hd0,0) # kopt=root=/dev/sda1 ro
and run update-grub.
You should probably also check /etc/fstab and make sure that it refers to /dev/sda1 instead of /dev/sdb1.
If you've installed a card into the MiniSD slot on the side of the unit, this will make your internal SSD drive become sdc instead of sdb. The same renaming rules apply if you experience this.
Alexandru I don't have this problem with my EeePC 900A-WF012 with Intel Atom CPU, 1G RAM and 8G SSD. However, it's best practice to verify yourself. I use standard Debian Lenny Installer RC1 which uses kernel and initrd from hd-media and the first iso image copied into USB flash. I use GRUB as bootloader on it.
AlanB I can confirm this problem on the EeePC 900A with 4GB SSD (not sure of exact model).
Steph Confirmed on 900A 4GB SSD EEEPC900A-WFBB01 (found on silver barcode sticker on bottom of unit)
Audio
see DebianEeePC/Model/900 “Volume keys”. I haven't checked the microphone yet.
The microphone does not seem to work out of the box, you need to install a newer alsa-drivers package as shown in Howto:Sound
Powersave
The kernel-module acpi_cpufreq is not loaded automatically on boot, so add it to /etc/modules to allow for frequency-scaling.
Also add cpufreq_ondemand to /etc/modules to allow powermanagers to switch the cpu-scaling-governor to “ondemand” – in most cases this is what you want on a eeePC running on battery.