I had to perform an install of Fedora on an Asus EEE PC 901 today, while Fedora has moved a long way forward and most hardware is well supported I knew from previous posts that I had read that some things were horribly broken but that did not discourage me. I got a shiny F13 Install DVD and an external DVD-ROM and started the install but after the media check it prompted me for the Install Source as Anaconda could not locate any valid source. First quirk, I changed the media to a Live Desktop spin, rebooted and after a short time I was automatically logged on to the desktop. From there it’s a breeze to install to the hard disk.

The install is quite fast and within minutes it was completed and I rebooted from the local drive and started inspecting the system looking for undetected hardware but couldn’t find anything suspicious so I assumed everything was working. I usually follow the install steps from Mauriat Miranda ( http://www.mjmwired.net ) who does a really great job of documenting every Fedora Release install and tweaks, so why reinvent the wheel? Highly recommended! Next step was to connect the wireless network card to my LiveBox, enter the WPA key but to my surprise it keeps prompting me again and again for the key, now I realise something is wrong, a quick look at /var/log/messages confirms that wireless driver is not working, copy/paste the error message to google and a few posts later http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EeePc comes to the rescue.

A look at the Hardware Support page confirms that the Eee PC 901/1000H wireless chip is Ralink RT2860, which is not supported by current kernel but there’s an open source driver provided by Ralink. RPMFusion has a kmod package with this driver (kmod-rt2860). If you already have rpm fusion repos installed, a simple yum install kmod-rt2860 will fix the problem. In my case my kernel was also updated so I rebooted and the EEE PC automatically connected to the LiveBox (remember I had already saved the WAP key).

I had a look at the instructions for optimizing the performance of the EEE PC and I would advise most people to skip installing revisor unless you really know what you’re doing.

I did follow the steps below:

1. Use the integrated HPET timer (saves about 30 CPU wake ups per second) Should be used by default.

$ cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource

This should return ‘hpet’
2. Change IO scheduler to deadline: Load the module.

# modprobe deadline-iosched

Edit /etc/grub.conf

Add ‘elevator=deadline’ to kernel options.

$ cat /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler

This should return ‘noop [deadline] cfq’

3. Disable rarely used services

# for s in abrtd atd auditd avahi-daemon ip6tables iscsi iscsid mdmonitor portreserve livesys livesys-late; do echo “chkconfig $s off”; chkconfig $s off; done

4. Noatime for hard drive (reduces writes to disk)

vim /etc/fstab

To make sure that I haven’t made any typo in the file, I usually run a mount -a which should not report any errors.

The instructions for installing Jupiter seems to be broken but I had a look at the Jupiter info on sourceforge, I will probably install it at a later date should it be needed but for the being time all seems to be working fine. Now time to run a yum -y update and go to bed but if you have bandwidth issues you can also do the following to download and install only available security updates:

# yum install yum-security

# yum update –security