Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 and the ASUS eeepc 1000HE

So, I have finally decided to downsize my computing footprint and my boss was kind enough to replace my aging and well worn Toshiba laptop with a ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10-Inch Netbook.

Since I’ve been running Ubuntu everywhere and the newest version of Ubuntu is offering a Netbook Remix.

The good news? It works almost 100% out of the box. Suspend and resume, volume control etc, it all worked.

So what are the items that don’t work out of the box?

Well the stuff that didn’t work was related to the hot keys. Most notably it was the hot key to disable and enable the wireless, the touchpad and the resolution.

After some digging I found the Statux site and their wiki page on common issues as well as their more general documentation page dedicated to EeePC.

So, the steps I took to get everything right were as follows:

sudo apt-get install asus-eee-dkms eeepc-acpi-utilities eeepc-tray

The page listing issues above is useful for making the wifi/wireless toggle work, which requires a modification to the kernel boot options. Simply add the following to the defoptions

pciehp.pciehp_force=1 pciehp.pciehp_poll_mode=1

Then run the following command to make sure the options will be in effect

sudo update-grub

Then reboot.

At this point the wireless toggle should work.

Now you’ll have the EeePC Tray running and you can right click on it and select Edit Configuration. This will open up an editor window and you’ll need to find and change the following settings to reflect the following:

KEY_TOUCHPAD="00000037"
KEY_RESOLUTION="00000038"

And that’s it. After I did all that everything was working that way I wanted it to.

On another note, I didn’t really need to install the additional packages from statux, but that was the only way to get the tray icon, which seemed worth it to me.

\\@matthias