10.16.2008

Adding programs to Eee PC 901

So I am a happy owner of an Eee PC 901 with the original linux (almost Xandros) operating system. Before I have bougth this small laptop, I have read a lot of information, how much tweakable this toy is. So it is, and I have found nice pagen on the net providing the details. Unfortunately almost all the documentations are focused on the first generation Eee PCs (700 and 701 if I am correct), and there were some complains in the comments that applying them has made their 901 model broken. So I has become cautious.
I have learned that Eee PC has an operating system derived from Debian Etch via Xandros 4. However the version on the PC is not fully compatible either with Debian or Xandros, therefore I cannot install anything from those distributions. But I have learned from this that Eee PC uses apt as the package mangment system, which is known to be one of the best such package managers. I am quite familiar with rpm and yum from Fedora, so apt is something new for me to learn.
As maybe many of you know, programs in linux are organized to so called packages, which are compressed archives containing the binaries, libraries and usually the documentation necessary for usage of the programs. Package managers are downloading these packages from repositories, therefore the easy way to install new programs to a system to add the correct repos.
The first thing I have made was to replace the Finnish language repositories to the English one to be able to change the language of the system as I have written earlier. For that I have edited /etc/apt/sources.list file as root:

sudo -i

vim /etc/apt/sources.lost

You can use nano instead of vim if you are not familiar with this text editor.
I have changed the line for the Finnish files:
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/1.6/ fi main
to the English one:
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/1.6/ en main
After this I have installed several programs and packages with the synaptic program, which is a kind of graphical interface for the apt system.
After this I still had a lot of missings from my favourite programs, so I have decided to cross the dangerous line to install packages from Debian Etch. For this I have added a new entry to the sources.list file:

sudo -i

cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free


Ctrl+D


After this I have downloaded the list of the available packages with
apt-get update
And intstalled some programs:

apt-get install emacs

apt-get install steghide

apt-get install unison


Since that was all what I needed, I have decided to comment out the debian repo from the sources.list file, so it won't offend the updates. To do this I simply put a hashmark (#) symbol to the beginning of the the offending line:
#deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stable main contrib non-free
I updated again the package list with
apt-get update
And I am back again to the safe waters.
I have also installed the debian packages for FBReader from their site to have a decent ebook reader. So that is all. Now I have everything I need for my work on the Eee PC 901.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

can you write all default repositories(english) because i got lost them...

Unknown said...

nevermind i got it -_-'

Csaba said...

cat sources.list
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/1.6 common main
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/1.6 p901 main
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/1.6 en main

Unknown said...

crap i got lost...
can't open terminal via ctrl+alt+t!!!!
what to do?

Csaba said...

Unfortunately I cannot answer. This Xandros is so different from other linuces I know.
When I gave up every hope with Xandros, I had no other choice than this.

Unknown said...

you can run xterm from file manager
I don't know how to fix it, happened to me, I just went for reset to factory