ASUS Eee Top Fails With Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ASUS Eee Top Fails With Linux

ASUS is among the few tier-one hardware vendors that understands Linux. Of the dozens of ASUS products we have tested over the years, it is hard to remember a product from ASUS that did not work well with Linux. ASUS was even the first motherboard vendor to ship with an embedded instant-on Linux environment known as SplashTop and they continued their adoption of this lightweight Linux desktop with their notebooks and a massive number of motherboards. Earlier this year ASUS also struck a deal to put Phoenix HyperSpace on some of their products, which is another Linux-based environment. On top of these other Linux efforts, ASUS also ships a modified version of Xandros Linux on their very popular Eee PC series. Their recently introduced Eee Top series, however, is not Linux friendly at all with the current generation of Linux distributions. The ASUS Eee Top ET1602 is a mighty fine piece of hardware at an exceptional value, but it does not know how to play with Linux without taking some advanced steps.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13605

[RealNC]

"The ASUS Eee Top ET1602 is a mighty fine piece of hardware at an exceptional value, but it does not know how to play with Linux"

Isn't it usually the other way around? Like "Linux does not know how to play well with it" :P

[kraftman]

"The ASUS Eee Top ET1602 is a mighty fine piece of hardware at an exceptional value, but it does not know how to play with Linux"

Isn't it usually the other way around? Like "Linux does not know how to play well with it" :P

If even such old 'piece of software' like xp works on it it's triple e fault.

[Ferdinand]

Ubuntu 8.10 runs very well on the Eee PC and other Atom-powered devices.
I bought an EEE 1000H laptop and both wifi-n and 100Mbit lan did not work with the current 8.04 or on the horizon 8.10. Only with the alpha's of 9.04 did they work.

I have also seen more and more comments on Anandtech that complain that computer company's are using atom in the wrong devices and in this case I agree. The only reasons to use atom is low power and cost(because atom is cheaper to make). But this device is always plugged in and has room to spare for a nice big heatsink. So why go atom? Wouldn't a nice AMD platform with a Radeon3300 and their low power athlon with a big passive heatsink be much better?

[glock24]

"ASUS is among the few tier-one hardware vendors that understands Linux."

Well, that's not what Asus tech support thinks, they'll just tell you Linux is not supported. I've seen lots of people complaining about Asus Laptop issued installing Linux, especially with AMD based ones, because of crappy ACPI code. Just take a look at Asus's own support forums, or head over notebookreview.com's forums.

I own a F8Va, and I had a bad time getting Ubuntu to work on it. This thing did not work even with the VESA xorg driver, so a text-based install is a must with acpi=off as a kernel argument.

It works pretty well now, after a couple BIOS updates, a custom 2.6.28.x kernel and the fglrx driver. The radeon, radeonhd or vesa drivers are still a no go.

[r1348]

If even such old 'piece of software' like xp works on it it's triple e fault.

Obviously, XP works on it because it comes with pre-installed drivers from the vendor.
Try to install "vanilla XP" on it and... good luck!

Point is that this test was made too early, in a month linux will be able to play it nicely even on the eeeBox.

Also, might be worth trying Fedora 11 Beta due out in a few days, usually Fedora tracks upstream development more closely than Ubuntu.

[VuDu]

OMG... Ubuntu doesn't run out-of-the-box on this weird piece of hardware and you state that it "Fails With Linux"?

I'm shocked with this "Linux is Ubuntu liveCDs" assumption!

[kraftman]

Obviously, XP works on it because it comes with pre-installed drivers from the vendor.
Try to install "vanilla XP" on it and... good luck!

Yes, that's a point :)

[Zhick]

OMG... Ubuntu doesn't run out-of-the-box on this weird piece of hardware and you state that it "Fails With Linux"?

I'm shocked with this "Linux is Ubuntu liveCDs" assumption!
QFT
Linux != Ubuntu

[Kano]

When you don't create a launchpad bug entry then this could happen. Did you create one? Usually U does nothing without... The used gfx chipset must be really old in theory so it could be only a small issue. Maybe intel gfx devs could tell you more.

[jhansonxi]

Is it the fault of Asus that Linux didn't work on it? How new are the components? Is it just a matter of waiting for new drivers to trickle down from the kernel and X.org teams?

[Kano]

I don't have got the hardware, first i would check the pci-id of all devices if they are in the intel driver or not.

lspci -nn

could be helpful. Then maybe you find a difference in the driver when you can find that specific id for the VGA chip. I don't think you can blame the hw vendor if intel maybe changed a little thing in the latest hw revision.

[jeffro-tull]

God forbid you guys try something other than Ubuntu.

Sorry if I sound bitter, but "things don't work well with Ubuntu" is not the same as "Linux support for $DEVICE is still pending". For example, my Aspire One. Everything worked with Linpus. My wireless didn't work out of the box with Ubuntu. The wireless worked out of the box with Madwifi with Mandriva. The wireless worked out of the box with ath5k with openSUSE.

[chithanh]

I agree with the other posters that the article should be named "ASUS Eee Top Fails With Ubuntu" rather than "with Linux". After all, you cannot blame ASUS for the Ubuntu release policy. The code which makes the Eee Top work under Linux is there for anyone to take and for any distributor to integrate as they please.

[superppl]

As an OpenSUSE user, I would have liked to see them try several other distros, but I have to admit that when it comes to hardware, modern distro's perform just about the same.

[Kano]

Well I have got my own distro, of course i try to provide best hw support. But for that i need more infos than just something like it does not work, that helps nobody.

[tormod]

Ubuntu 9.04 will not likely ship with the Intel 2.7 driver, which means Eee Top customers would need to go through these added steps at least until later this year when Ubuntu 9.10 is introduced.

If only simple fixes needs to be picked from the 2.7 branch, it is still possible that support can be added to Ubuntu 9.04. But as someone already said, this will not happen without a bug report being filed.

BTW, there are Jaunty builds of the -intel master branch (pretty similar to the 2.7 branch at this point) at https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa which should work and hopefully make those "added steps" easier.

A useful resource for Ubuntu 8.10: http://www.eeepc.it/en/guida-installare-ubuntu-su-asus-eee-top-1602/

[Kano]

How did you build em? I needed a little build fix linux-libc-dev 2.6.28, because one line is not defined there (only in 2.6.29).

[tormod]

How did you build em? I needed a little build fix linux-libc-dev 2.6.28, because one line is not defined there (only in 2.6.29).
Any additions to the Debian packaging is documented in the changelog. They were built against a libdrm-dev from the same PPA, but check the build log see exactly which version.

[lordmozilla]

you can bet that any other distro released recently, wether linpus, opensuse or fedora will faill on that box, drivers need to be written/updated, it just says it doesnt work out of the box....

Windows never does, why do people seem to expect linux to work straight away and all drivers to work seemlessly?

For one i don't really see it as a failure, the only thing that seems to fail is the touchscreen, and the fact there is some input seems to mean the driver needs work, but that it does exist, which is always good.

[tormod]

From the link I posted and other Google hits, it seems like the touchscreen actually works fine, with the evtouch driver. So basically everything works in Linux, but as with many computers there is a little bit of fiddling or configuration after installing a given distribution.