Ubuntu and the Asus Eee PC 900

Yesterday I said hi to a classmate of mine and while going through the routine: “how are you.. what’s up .. blablabla”, he told me he had trouble with a new “mini” laptop he just bought. He installed Ubuntu on it and the wireless wasn’t working. So, I asked him if it was a Asus Eee and he told me “Yes”.

I’m a fan of the Asus Eee and netbooks in general, because they are practical, “cheap” and can replace a paper notebook. Also they could proliferate the use of 3G Internet, only if mobile operators could see the potential and market it in a smart way.

I’m not going to write down a howto however I will reference to the sites I used and point out what, problems, what was done differently, etc. So the first thing you need to do is STFW . And started with the follow page:

http://www.tommcfarlin.com/2008/07/11/ubuntu-on-the-eee-pc-900/

I tried two of the fixes the post regarding Ubuntu on Asus Eee. The shutdown fix, worked without problems. However the wireless fix didn’t work all the way. First I couldn’t download the package because the madwifi domain couldn’t be resolve. A quick search, permitted me to find out that madwifi had a problem with the DNS and they changed their domain to madwifi-project.org. The second challenge I got, was when I tried to compile the madwifi drivers, since I received some errors on the make:

:~/madwifi$ make
Checking requirements… ok.
Checking kernel configuration… ok.
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.27-7-generic/build SUBDIRS=/home/ndaula/madwifi modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.27-7-generic’
CC [M]  /home/ndaula/madwifi/ath_hal/ah_os.o
cc1: warnings being treated as errors
/home/ndaula/madwifi/ath_hal/ah_os.c: In function ‘ath_hal_lookup_register_name’:
/home/ndaula/madwifi/ath_hal/ah_os.c:451: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments
make[3]: *** [/home/ndaula/madwifi/ath_hal/ah_os.o] Error 1
make[2]: *** [/home/ndaula/madwifi/ath_hal] Error 2
make[1]: *** [_module_/home/ndaula/madwifi] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.27-7-generic’
make: *** [modules] Error 2

Honestly I was to lazy to try to go into the code and check what was the problem. So, after trying, updating and doing everything that was in page, I decided to give it a rest. After a couple of hours, I went back and tried to fix the this issue. After searching the Web for the error on the make, I ended up in the follow page:

http://madberry.org/2008/11/how-to-get-atheros-ar242x-to-work-on-810-intrepid-ibex/

Given that it was similar process to the first page, I decided to give a try. Here, instead of using the drivers from madwifi, they use the drivers from kernerl.org. So, I download them, made the make (which took a long long time) and then continue with make install, unload and load of the new drivers. And after a reboot it work good.

[Side note]

By the way, I think madberry has a script that updates the url of the tar with the driver. You see, every day kernel.org changes the name of the tar, with “today” date. This is pretty neat since visitors can follow the tutorial step by step without thinking.