Help! A friend of mine with an ASUS eeePC 4G has a big problem. It seems that his son tried to install or upgrade Open Office and has screwed the machine royally. I had enabled the full Xandros KDE desktop on this machine several months ago. They ran into a problem opening a Powerpoint file, which however seemed to open fine in Star Office on another machine. So they decided to do something with the OO install. The best information that I can get is that they ran an install via synaptic. Now, on booting, the machine goes through an endless loop of initial eeePC bootscreens (the Intel BIOS stuff), and then just re-starts repeatedly. One desktop restart is normal in full desktop mode. If you've ever done that, you'll notice that it initially starts the easydesktop, but then quickly re-starts into KDE. So I think that that is where the failure is occurring. The only signal that I seem to be able to get to the machine is ctl-alt-del. Pressing that causes the loop to freeze momentarily, and the most interesting but garbled terminal output appears: it shows, as best as I can make it out, the commands that they must have used to try the synaptic OO install (e.g. "Install package without verification [Y/N]?"). I'm at a loss here. The son suggested installing XP, but my colleague, perhaps wisely not trusting that advice, would like to try to repair the Linux installation first. So, if anyone here has any advice, or has seen this problem before, please reply! Otherwise, I'm going to try to boot and install a distro. via his 8GB San disk card. Why not?! Peter

proopnarine, Sorry I don't have the fix for your friends problem. In case you decide to boot up a new O/S though I found this neat link for customizing your own Nimble X distro by selecting what packages you want added to the iso and it even has a meter type green bar above that shows How many mb your distro will be. Just thought I would share it. http://custom.nimblex.net/ P.S. isn't possible to boot up the live cd version of the existing O/S and fix it that way by going into terminal at the user login screen? If so I will google for the right command line.http://www.eeeuser.com/ [Modified by: rokytnji on August 05, 2008 02:39 PM] [Modified by: rokytnji on August 05, 2008 02:48 PM] [Modified by: rokytnji on August 05, 2008 02:49 PM]

Found eeepc wiki for Debian http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/TipsAndTricks

Here is another helpful link I think. http://www.linuxclues.com/articles/09.htm

Thanks for the links rokytnji. I'll wait to see if anyone has any "fixes", and if not, I'll follow the Debian link and give the install a shot.

Some progress, sort of. I've had absolutely no luck in accessing the Xandros system. The machine will respond only to BIOS access during the initial boot. Today I created a live USB stick with Fedora 9, and it booted without issues. I haven't had time to try wireless or the webcam yet. LAN networking works perfectly. Sound doesn't work yet. But progress is progress.

SUCCESS! Using liveusb-creator, I created a live USB version of Fedora 9 (KDE). My hat is off to Fedora for this nice, and very easy to use little program (I ran it from a Fedora 8 installation). Some good documentation may be found here http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo I installed via yum. The GUI worked flawlessly, and it took me only a few minutes to copy the iso to the USB stick. I then booted the eee PC from the stick by powering up the little machine, and pressing esc during the initial BIOS boot. I then selected the USB stick as the boot device, and Fedora booted with no issues. I noted that LAN networking worked, but the atheros wireless device was not recognized. Nor was the webcam. Anyway, I went ahead and selected the "Fedora Install" icon on the desktop. I simply accepted most of the default settings, including disk partitioning. (I was unsuccessful in accessing the Xandros install prior to this, but my friend didn't have any files that he wanted to save anyway). Installation went without a hitch, and I re-booted (with the USB stick still attached) for post-installation setup. That also went well, and then we logged into the new user account. Once in there, I went online and downloaded the driver for the atheros. I followed the suggestions here http://kernelreloaded.blog385.com/index.php/archives/madwifi-wireless-for-asus-eee-pc-on-fedora-9-howto/ I first added the livna repositories with this command (issued as root) rpm -i http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm and then yum --enablerepo=livna-testing install kmod-madwifi and that was it! I received e-mail from my friend today, who was using a wireless signal at Lake Tahoe (lucky bugger). And I have to say that Fedora 9, with KDE 4.0, is as beautiful as I've come to expect from Fedora desktops. I didn't have time to check the webcam before said friend left for his trip, but we'll give it a shot when he returns in a few weeks. Or, more likely, I'll give it a shot when I replace Xandros with Fedora 9 on my own eee PC!

P.S. Thanks rokytnji!

You're the bomb proopnarine.

Just to get off topic a little since you resolved your friends issue I made up a custom Nimblex live cd with all the restricted drivers and such. Distro came out to over 600mb. I slapped it into the Amrel 900mhz,256mb,20 gig with a Belkin F5D 7010 pcmcia wireless cardbus and it took right off from the bootup and connected to my router. Amazing to me. I am currently trying to figure a strategy to install it on my other 100gig Amrel hardrive maybe with ZevonOS cuz Nimble doesn't come with grub bootloader and their installer is kinda flaky. Makes a nice live cd though.

I have the exact same problem as your friend had, proopnarine. Here is the sequence of events: I unpacked my shiny new ASUS Eee PC. I used the word processor to write the first draft of my essay for college. I saved the work several times. I then decided I wanted a different desktop interface. I used [url=http://www.itwire.com/content/view/15909/1141/1/2/]this article[/url] to get the full KDE desktop up and running. It requires a restart, but I opted out for the time being to complete my essay. Then I explored the software on the EeePC using synaptic package manager. An 'asus security update 2' (or something similar) was available for install, I installed which then prompted to restart, which I accepted, which sent the Eee into its looping madness. I'm quite disgruntled at the moment. The solution you have come up with sound's good, but I want the asus to run on its own. Is there a way of restarting it with the easy desktop? or reseting it back to factory settings? I need that essay but I can easily write another if needs be. P.S. my main notebook is running XP and I've never used Linux before today. Eeep! [Modified by: polyvitamene on August 28, 2008 09:31 PM]

Hi polyvitamene, Sorry, I've been away and missed your post! The problem is that there are some incompatibilities between the main Xandros distribution and that tweaked for the Eee PC. So, particularly when using the unlocked KDE desktop, you have to be very wary of accepting any updates. Some of the help articles make this clear, but not all do. As far as I could determine, there's no way of getting back to the easy desktop short of re-installing the Eee PC version of Xandros. Sorry, but that's probably bad news for your essay. The machine really is a very nice machine, and I guess that it's a bit of our fault (and my friend's), for trying to get more out of it than was delivered. I recommend that you just slap the latest Fedora on there, and get to using and enjoying the machine. NOTE: I haven't tried to get that webcam working yet with Fedora though.