[hemmerling] The Notebook "ASUS Eee PC 901"

Related pages:

• Notebooks.
• The Notebook "ASUS K95VB".
• The Notebook "ASUS Eee PC T101MT".

• EN.Wikipedia: "ASUS Eee PC", DE.Wikipedia: "ASUS Eee PC".
• Geizhals.AT "eee 901".
• HDD installation.
  • YouTube: "How to add more storage to Asus Eee PC 901" - note that some ASUS 901 items don´t have the interface to install HDD hard drives and CompactFlash hard drives.
  • YouTube: "Super Talent 64GB MLC SSD for Eee PC 901/900A/701-7A/702/100".
  • YouTube: "Super Talent 64GB SSD for Eee PC Problems with Power Saving" of the Super Hybride Engine.

• For installation, set “Hard Disk Drives” order:
  1. “1st Drive [USB:SMI USB DISK]” - Installation USB.
  2. “2nd Drive [HDD:SS-ASUS-PHISON]” - Boot drive with GRUB boot loader.
  3. “35d Drive [HDD:SM-ASUS-PHISON]” - ”/home” & swap partition.
• Basics:
  • Language = English.
  • Format = Ireland ⇒ Disadvantage, clock is set to UTC for Ireland instead to UTC+1 for Germany .
  • Keyboard = German.
• Drives:
  1. “SCSI2(0,0,0)(sda) 4.0 GB AT ASUS PHISN SSD” ( “SM-ASUS-PHISTON” ).
     • 2GB Ext4 primary partion, Mounted at ”/home”.
     • 2GB swap logical partition.
  2. “SCSI2(0,1,0)(sdb) 8.1 GB AT ASUS PHISN SSD” ( “SS-ASUS-PHISTON” ).
     • 8.1GB Ext4 primary partion, boot flag, mounted at ”/”.
     • No swap partion on this drive, due to lack of space with Debian 12. Note that ”/tmp” and ”/var/tmp” are also on this drive!
• Install the GRUB boot loader. “Device for bot loader installation:”.
  1. “Enter device manually”.
  2. ”/dev/sda (ata-ASUS-PHISON_SSD_SOQ1782266)”
  3. ”/dev/sdb (ata_ASUS-PHISON_SSD_SOQ2783202)”.
• Suggestion to install boot loader GRUB on the primary drive ( “sda” ).
  • ”/dev/sda” will install GRUB to your primary drive ( UEFI partition / boot record ).
  • ”/dev/sdb” will install GRUB to a secondary drive.
• “Software selection”.
  • [x] Debian desktop environment.
  • [x] GNOME.
  • [x] SSH Server.
  • [x] standard system utilities.
• After installation, set “Hard Disk Drives” order:
  1. “1st Drive [HDD:SM-ASUS-PHISON]” - “sda”, ”/home”, boot loader GRUB.
  2. “2nd Drive [HDD:SS-ASUS-PHISON]” - “sdb”.

• Wifi works fine after installation .

• Wifi hardware is detected, but no properly driver is installed .
• Error boot message “firmware: failed to load rt2870.bin”.
• Effect:
  • If Wifi is enabled, there is no access to the local network ( e.g. 192.168.168.* ), just access to Internet.
  • If Wifi is disabled, access both to the local network ( e.g. 192.168.168.* ) and Internet.
  • If you disable Wifi by Debian desktop menu item ( “Turn Off” ), you must press the ALT-F2 key combination to turn it on again. First you are in “Flight Mode”. You may leave “Flight Mode” by the Debian desktop menu.

• Dell Community "Vostro 1000 Linux wifi" - Check detected hardware:

  $sudo lspci -v
  01:00.0 Network controller: Ralink corp. RT2790 Wireless 802.11n 1T/2R PCIe
  	Subsystem: Ralink corp. RT2790 Wireless 802.11n 1T/2R PCIe
  	Physical Slot: eeepc-wifi
  	Kernel driver in use: rt2800pci
  	Kernel modules: rt2800pci
  

• Add a “non-free” component to /etc/apt/sources.list, for example:

  # Debian 11 "bullseye"
  deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free

• Life of a webmaster. Another web-master's blog "Linux does not see Wi-Fi on Realtek chipset. 'firmware: failed to load rt2870.bin' error (SOLVED)", 2022.
• In Debian Linux and Kali Linux, the rt2870.bin firmware is placed in the firmware-misc-nonfree package, install it:

  sudo apt install firmware-misc-nonfree

• On Ubuntu, Linux Mint and their derivatives, run the following command:

  sudo apt install linux-firmware

• Debian Wiki "Firmware".
• Google - Search for "firmware failed to load rt2860.bin".