40.26 ASUS EeePC 1005P (Rhesus)

The system was purchased from Bing Lee for $425. It is an excellent netbook with a bright screen, and purportedly a long battery life, and well featured when running Ubuntu.

40.26.1 Rhesus Usage

Rhesus is a netbook computer for portability and general computing requirements including presentations, email, skype, web browsing, music and video. It has been replaced [121230] as the primary portable machine, and has since acted as a audio media server connected to a receiver, for reception of internet radio and podcasts.

40.26.2 Rhesus Hardware

The netbook features a 10.1 inch display, an Intel Atom N450, 1.6GHz CPU, 11 hours battery life, with 1GB of DDR2 memory and a 250GB hard drive. It includes an inbuilt SD card reader, 3 USB2 sockets, wireless, bluetooth, and a TouchPad.

40.26.3 Specifications

From the dmesg, dmidecode, lspci and lshw commands and /proc/cpuinfo:

Spec Details
Machine: Asus EeePC 1005P
CPU: Intel Atom N450 1.66GHz
Bogomips: 3333.08
Memory: 1GiB DDR2 DIMM Synchronous 667MHz (1.5 ns)
Network: Atheros AR8132 / L1c Gigabit Ethernet (atl1c)
Atheros AR9285 802.11bg wifi (ath9k)
Disk: Hitachi HTS45402 (250GB/232GiB ATA /dev/sda)
Video: N10 Family Integrated Graphics Controller (i915)
Camera: (uvcvideo)
Audio: N10/ICH 7 Family High definition Audio Controller (snd_hda_intel)
Touchpad: Synaptics SynPS/2 ()
Bluetooth: (btusb)
Boot: Grub2
Kernel: 2.6.32-21-generic

40.26.4 Operating System

Rhesus came with MS/Windows 7 Starter which was immediately installed over. Ubuntu Netbook Remix (10.4) was installed from USB [100503]. The iso image was downloaded from Ubuntu. It was uploaded to a 2GB USB Thumb drive formatted as fat32. The machine’s BIOS boot menu was obtained through a Ctrl-Esc on booting, selecting the removable drive. Successive upgrades of Ubuntu have been successful. Upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 [140422] went smoothly running do-release-upgrade.

40.26.5 Issues

Working: Skype (audio, though only external microphone), video, ethernet, wifi.

Not Tested: Skype (video), hibernate, suspend, external monitor.

Not Working: Skype with internal microphone (Sound Recorder records sound okay).

40.26.6 Rhesus Install Log

40.26.6.1 3 May 2010

Download ubuntu-10.4-netbook-i386.iso from http://www.ubuntu.com. Write to a 2GB USB thumb drive using ImageWriter (usb-creator-gtk).

Then start the EeePC holding Ctrl-Esc to get into the boot menu to boot from the USB HDD. Getting the boot menu seems tricky on netbooks. Sometimes it worked, one time I needed to F2 then F10, then OK, then repeatedly press Esc.

Install went forward just fine.

To get the Fn-F5 and Fn-F6 working properly (rather than randomly), change a line in the file /etc/defailt/grub:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor splash"

and then

$ sudo update-grub2

It worked just fine after this.

Wifi did not seem to be working at first, though the module seemed to have been loaded (ath9k). I started Network Tools under System, and that allowed specificaiton of the passphrase, and then it started working and continues to work on reboot.

40.26.7 Rhesus Troubleshooting

40.26.7.1 12.04 Upgrade: Sound Input Issues

After upgrading, recording audio from the internal mic or from an external mic resulting in a very noisey/scratchy background and low quality voice. Solution was found to add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-audio-dev/alsa-daily/ubuntu precise main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-audio-dev/alsa-daily/ubuntu precise main

The install the latest version of the sound driver:

$ wajig install alsa-hda-dkms

Then reboot:

$ sudo reboot

Sound was much better. Now has a level of contstant white noise in the background. On advice I also added the following to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf, but made little difference to the background noise - so stay with it for now - sounds okay.

options snd-hda-intel model=asus

Note that the built in microphone is working just fine too.



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