Pursuing my obsession for lower electrical power, I have been
attempting to get an ASUS EEE Box (the desktop, not the
micro-notebook) working with SL5.0  .  The box draws only 16
watts, up to 20 with some USB peripherals added.  However, it
is a bit of a driver nightmare, and a few things are implemented
wrong (2.8V on the microphone input?  Should be 5V to power 
electret microphones).


I've got most of the problems solved, but the graphics is still
driving me a bit nuts.  It uses an Intel 945GM chipset.  I have
a 1400x1050 monitor, and have been fiddling around with
915resolution and xorg.conf and modelines, but X insists on
bringing up the display in ugly 1280x1024 mode using the vesa
driver in SL5.0 with the updated 2.6.18-92.1.18.el5 kernel and
X version 7.1.1 .  Playing with the i810 or i915 driver prevents
X from starting.  I am quite ignorant of what I am doing, but
don't know which portion of my ignorance to correct in order to
get this running.

The EEE and the 1400x1050 display works fine with the delivered
WinXP (on a different hard drive) and with installed Ubuntu
8.04 Hardy Heron (on yet a different drive).  It also works
directly off a live CD with Ubuntu 9.04alpha3 Jaunty Jackalope. 
I've been looking at the Xorg log from that for clues, but I
suspect that X and the drivers are so much newer than SL5
that there is little knowledge that ports backwards.

The eee will eventually end up in my wife's office, with a
1280x1024 display anyway - so I am probably wasting time trying
to get the larger monitor working properly.  However, there
might be folks here interested in the eee, so I will continue
attempting to do resolution hacks if that is of interest.

Does anybody care enough about this for me to spend a few
more hours banging my head against this wall?  If so, can
anyone point me at successful usages of Centos5/SL5 X with
Intel graphics chipsets and this non-standard VESA resolution?


BTW, I plan to run a VMware Win2K client on the SL5/EEE, with
Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Professional running, copying a
similar setup from my T30 laptop.  The next task is to compile
a custom kernel with some realtime timing hacks so that the
sound processing is smoother.  I will be using a USB mike,
bypassing the stupidly designed analog input.

With the Intel graphics sucking bandwidth out of the main
memory, I wonder if the speech recognition will fail?  Since
the T30 uses a 2GHz P4 with PC2200 RAM, and the EEE  uses
a 1.6GHz Atom with PC5300 DDR2 RAM, I suspect there will be
more overall bandwidth available for computation on the EEE.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs