Debian Lenny on the EeePC 1000HE, 2.6.26-2-686 kernel

Today I finally stopped um-ing and ah-ing and went and bought a new Asus EeePC 1000HE :)

I originally bought a 701SD and loved it, but gradually grew frustrated with the tiny screen. The smaller netbooks get a bad rap for their keyboards being to small, but I actually got used to them. The screen was the bigger issue for me.

I bought a second hand 900 a couple of months back and that was a lot better screen-wise, but the Celeron processor and short battery life proved troubling again.

Finally I shelled out a little bit and got this 1000HE, which sports an Atom N280 1.66GHz, 1GB of RAM, and a battery life declared to be '9.5 hours' worth, but which I expect to be a bit over 5 hours at normal use - which is still fantastic!

As I said, I've owned a couple of eeePCs, and have become accustomed to upgrading to the backported 2.6.29 kernel on Debian after a fresh Lenny install. The newer kernel provides better support for wireless on most of these eee models, so I expected to have to do the same again per the wiki notes.

However, to my surprise, the stock 2.6.26-2-686 kernel in Lenny worked with wireless straight out of the box! No mods necessary. Webcam etc works fine too, though this is increasingly common on Linux without requiring extra work.

Hotkeys appear to all work fine too; volume, wireless, screen brightness etc. The machine also suspends correctly when the lid is closed.

So far, this is the best out-of-the-box experience I've had with a laptop on Linux, especially Debian, and I've had many such experiences!

Only one thing wasn't right, and that was that by default, the fonts in Gnome were huge, just too big to not be distracting. Apparently some sort of DPI issue per the user with the 1000HA who made such a note on the wiki.

The same fix worked for me, adding this to /etc/gdm/gdm.conf and restarting:

[server-Standard]
name=Standard server
command=/usr/bin/X -audit 0 -dpi 96
flexible=true

Other than that, fantastic! Here are some shots.