The driver for the wifi in the Eee isn’t under the GPL, however, and therefore only works on the Xandros kernel provided with the default OS. Since I really can’t live without wifi and it is not my first choice to buy replacement hardware, in the interim, I’m living with using the Xandros kernel and modules on Debian. I can learn from studying the Xandros components in action, but it’s not a solution I’m happy with in the long term. The Debian-eeepc project’s goal is to produce a pure Debian solution, at least as far as that is possible given the hardware present in an unmodified system. On that front, I think the best bet is for ath5k to support the particular Atheros chip in the Eee. (Yes, I know about ndiswrapper, but for both technical and philosophical reasons I won’t use it.)

Now comes the challenging part. Xandros is the default OS and we want Debian on it instead. I have started supplementing the system with packages from Etch and Etch-backports using apt pinning, but already I have noticed some cracks beginning to develop: with pure Xandros, an SD card was automounted when it was inserted. Now it fails. Also, the Network utility no longer launches. I can work around these glitches for now, but it is plain that in the long term this Xandros/Etch hybrid is going to be more grief than it is worth.

To that end, enter Debian-eeepc. Building on the work started by timbobsteve and drawing from the collective experience of the Eeeuser.com community we will make a debian-live cd + debian-installer to install Debian (as pure as possible—obviously the kernel is going to be our most contentious issue) on the device. So stay tuned for more articles on that work-in-progress.

And how does my new toy shape up for mobile text editing so far? I’m delighted! For starters, this article was drafted on the bus home from work. The keyboard, while small, is still quite usable for touch-typing, the display is crisp and bright, and the size is just perfect for the cramped quarters of a public transit bus seat.

But beyond just editing text, I have loaded up the system with all of the tools that go around it: subversion, git, ruby, gcc, meld, etc. I’ll be able to manage a fair amount of development on the bus, with the exception being really large builds that will continue to be done on remote build systems.