Installing Cauldron Mageia 9 on an Eee PC 901
The install of Mageia 8 ended with a boot for a kernel panic :/ (I had no updates)
Therefore I decided to test the install with current beta2 of Mageia 9 (as of 2023-06-21):
- 1st SSD of 4 GB dedicated to /boot (2 GB ext4) and swap (2 GB)
- 2nd SSD of 16 GB dedicated to / (ext4)
- I enabled the Ethernet connection to Internet & the updates during installation (core, non-free, tainted)
I began by 12h00, failed with Mageia 8, then decided to install current Mageia beta2 9 cauldron and it was successful by 16h00 (took ~1h30), with the upgrade from Mageia 8 to 9 only I would have expected at least 4 hours :-) (slow SSD... too many packages to update)
- I booted successfully Gnome, task-gnome-minimal was installed (gedit is available and gnome-power-statistics, but not rhythmbox for example)
- A bit slow at the beginning (gnome-shell, tracker and mandb taking 99% of 1 CPU core for indexing, then coming back to 5%-20% on each core)
Follow-up:
20230627 - switch to kernel 6.3.9-desktop-2 i686 + use powertop
20230621 - initial install task-gnome-minimal + task-lxqt
What could be enhanced for installation
- the graphic installer does not work well in 1024x600 (which is the resolution of the Eee PC 901)
- buttons like `Next` at the bottom are not displayed : I've got to guess where they are with the mouse (below the screen) or hope they are sometimes displayed
- there are graphic glitches, sometimes the screen is splitted in too, letting appear Next button so I can click on it :-) otherwise, Tab+Space (or Enter to validate) works if I find the right button
- If I had access to the text installer, it would have been easier (or I could have connected to an external screen with VGA adapter)
- get a better SSD (specific to Eee PC... M2 ?), perhaps faster and with more room for installation
Switching to lxqt
There's task-lxqt which permits itWhy lxqt? Well,
- LXDE uses too many GNOME processes, which induces CPU consumption (and some RAM)
- enlightenment seemed to have a bug and consume 99% of one core on a previous installation I made on an Eee PC 1000 (I've to diagnose what configuration could optimize it)
With GNOME, gkrellm shows that I've got 1500 M / 2000 available (500 consumed, some being not shown as in cache)
With lxqt I expect 1800 M / 2000 available and less than 3 % / core CPU consumption
- gkrellm shows 1700 M / 2000 and 2% to 15% CPU usage
Disk space used:
- sda : 35 MB / 2 GB for /boot
- sdb : 6,4 GB / 15 GB for / after installation of GNOME & LXQT (+ gkrellm + lshw, I'll add some games later :p 2175 packages)
Everything seems to work: wifi, blutooth, touchpad, webcam...
though the CPU Intel Atom N270 @1,60 GHz is still slow and the screen 1024x600 a bit small, the GPU Mobile 945GSE Express Integrated Graphics doing good work
The battery is given for 55,3 Wh, the last full charge was 48,2 Wh which gives about an autonomy of 4h (discharge rate of 9,34 Wh)
Some remaining problems / things to check
- What's the reason why I've got to push power button / then again to get to the authentication prompt?
- checked use powertop to tweak hardware use => results from 9,4 Wh to 8,6 Wh
Enhancements for LXQT
For touchpad (ETPS/2 Elantech)- enable tap to click by default (like 2-fingers sliding)
- adapt acceleration speed to 0,50 so that going from top-left corner to bottom-right corner on the touchpad gives the same result on screen
some interesting references
https://www.notebookcheck.biz/Intel-Atom-N270-Notebook-Processor.28990.0.html N270 technical datahttps://libre-ouvert.tuxfamily.org/index.php?article48/debian-8-jessie-sur-netbook-dell-mini-9
TestingMageia InstallLaptop
