Asus EEE PC emulation

January 14th, 2008, 02:37.

I’ve taken the time to torrent a rescue CD for Asus’ Eee PC. On it, there’s a complete disk image which I used to configure and run the Eee software inside a Qemu.

From what I have seen in the first hour, the system looks pretty messed up. It’s running Xandros Linux, which is in turn based on Debian. It eschews running the normal boot process through /sbin/init, and instead relies on a binary called /sbin/fastinit. It simply runs startx as user “user”. The terminal is available by hitting Ctrl-Alt-T, defaults to an UTF version of xterm. User “user” is in the sudoers file, so you can just sudo whatever you want.

I’ll be playing around with the default installation for a few days before I decide if it’s of any use or if it should get junked. In the meanwhile, I’ll try to explain to my girlfriend why I need another gadget and maybe even buy it.

The thing that I like the most is that it’s a piece of complete, self contained hardware for a meager price. I mean, I always wanted to have a go at laptop case modding, but price was always an issue. This thing, hell, this is practically free for a PC of these (quite decent) properties.

Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the interface running on my Debian Linux laptop:

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