I have recently purchased an Asus EeePC 1000H to replace my IBM T42 whose battery can only last me for an hour when I’m on the road. The EeePC comes with Windows XP Home on a 80GB HDD and promises a 4 to 7-hours battery life with its 6-cell battery pack.
Installing Fedora Core 9 is straightforward. All you need is either an USB external DVD drive or to create a Fedora live image on an USB thumbdrive. Hit <F2> to access the BIOS to configure it from to boot from the USB device and your Fedora installer will start loading. My EeePC comes pre-configured with 2 x 40 GB partitions (1 has been used for Windows XP Home and the otherĀ is empty). So I just wiped out my second partition to create a Linux partition with a small swap 1GB partition.
However, the network devices on the EeePC are not supported by the kernel from the Fedora DVD. These devices have the following signatures (lspci output):
01:00.0 Network controller: RaLink Unknown device 0781
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Attansic Technology Corp. Unknown device 1026 (rev b0)
Fortunately, I have a 3G USB modem which I have setup with minimal efforts to be able to access the Internet through it. With the 3G connectivity, I upgrade the kernel to 2.6.25.11-97.fc9.i686 using yum and the wired LAN starts working with the atl1e kernel module. If you don’t have alternative means of Internet access, you can still download the 2.6.25.11-97.fc9.i686 kernel source rpm to an USB thumbdrive, copy it and rebuild it on the EeePC.
Right now, I’m still working on getting the wireless LAN to work. I plan to release the kernel module once I have gotten the wlan working.
Updates (2008-11-08): I have gotten the wireless LAN to work on the Asus 1000h. Please refer to this link for more details.