Hey all,

I have an Asus eeepc 4g series 700, the very first eeepc model.
I've used it a bit in the past, not that much, but it was useful form time to time. Right now it's just collecting dust in a shelf
For some reason, the battery stopped working, the computer dies at once if I take unplug the power. It's pretty useless to me, even if the battery would work, I don't think I have much use for it, if any at all.

Routers are ridiculously cheap these days, but I'm kind of an ecologist so I think it's just unnecessary to buy a router when I have perfectly capable hardware of much higher specs I can use.

I searched the forums and the wiki and didn't find much information about this. I'm guessing the x86 build should work out of the box. Does it? If not, what configurations/modifications are necessary?Has anybody tried it on an eeepc?

I'm comfortable with more advanced installation procedures, but I'm not sure I am willing to spend like a whole day patching and compiling drivers, etc. I.e. I might just grab a router if the installation requires much time and work.

I've got nothing against OpenWrt, but since you've got plenty of RAM and SSD, you might want to consider running a lightweight Debian installation on it (see this page), and just configure it as a router.  The ath5k driver in recent Linux kernels supports hostap mode, so you can set it up as an access point.

What advantage would I have if I would run debian instead?
I'm suspecting that 'configuring it as a router' means messing up with a handful of configuration files, shellscripts and whatnot and ending up with a working solution that wouldn't provide practical features such as a web interface.
Not that I'm not familiar with that, quite frankly I just don't see the point of it.

But going back to the my original questions. So the answer is yes? Can I just intall the x86 build anb be happy? Or are there any issues I should be aware of?

Or use Ubuntu for Netbooks edition...

I kindly ask everybody to stay on topic. If my questions were not specific enough I can rephrase, but I think was rather clear.

I have tried, the LAN does not work.. and external usb keyboard is also useless...

I know this is an old thread, but the following procedure might be useful to anyone else who comes here. The same resulting image has been tested with a 701 and a 900, but I suspect it will work with a 700 as well (perhaps someone else can confirm). Based on tomlase's comment, I dug around until I found the ethernet and wifi modules required, plus the USB modules. I took one look at the docs for creating a build environment and thought, "Life's too short." So instead, I just modified the generic image in a VM and converted the VMDK back to a raw image for writing to the Eee PC. Here's my step-by-step, using Windows as the build platform:

You will need:

• VMware player

• the generic X86 OpenWRT image

• the qemu-img.exe and libssp-0.dll files from the QEMU Windows package

• a bootable USB flash drive containing System Rescue CD 4.5.2 or later, with at least 80MB spare

Stage I

1. Create a VM using the instructions here. Note that if you use VMware Player, you won't have a choice of NIC, it will default to pcnet32.

2. Boot the VM and set both interfaces to dhcp IPv4

3. uci commit

4. passwd

5. sync ; reboot

Stage II

1. opkg update

2. opkg remove kmod-3c59x kmod-8139too kmod-e100 kmod-e1000 kmod-ne2k kmod-sis900 kmod-r8169 r8169-firmware kmod-via-rhine kmod-via-velocity

3. opkg install kmod-8021q kmod-ath5k kmod-atl2 kmod-usb-core kmod-usb-hid kmod-usb2 kmod-usb-wdm

4. opkg install kmod-mmc kmod-usb-storage kmod-usb-storage-extras usbreset usbutils

5. opkg install kmod-fs-ext4 kmod-fs-ntfs kmod-fs-vfat e2fsprogs fdisk ntfs-3g

6. opkg install hostapd hostapd-utils iwinfo wpad

7. Since you've got plenty of room, why not add some more useful packages:
       opkg install diffutils ip-full lftp procps tcpdump vim

8. sync ; reboot

9. login via LuCI and make sure everything is as you would expect

Stage III

1. halt

2. convert the vmdk back to a raw img file using qemu:
       qemu-img convert -f vmdk openwrt-x86-generic-combined-ext4.vmdk -O raw openwrt-x86-eeepc-combined-ext4.img

3. copy the new img file to a folder on your SystemRescueCD USB drive (note which folder you used)

4. boot the target machine with the USB drive until you get a command line

5. dd if=/path/to/openwrt-x86-eeepc-combined-ext4.img of=/dev/sda

6. startx and then run gparted

7. use gparted to expand sda2 into the free space on the disk

8. reboot the Eee PC and off you go.

(Last edited by jrdld on 9 Sep 2015, 10:35)

Nice.