openSUSE 11.4 on Eee PC 1201n

martin_helm · November 7, 2011, 7:32pm

Since I received a private message about installing openSUSE on above
mentioned netbook I will answer that public for anyone else who wants to
know or wants to comment

Eee PC 1201n and OpenSuSE

Hi Martin.
Your signature indicates that you are using the Eee PC 1201n installed
OpenSuSE.
I have a netbook, and I want to install OpenSuSE on it.
As a person who has already spent installing opensuse, I would like to know
from you whether there was not any specific problems, and all the equipment
work immediately after installation?

Sorry for my English, I have to use Google translator to compensate for gaps
in knowledge.
Best regards, Anton.

First of all the netbook has no optical drive so one needs to create a
bootable usb. I do not know and did not check how the live cd versions work
since I almost always use the netinstall.
http://tinyurl.com/dyuk6z8

You have to connect the netbook via wire to the network (the only feature of
the machine which does not work OOTB with 11.4 is the wireless adapter, but
it is easy to install that later).

Just install 11.4 (I use 64 bit) with the selctions you like after booting
from the usb. Btw I use the desktop kernel as far as I remember this is also
selected by default.

After the first login install all available updates (still connected by
wire).
Add the community nvidia repo in yast and then start yast -> software
management it will automatically install the proprietary nvidia driver.
To make wireless work add the following repository
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/driver:/wireless/11.4-update
and install
rtl8192se-kmp-desktop
rtl8192se-firmware

Reboot now (kernel was updated and it makes the nvidia driver and wireless
effective).

One additional thing you can do but its not a must:
Add acpi_osi=Linux to the bootloader, it improves a bit the function keys.

This was off to of my head, I hope I did not forget anything, maybe someone
else has this machine and has additional comments.

martin_helm · November 7, 2011, 7:50pm

Sorry that this went into the general hardware forum, I wanted to answer that question in laptop, if some admin feels that this is here the completely wrong place feel free to move it.

FireLizard · November 7, 2011, 8:19pm

Thank You Martin.

martin_helm · November 7, 2011, 8:44pm

Just as an additional comment:
I also ran 12.1 RC1 and RC2 on that machine for several days respectively
and under real world conditions.
So far it was a good experience, wlan in 12.1 works out of the box without
additional drivers. But since I noticed the machine running at higher
temperature and also had some random lockups I decided to switch back and
wait until after the final release to try it again when time permits (which
I did not have now) to track down the reasons for the machine running hot
and where the lockup came from and howto solve that.
With 11.4 I did and do not see these problems.