jueves, 27 de diciembre de 2007

Making the Asus R2H look good

The Asus R2H has been reviewed as underpowered mainly due to its 900 mhz. ULV Celeron but the truth is that the original setup makes it take ( painstaking ) 4 minutes to fully load all the startup apps in windows, that can be solved by removing all startup items under windows->run type msconfig (hit enter for the less skilled ), under startup remove all but the following
... this will allow you to still use your quick launchers such as configuration and programs. This is all the advice for windows, you might want to install windowblinds and such ... but now to the real deal.

The ASUS R2H can look good and perform really fast on linux, when i say fast and good i mean full graphics acceleration enabled under Ubuntu 7.10 as can be seen in the video below and can run metisse as can be seen in the images below

Metisse running on xorg 7.2
Metisse running on fwmn (credits to crazy___cow on this one)



Small demo video of graphics acceleration under ubuntu. Captured using xvidcap at 10 fps.

Lastest picture of the system


google-up "how to install Ubuntu from a pendrive" or head to
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/09/28/usb-ubuntu-710-gutsy-gibbon-install/, you could back up the whole drive in a 6.5 gb file using the dd command under linux and filling all free spaces with big files full of zeros (remember 4gb is that max file size for FAT32) and piping it through gzip (bz2 should yield better results but it'll take longer). My suggestion is to install it in the 20Gb partition.

After installing Ubuntu 7.10, this is what you get out-of-the-box:
  • Accelerated graphics after a sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg because the auto installer failed (miserably) to detect the correct chipset
  • Sound (front sound correspond to headset and the speaker to the mono which must be un-muted)
  • Wireless works great
  • Bluetooth
What you have to work with to enable the rest
  • Fingerprint scanner: can be enabled and linked to the PAM authentication system using fprint
  • Webcam: works thanks to the efforts on the syntek open source drivers
  • Touchscreen: works as pointed out here using the evtouch projects code
This shows that this machine is quite capable of packing enough power through proper configs :D

So... where is the hardware hacking... i'm going to replace the 60gb harddrive with a 8gb SSD as soon as I can get my hands on the infamous and ever elusive ZIF to 44 pin IDE adapter...