Monday, July 9, 2012

Loading Debian on a WM8650 netbook

SOFTWARE IS TO HARDWARE AS _________ IS TO CAKES
This is the netbook I purchased - at 70 dollars it was a pretty great deal if you like to hack around and put Linux on things.

I was inspired by a post on Hack A Day about putting ArchLinux on one of these netbooks - I like Debian more, so I figured I would start with the rootfs and eventually try to get a custom kernel going. This post will walk through the rootfs setup side of this process.


DEBIAN, MY DEBIAN
Using the instructions from here
I got an SDCARD with Debian to boot on my system. It took a very long time to boot, but it did come up eventually. However, there were a few issues on my hardware.


THE SADDEST OF ALL KEYS
First major problem - keyboard wasn't working correctly. From a post deep in this webpage...

I finally was successful to get the keyboard problem solved.

In a first desperate attempt I changed the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file

Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier "keyboard"
   Driver "evdev"
   Option "Device" "/dev/input/event1"
#           Option "Device" "/dev/input/event2"
EndSection

Then the keyboard worked BUT NOT the touchpad any more.
So I changed :

Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier "utk_touch"
   Driver "evdev"
   Option "Device" "/dev/input/event2"
#Option "Device" "/dev/input/event3"
EndSection


This fix solved the keyboard problem for me.


WHY FIGHT
To fix the wifi, go to the start menu, under internet, then do WIFI ON.
The output of lsusb should mention Ralink Technology Corp. RT5370

cd /lib/modules/2.6.32.9-default
modprobe -r rt3070sta
rm rt3070sta.ko

cp rt3070sta_rt5370.ko rt3070sta.ko

Next, open into /usr/local/sbin/wifi-on (nano /usr/local/sbin/wifi-on), and commented out the line that starts the network manager. I also added a line for ifconfig ra0 up.

Edit /usr/local/sbin/wifi-disconnect, and remove the line that turned off network-manger.

Next restart the netbook. Now when you do WIFI ON as above, and then ifconfig, you should see a device labeled ra0. This is the wifi device.
Connecting to your network will require the use of wpa_supplicant

First, generate a .conf file for the network you want to connect to by doing
wpa_passphrase <ssid> [passphrase] > {configfile}. In my case this was something like
wpa_passphrase "MyWifiNetwork" "coolcoolschool" > home.conf

Next, associate with the wifi network by doing
wpa_supplicant -Dwext -ira0 -chome.conf -B
Finally, to get an ipaddress, do
dhclient ra0

You can also scan the surrounding area for networks to join by doing iwlist ra0 scanning


ODD FUTURE WORK

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