Versione italiana: Asus non terminerà la produzione degli Eee PC da 7 e 8.9 pollici
A few days ago Asus’ president Jerry Shen has been misquoted: e-magazines believed that Asus would stop the 7 and 8.9 inches production, to focus on larger Eee PCs.

A spokesman told ZDNet that Asus will continue the production of the smaller Eee PCs.

This isn’t official, but I think that it’s true: Eee PC’s benefits are:

1. small size…
2. … and low weight…

… so you can carry it inside your bag, without any addictional carriage.

With 10” Asus betrayed a little the first Eee PC’s philosophy (even if there could be someone that may prefer a larger and more comfortable notebook); but, completely stopping the production of smaller Eee PCs, Asus could betray all the smaller Eee PCs’ fans.

What do you think about it?

Most Commented Posts

• Eee PC: forgotten password reset
• How to change Eee PC’s theme and title bar - Easy Mode
• Enabling horizontal scrolling on Firefox for the Eee PC
• Reducing Eee PC’s task bar height in Easy Mode
• Asus won’t stop 7” and 8.9” Eee PC production

Sorry for the screenshot language, but I own an Italian Eee PC
… and sorry for my poor English, too!

Don’t worry: you can reset the password, setting a new one without resetting your Eee PC with the built-in “Restore Factory Settings“… and without losing your precious data!

Removing the login password request

To remove the password request (in order to be able to do the login again) you have to delete a configuration file… so, you’ll need to access the file system. You can do this entering the single user mode.

Entering boot loader (Grub) of the Eee PC

Turn on your Eee PC; as soon as the first screen appears (the one with the “Press F2 to run setup” request)…

… press and keep pressed the F9 key, until the Grub main screen will appear. Now, you have 3 options:

1. Normal Boot;
2. Perform Disk Scan;
3. Restore Factory Setting.

Booting Single User Mode

Select (using the arrow keys) Perform Disk Scan and press the “e” key, to edit the line. Now select the second line (the one that begins with “kernel”), and press “e” again.

The cursor will blink at the end of the line. As the article How to Create a Rescue Mode for an Asus Eee PC says, to enter the single user mode you have to replace the string XANDROSSCAN=y with XANDROSBOOTDEBUG=y

Press enter, then press the “b” key to boot single user mode.

Removing the configuration file with BusyBox

Now you’ll enter BusyBox, a small Linux-based system, with an ash shell. With this shell, you’ll delete the configuration file /home/user/.AsusLauncher/requireLogin: this way, you’ll remove the login password request!

Execute the following commands:

1. for the Eee PC 701 or Eee PC 904 HD:
   1. mount /dev/sda2 /mnt-user/
   2. cd /mnt-user/home/user/
   3. rm .AsusLauncher/requireLogin
   4. exit
2. for the Eee PC 900:
   1. mknod /dev/sdb b 8 16
   2. mknod /dev/sdb1 b 8 17
   3. mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt-user/
   4. rm /mnt-user/user/.AsusLauncher/requireLogin
   5. exit

(click on the photo to zoom it, to be able to check the commands)

Press return to reboot and to enter your Eee PC without the login request!

Resetting the old password and setting a new one

Now you’re able to read and edit your files, but you can’t administrate your Eee PC: you have to set a new password.

Open the terminal (with CTRL+ALT+T). To set a new user password type:

sudo passwd user

Press enter and type the new password.

Do the same for the root password, typing

sudo passwd

As promised, you’re playing again with your Eee PC without a data loss!

• Enabling horizontal scrolling on Firefox for the Eee PC

First of all, I’ll show you the result:

Zoom

Let’s begin. After having copied the IceWM preferences file into your home directory, open the Terminal (CTRL+ALT+T), and open IceWM preferences with the following command:

kate ~/.icewm/preferences

The Kate editor will open; search for the following text

# Dimension of the small icons
# SmallIconSize=16 # [8-128]

and substitute it with

# Dimension of the small icons
# SmallIconSize=16 # [8-128]
SmallIconSize=12

You can use also another number (the minimum is 8).

Save the file and restart IceWM to obtain, on your Eee PC, a thinner Task Bar.

• How to change Eee PC’s theme and title bar - Easy Mode

Let’s take a look at the final result:

Eee PC’s IceWM with the “Yak” theme
(zoom)

As you can see from the following comparison between the default theme and another thin theme (Crux-Teal), you can gain 10 pixel of vertical space (but there are themes even thinner):

Changing Eee PC’s Theme

Create IceWM configuration files for the current user

Open the terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) and type the following command:

cp -r /etc/X11/icewm/ ~/.icewm

This way, you’ll have a copy of IceWM configuration in your home directory: IceWM will read your settings, instead the system ones. ). A little footnote: you can paste commands on the Eee PC’s terminal simply pressing CTRL+Ins.

Additional IceWM themes (optional)

You can install more IceWM themes adding additional repositories. This step isn’t necessary; however, you’ll find more minimal themes. Be careful: it’s dangerous.

Enable additional Eee PC repositories

If you haven’t done it yet, you have to extend your software repositories. Read (carefully) the tutorial Adding additional software repositories. If you want to do this, it’s at your own risk!

IceWM themes’ package installation

Now, open the terminal (CTRL+ALT+T) and type:

sudo apt-get install icewm-themes

Show Start Menu in Eee PC Easy Mode

You can change IceWM’s theme with the start menu, which is hidden, by So, you have to enable it. At the end, you can always hide it, if you want so.

This are the steps you have to follow, as “Working with the IceWM Windows Manager“ says.

Type, from the terminal:

kate ~/.icewm/preferences

The Kate text editor will open; search the string

TaskBarShowStartMenu

and change its value from 0 to 1, this way:

# Show ‘Start’ menu on task bar
# TaskBarShowStartMenu=1 # 0/1
TaskBarShowStartMenu=1

Restart IceWM without closing opened programs

To apply the changes, you have to restart IceWM. You can do it without closing anything, simply typing, at the terminal:

killall -s SIGHUP icewm

Changing theme

To change the theme, go to Start Menu > Settings > Themes, and choose your preferred skin.

They are too many, right? I prefer the Yak theme, and a few others. Here they are:

• yamm
• unusualscars
• small (not too good, but it’s thin)
• paranoia
• metal-small
• mozmodern
• K-ath-Leen
• jim-mac
• IceGnome2
• FrostyG (the start button is a bit too large, but you can deactivate it)
• ElbergBlue
• Dusk
• Crux-Teal
• BlueCrux
• BlueHeart
• Aalglatt
• Anon

Deactivate Eee PC Start menu (opzionale)

As you can see, the start menu is a bit too empty; you can add more useful menu items, however, reading “Setting Up a More Useful Start Menu“.

Otherwise you can remove it. Repeat the previous steps, restoring the 0 (zero).

Remove icons from taskbar

As you can see, the SOS, Eee PC Tips and Shutdown buttons are too large, leaving a little space for task buttons.

You can remove them changing, again, the IceWM configuration file. Open the terminal and type:

kate ~/.icewm/toolbar2

Comment out lines number 4, 5 and 6, putting a # at the beginning of every line. You can always execute the task manager pressing CTRL+ALT+CANC, and you can halt the Eee PC pressing its power button.

Here’s another image, with a minimal Firefox GUI::

(zoom image)

Removing the “show desktop” button

Since you can hide all open windows pressing the “meta” keyword button (the one with the home icon), you can save another pixels removing the taskbar button. Open terminal and type:

kate ~/.icewm/preferences

Find TaskBarShowShowDesktopButton, remove the # character at the beginning of the line, and set its value to 0 (zero). Restart IceWM to apply the changes. Finally, the task bar has more space for the task buttons.

Hide the task bar automatically

You can save additional vertical space showing the task bar only at mouseovers. Type, from terminal:

kate ~/.icewm/preferences

Search TaskBarAutoHide, remove the # at the beginning of the line and set its value to 1. As always, restart IceWM to apply the changes.

Appendix: change themes without using start menu

To change Eee PC’s theme without the start menu, type, from terminal:

kate ~/.icewm/theme

Now you have to know the exact theme’s name. For example, if you want to use FrostyG, insert

Theme="FrostyG/default.theme"

Save and close the editor. As always, restart IceWM to apply the changes! Here is a screenshot of the FrostyG theme:

Zoom image

• Reducing Eee PC’s task bar height in Easy Mode

Activate the Eee PC’s touchpad horizontal scrolling

Activating the horizontal scrolling on the Eee PC is easy: in Easy Mode, just go to Settings > Touchpad > Scrolling, and check “horizontal scrolling“!

Fixing Firefox’s strange scrolling behaviour

Open Firefox, and open its prefences page typing about:config in the address bar. Using the small search box, search for
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action
and set this variable to 0 (zero).
Now, search
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines
and set it to true. That’s all, now the horizontal scrolling should work fine in Firefox.

Note: this little how-to should work not only for the Eee PC, but for any Linux distribution!

• Eee PC: forgotten password reset
• Welcome!