However if you’ve got one, its likely getting a bit long in the tooth by now.

Getting BIOS setting errors on each boot up of your eeePC? If it’s asking you to reload setup defaults by pressing F2 every time you turn it on, it’s probably time to replace the CMOS backup battery.

With a hefty disclaimer of me not being responsible for anything you do or don’t do… here’s how:

First buy a replacement battery. It is an ML 1220 3V rechargeable button battery. eBay or Amazon will be your best bets. If you can get one with metal contacts pre-soldered to the battery, it will make your life easier. Don’t get a CR1220 — those are non-rechargeable.

When ready, it’s time to open up the eeePC.

1. Unplug the eeePC and remove the main battery.

2. Turn the netbook upside down and remove the four Philips screws, one in each corner. Unscrew the memory flap on the bottom to find a fifth screw inside. Unscrew that too.

Unscrew the five screws

3. Turn the netbook right-side up and flip open the screen. You need to separate the keyboard from the body. It is held on with small plastic clips along the top side. Use a small plastic spudger tool or (gently) use a small flat-head screwdriver and slide it along the top gap between the keyboard and the body. There are about five clips.

5. Once the clips are released, the keyboard will slide upward. It is still connected near the bottom by a ribbon cable. Gently use a small flat-head screwdriver to flip open the black latch holding the cable to the mainboard, release the cable and remove the keyboard.

Unclip the keyboard ribbon cable

6. Now it’s time to begin removing the top shell of the netbook. Remove the five screws you can see. One is underneath the “Warranty void if broken or removed” sticker. There’s no way your eeePC is still in warranty. (If it were, you should know you can easily buy tamper-resistant “Warranty void if broken” stickers on eBay). Once the screws are removed, gently release the touchpad ribbon cable before going any further. Again, a small flat-head screwdriver prying on each side of the black clip will release it.

Unclip the touchpad ribbon cable

7. Release the top shell by sliding your plastic tool or a small flat-head screwdriver between the two shell halves along the front. Again there are 5 or 6 clips. You only need to go along the front… The entire top half will separate once the clips are released. It will come away since the touchpad cable is disconnected.

8. The battery is on the lower left-hand corner of the mainboard, probably peeping out from behind a wireless module that is taped to the top of the board, just below the big fan. The battery is wrapped in dark green heatshrink plastic, and clips to the mainboard using a white connector.

The eeePC is finally open. The backup battery is hiding on the lower left of the netbook (top of this photo, to the left of the fan).

9. Carefully unstick the wireless module and move it out of the way. Then use small needle-nosed pliers to carefully unplug the white plastic plug connecting the battery. You can cut away the green heatshrink material to expose the battery underneath. If you test the voltage across the battery, you should see significantly less than 3V. Mine was down to under 1V.

The CMOS backup battery with heatshrink

The CMOS backup battery exposed

10. Snip off the black and red wires as close to the battery as possible, and strip and carefully solder them onto the terminal clips of your new battery.

Bear in mind that soldering to lithium batteries isn’t the safest of things you will ever do. Lithium batteries aren’t all that friendly, and can catch fire or explode very violently. If your battery doesn’t have terminals pre-welded to it, if you are cack-handed or only have a cheap non-temperature controlled iron, skip soldering and just use electrical tape. Just be sure to clean the battery thorough and fasten the wire well enough to ensure it won’t move and potentially short out the battery, causing another potentially amusing fire at a later date.

If there are no terminals, solder the wires onto small pieces of broken paperclip coils wound into mini single-turn springs, place these springs on each side of the battery, ensuring they don’t touch or short out the battery, and tape around the battery tightly. The compression should make a good connection.

If yours does have terminals, then go ahead and solder, but use the “heatsink trick”: To sink heat away from the battery when soldering, use needle-nosed pliers to grasp the battery terminal between where you are soldering and the battery. As the metal of the pliers acts as a much larger heat reservoir than the battery, a lot of the heat will travel into the pliers rather than into the battery. Also, solder quickly, wear eye protection, keep your head back and flammable materials away, and use an aforementioned decent temperature-controlled soldering iron. If you, or any part of you or your property, family, friends or pets does decide to go on fire or otherwise get hurt as a result of this article: tough luck, I warned you I would take no responsibility

Make sure you solder or tape the right way round: Red to the + terminal and black to the -.

The new battery, before soldering

After soldering

11. Once soldered or taped, use electrical tape to wrap the battery and terminals, so that no metal parts are exposed. Make sure there is no way the two terminals can ever touch themselves or anything else.

Then clip it back to the mainboard (make sure you clip it the right way round — don’t force it in the wrong way. Mine had a pen mark on the top to show which way was “up”) stick back the wireless module, and reassemble the netbook in reverse order. Be careful when re-seating the ribbon cables — wiggle them left and right to seat them as far as possible before re-engaging the clips with your other hand.

Tadaaa… Done. Extra points if you have an anonymous screw left over after putting it back together.

All small white things are good

You should now no longer have to reload BIOS defaults on every boot. The CMOS backup battery should be good for another three to five years.

As the 1005HA is pretty new, it has a few odd hardware quirks that won’t be fully supported out of the box until the next release of Ubuntu.

Here I run through what I did to end up with a 100% working install — including all Fn hotkeys. The good news is that it is very easy!

My perfect Ubuntu setup on the 1005HA

If you followed these instructions before, and now want to upgrade to Karmic, see my notes here.

Step 1: Installing Ubuntu

Start off with Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It is designed for netbooks and comes with a customised kernel. Even if you don’t like the special netbook interface, it can be easily reverted to the default Ubuntu look with a single click.

Download it here, and follow the simple instructions here to create an installer on a USB stick.

Power on your netbook, and repeatedly tap F2 to bring up the BIOS configuration.

Under “Boot settings”, disable “Boot Booster”, and hit F10 to save settings. We do this so that we can specify our USB installer as the boot device, and can re-enable it later.

When the machine reboots, hit “Esc” repeatedly to being up the boot menu. Choose the USB key, and away you go.

I wouldn’t bother with the “live preview”, and jump straight into the install.

The Ubuntu install process is straightforward.

Partitioning during install

Partition the disk however you like.

I created separate partitions for / (20gb), /boot (1gb), swap (4gb), bootbooster efi partition (16MB), and /home (the remainder), but how you do it is really up to you. I favour the above partitioning scheme to serve me really well over the years.

I set /home, /boot and / to format as ext4, and found performance to be great.

Don’t forget to create a swap partition of around 2x the amount of RAM if you want hibernation to work!

The EFI partition is for the Asus Boot Booster feature. It needs to be 8MB — I made it 16 just to be sure. At boot time, BIOS information is cached in this little partition so that the power-on self test can be bypassed. It speeds up the boot process by several seconds, which I think is great.

You can leave the EFI that comes pre-created. However, I wanted to blow away all partitions and start from scratch with my own partitioning scheme, so I recreated it. It must be a primary partition. It must be labelled as type “EFI”, which I was not able to do using the installer. See below for instructions on how to set it after the install is completed. Leave this partition unformatted.

Wired networking

After install, the first thing you’ll notice is that ethernet and wireless networking aren’t working. Fortunately, they’re easy to fix.

On a computer with working networking, download this file:

atheros-wired-driver-1005ha-linux

Open the zip file (double-click it), and extract it to the location of your choice. Then, in a terminal, navigate (‘cd’) to the ‘src’ directory of the unpacked files, and type:

make
sudo make install
sudo insmod atl1e.ko


If you receive an error after the first line, and you’re not running Ubuntu Jaunty UNR, ensure you have the linux headers package installed for your kernel — you’ll need to find and download the appropriate .deb and install it. Information is here.

Until Ubuntu Karmic is released, every time you do a kernel update, you will need to re-run the last two steps (preceded by a sudo rmmod atl1e.ko).

You now have ethernet network — so plug yourself in to a network cable and set up wireless…

Wireless networking

This is easy — you just need to install the driver back-ported from the next Ubuntu release.

First, enable the backports repository: Administration > Software Sources > Updates and enable “Unsupported Updates (jaunty-backports)”.

Then, open Synaptic Package Manager, find the package linux-backports-modules-jaunty, and install it.

Getting rid of the Netbook Remix interface

While the netbook remix interface is innovative, I prefer having a desktop and a normal panel with window switcher. To kill the netbook interface, Just go to Preferences > Switch Desktop Mode.

Gnome panels can take up too much space on a netbook screen — you can set them to auto-hide by right-clicking them and choosing Properties. To speed up the auto-hide behaviour, fire up gconf-editor, and navigate to apps > panel > toplevels, and reduce hide_delay and unhde_delay for each panel.

Super Hybrid Engine, Installing an eeePC tray utility, and getting all hotkeys to work

An eeePC tray utility is useful in order to utilise Asus’ so-called “Super Hybrid Engine”, which is really just marketing lingo for adjusting processor speed for different power:performance profiles. It also enables you to switch on/off all the eeePC’s integrated peripherals with a click or two, or using the hotkeys.

After a bit of trial and error, I found that the best tool for the job is “eeepc-tray”. It can be installed from a repository, which means that it will be automatically kept up to date.

Follow these simple instructions to add the statux.org repository.

When done, fire up Synaptic Package Manager, and find and install the packages eeepc-tray and eeepc-laptop-dkms. When done, reboot.

Now, all your hotkeys, apart from Fn+Space, Fn+F3, and the top-left touchpad enable/disable buttons,will be working.

Finishing off: Final hotkeys

First off, we need to make the touchpad addressable by other applications. The safest way to do that is through a rather cumbersome SHMConfig policy XML file.

Create a new plain text file, with the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.product" string="SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad">
<merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">synaptics</merge>
</match>
</device>
<device>
<match key="info.linux.driver" string="psmouse">
<merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>

and save it as /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi.

Then reboot, or restart X (right-alt – SysRq – k), and the touhpad will now be addressable. When you type, it will briefly disable to prevent accidental mousing.

All we need to do now is enable the outstanding hotkeys. Right-click the eeepc-tray icon, click “Edit Configuration”, and paste the following in the empty file:

#Touchpad control
KEY_TOUCHPAD="00000037"
# Fn + space
KEY_FSB="00000039"


And there you go… all working!

Sound and microphone

The sound works perfectly out of the box. However, the microphone input is set to the microphone jack, rather than the internal mic by default. To change it, open Volume Control, hit Preferences, and enable all the Mic and Input Source options. Then, set the input source to “Int Mic” under the Options tab.

In skype, set your Sound In device to be HDA Intel (hw:Intel, 0). (Sound Out and Ringing should be set to ‘pulse’)

Setting the EFI partition for boot booster

As mentioned above in the partitioning section, for boot booster to work if you removed the default Asus EFI partition during install, you’ll need to set your new 8MB primary partition as type “EFI”. Doing that is simple:

open a terminal, and type sudo fdisk -l to list your partitions. Look for the little Boot Booster partition you set aside. My EFI partition was on device /dev/sda3.

Then, to set the appropriate partition as “EFI”, type sudo sfdisk --change-id /dev/sda 3 ef, replacing “3″ with the device name you found in the previous step (e.g. “2″ for /dev/sda2).

Just be sure you do it to the right partition — back up your data first if you’re unsure!

When you reboot, hit F2, and re-enable boot booster in the BIOS.