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As soon as I’d made up my mind to get an Eee PC 901 I had it in the back of my mind to get this done. However my first couple of attempts ran aground upon the pointy rocks of my general linux ignorance. But, to quote Homer Simpson: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, give up’, so I did.

Today however through sheer presistence and force of will I managed to get BackTrack 3 installed on a shiny new 4gb SD card with Eee Pc friendly graphics mode and persistent changes saved also.

I did a combination of these two guides

Install BT3 on USB with Persistent Changes

Install BT3 on USB with Eee PC Graphics Mode

If you want to set it up on your Eee PC 901, I’ll point out the differences I found with the Persistent Change guide.

The first difference is how the poster Umattu refers to his SD location (sdb, sdb1, sdb2), the Eee PC 901 comes with 2 internal drives and sdb refers to the second 12Gb one (on Linux). When you put a SD card in the slot it is identified as ’sdc’ so make sure you change any references in sdb to sdc when you are running through the guide.

I notice Umattu talks about getting the BT3 USB edition as a rar file, but I downloaded the USB in iso format (from here) so I opened it Archive Manager and copied the 2 directories over from there (Boot and BT3).

Follow the guide down to the section that begins

Using your favorite text editor we need to modify the syslinux.cfg file. Here I will use nano
Code:
nano syslinux.cfg

Here we take a little side track to add the Eee PC 901 graphics mode stuff.

Download the lzm file from here

Copy it into the /BT3/Optional folder

Now edit syslinux.cfg (I’m using gedit)

sudo gedit syslinux.cfg

And add this section at the top after the PROMPT, TIMEOUT, DEFAULT lines

Label EEE

MENU LABEL EEE Mode with Persistence

KERNEL /boot/vmlinuz

APPEND vga=785 initrd=/boot/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=6666 root=/dev/ram0 rw changes=/dev/sda2 load=901_net_gfx

Now go into the second partition on the sd card and create a directory called ‘changes’.

Once you’ve done that you can pick up Umattu’s guide at the section beginning

Run the bootinst.sh script:

Code:

./bootinst.sh

Eh, voila – you should be rocking BT3 happily on your 901 with persistent changes.

N.B. Minor thing but I noticed it didn’t save the settings when I changed the keyboard to GB, but when I went into the config panel for the keyboard and removed all the other countries then applied the changes it saved them okay.

1. 
   Andrea said...
   10:17 am - December 24th, 2008

   thank u 4 your guide,
   i followed it but i cant create change folder in sdb2.

   how can i see sdb2? in desktop my usb card now has 1.1 gb

   thnks

   gordi73

2. 
   admin said...
   4:24 pm - December 28th, 2008

   Hi,

   With the card in the Eee PC I went to /media/disk as root. It also showed as 2 drives in the file browser (1 for each partition).

   Hope that helps.

   Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.

   Mark

3. 
   johnny said...
   7:52 pm - December 30th, 2008

   s5KwC3 Thanks for good post

4. 
   Stan Marsh said...
   12:29 pm - January 16th, 2009

   You are the SHIT!!!!!! This worked on my 1000H. I used G-parted to partition my 4G SD card (fat32 and an Ext 3 filesystem)
   Then booted a live linux CD, created the ‘changes’ folder on my 2nd partition (EXT 3). (windows can’t read linux partitions) I can’t thank you enough!!!!!!!!!

5. 
   Red said...
   5:43 am - March 3rd, 2009

   where you tell us to put …”changes=/dev/sda2 load=901_net_gfx”..
   ahouldn’t it be “sdc2″ instead of “sdb2″ ?

6. 
   Red said...
   5:44 am - March 3rd, 2009

   I meant “sdc2″ instead of “sda2″?

7. 
   admin said...
   3:06 pm - March 3rd, 2009

   Hi Red,
   I don’t have my EeePC to hand but I think you are right. I’d say in the short term give it a try. I’ll double check when I get my machine back but if it works, would you mind giving me a shout back and I’ll up date to post.

   Cheers

   Mark

8. 
   lucas said...
   1:02 pm - March 12th, 2009

   to Red:
   When BT3 boots from the SD it becomes sda1 (boot FAT32) and sda2 (EXT2) , so sda2 it’s ok. Just one thing, to me, the changes relative to keyboard don’t save. any suggestions?
   thanks

9. 
   admin said...
   1:21 pm - March 12th, 2009

   I had the same problem, wasted a few hours thinking that the persistent changes weren’t working. Dunno why it doesn’t save them but I got round it by removing all the other keyboard options from the list. Don’t have my machine back yet but I’d guess it’ll just be on the keyboard settings manager.