Anthony from freshplastic recently asked if I could provide a rough guide to installing Hydrogen, a free drum machine for linux on his EeePC. This has inspired me to post a HOWTO on getting additional applications installed on your EeePC without actually wiping out the default installation, etc.

First off I should state my assumptions:

• You’ve got an EeePC with the default “easy mode” installation intact
• You’re connected to the internet
• You’ve got enough space to actually install stuff
• You can type
• You can read

Ok, so with that out of the way, lets get to work.

So we will be installing hydrogen, just as an example, but you can sub in most anything that has a debian style package. (more on that later)

So first off, boot up your Eee.

Now we want to bring up a terminal window, so hit

Ctrl+Alt+t

That’s a T on the end there.

Now that we’re in terminal land, we need to add a more items to the list of “places” that your Eee knows how to download packages from.

Those “places” are called repositories, and by default your Eee knows only about the repositories built specifically for it. These default ones are great at what they do, but they don’t do much. To expand the list we are going to add the repositories for Debian, which is another linux distribution, one that happens to be what Xandros (the distribution your Eee came with) is based on. You’ll find many distributions (distros) use the same packaging system as Debian, mostly due to total awesomeness.

So, back to our terminal window.

Type in:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Now I suppose I should explain the above command.

• sudo - this tells the machine to execute what ever command that comes after it as the Super User (so it’s basically “Super User DO”). We need this because the file we are editing is protected, and only the super user can change it.
• nano - little console based text editor that comes preinstalled on the Eee
• /etc/apt/sources.list - this is the path to the file we want to edit with nano. /etc/apt is the directory it’s in, sources.list is the file.

So now we’re inside nano, looking at the contents of sources.list.

Should look something like this:

deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701 p701 main
deb http://update.eeepc.asus.com/p701/en p701 main

Don’t worry too much about what all that means, but click here if you really want to know. So, we are going to add an item to the list, thereby expanding our horizons.

Add the line

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free

to the end of the file. Then press Ctrl+X to exit nano, press Y to save changes, and hit enter to confirm the filename.

So now we’re back to the regular terminal, and we need to update our package cache to reflect our new repository. To do this type in

sudo apt-get update

You’ll see some stuff fly by, and now we are ready to install something, namely hydrogen. Type in

sudo apt-get install hydrogen hydrogen-drumkits

This tells the machine to install 2 packages, the core hydrogen package, and some additional drumkits. You should see the system fetching the package files from the net and installing them. Once that’s done you should be able to launch hydrogen by simply typing in

hydrogen

You may notice things are a little cramped, so you’ll have to move somethings around to see what you need(remeber hold Alt and click-drag if the window is too big to see an OK button, in this case just hitting enter will make that big first window go away). Also, for actual use of the program you can refer to the hydrogen manual.

I found I got some clicking and skipping when running it, so I turned the buffer size up to 5000 in the audio system preferences, that seemed to help quite a bit.

….

So there you have it, hydrogen is installed and running, woot woot. You can apply the same process for any other package:

sudo apt-get install packagename

If you’re not sure on the package name of a particular app, you can try

apt-cache search appname

this will search the package cache for anything matching your criteria, you can then do an “sudo apt-get install” based on that.

I hope that helps

I’ll be posting about my misadventures trying to get Battle for Wesnoth working on my Eee shortly, as well as my HUGE SUCCESS with portal, er, I mean Uplink. =)

Also maybe something about adding items to the “easy menus”…

EDIT: I should note that if you try and install certain things from the debian repositories, odd things can happen, usually due to version conflicts and that (we do have sources from 2 dirrerent distros), so if you are doing an apt-get install, and it says X packages will be removed, say NO. … or you may end up having to restore your eee to get it back to how it was when you bought it.