I resigned to the fact that we would have to try out of circuit next. Hmmm.Īfter a few attempts with this circuit and thoroughly testing that the RPi's SPI lines were functioning correctly. Sadly, our in-circuit attempts failed even though we were careful to firstly isolate the positive pin from the motherboard / EEPROM, used 150 Ohm resistors on the data lines and kept the impedance low by using short cables and a 47uF tantalum as a decoupling cap.
That and the fact that my brother has everything electronics under the sun at his place, we joined forces and attempted an in-circuit update using the RPi and a freshly compiled version of Flashrom. Excellent, I had two RPis on hand so this would not be a problem. After finding it on the bottom, I looked up the datasheet (Winbond W25x16) and at the same time found a blog entry that had instructions on updating an SPI EEPROM with a Raspberry Pi.
The next day, with a fresh determination, I opened the EEE PC and removed the motherboard in search for the serial EEPROM. I have a saying that seemed appropriate at this time: "Just because I can, doesn't mean I want to!" After hours of trying cryptic combos and countless reboots, I resigned to the fact that I would need to go lower level if I were to pursue a fix.
Then there was a glimmer of hope when another blog entry pointed to a new keyboard combo: CTRL + FN + HOME. No go, I tried every combo, more than once. *sigh again* I spent the next few hours deep in forums looking up and trying various hidden keyboard combos to miraculously enter a ROM update state in the first 16k of the EEPROM or similar. The next reboot would be indicative of the damage done, there was no (well very little) response. Noooooooooo! I left it as is, had dinner and came back nearly an hour later but unfortunately there was no change whatsoever. It started and erased the old ROM just fine, but only after a few seconds it got 'stuck' on 12%. The utility read and recognised the new ROM and presented a screen with the old and new versions side by side. The USB stick was easy to find and I had already renamed the new with under 8 characters as it is suggested to: 1015B.rom I've never used EasyFlash but the name made it sound seamless and well, easy! In these cases, you can force the execution of a PAE kernel with with kernel options forcepae - forcepae ( detailed instructions).After acquiring the correct BIOS from the Asus website, I put it on a FAT16 formatted USB stick and entered the BIOS screen. Side note: Though I did not need it for this model of computer, some CPUs falsely advertise that they don't support PAE when in fact they do. So I am not sure what causes the "CPU incompatibility" issue in your case. I installed a regular (PAE based) kernel, and it runs just fine. So it turns out that it is not necessary to utilize a non-PAE distribution. The Eee PC 4G (701) uses a CPU "Intel Celeron M Processor ULV 353", which supports 32-bit Physical Address Extension (PAE), according to the specs. Normal Ubuntu / Lubuntu boot options in current releases fail to start the Linux kernel on non-PAE CPUs. PAE is "physical address extension", allowing a 32-bit processor to access main memory beyond 4 GiB. My first guess was that you might need a non-PAE kernel for this computer. are all the same as in Ubuntu, and you can even add packages from Ubuntu repositories. deb packaging system and package names etc. working out of the box, and still is very compact (~120 MiB main memory usage after start). It runs nicely, with most of the Fn keyboard shortcuts etc. This distro is based on Debian 9, so pretty close to a recent Ubuntu. For installation troubleshooting, see my other answer. Right now I am running BunsenLabs Linux Helium on it, from image bl-Helium-4-i386.iso. So for whatever reason I found myself looking for a Linux distribution for the Asus Eee PC 4G (701) today, in 2019 :D