Hacking Express gate (Asus Splashtop)

[DroK]

I find the ExpressGate/SplashTop Linux Distros rather marginal, awkward, and limited -- especially for their intended platforms. Distros like Slax (which also uses SquashFS), and Moblin (which has some sort of partnership and/or has coded used by SplashTop) would be a lot more functional flavors of Linux.

There's some indication that Darkstar2000 was making progress at booting his preferred Linux using the fast boot capability SplashTop/Expressgate offers, but some of the details went over my head... Just wondering if anyone else has made any progress at using Splash/Gate to fast boot an alternative Linux Distro?

I too am interested in this. What is the boot process with this? Where is the actual kernel image even located? Is it CEFULL or kernel.bin or a combination of the two? And if the bootloader is located in the bios rom would that mean there would be no way to pass options to a custom kernel?

[lilas]

I am waiting for Mandriva Instant On which will be publicly available soon!

http://wdata.mandriva.com/g/docs/instanton/en/FP_InstantOn_ENG_1108.pdf

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xain5c_apercu-des-fonctionnalites-de-mandr_tech

[DroK]

I am waiting for Mandriva Instant On which will be publicly available soon!

http://wdata.mandriva.com/g/docs/instanton/en/FP_InstantOn_ENG_1108.pdf

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xai...-de-mandr_tech

Sounds interesting, but i want to put gentoo on lol

[MarkJohnson]

I am trying to get a printer installed on my Asus P5QL Pro motherboard (ExpressGate) Is there an easy way to do this.

I have used Ubuntu Linux, but it is very different from this version of linux.

I am a little familiar with the command prompt, but only a little.

I'm having issues with videos as well, especially youtube.

Thanks for any advice
-=Mark=-

[Nalman]

Splashtop Noob

Hi - I am very new to this and my main objective is to make the resolution better on my laptop with express gate. Here are the specs for my maching:

ASUS G51VX-A1
Native Resolution 1920x1080
Express Gate installed on Hard Drive
OS - Windows 7 ultimate 64bit

Can someone provide a link or step by step instructions on how to:
1) edit the resolution file in the ASUS.SYS directory (va-915resolution.sqx) under windows (if that is possible.
2)Do I need to install Linux (ie Ubantu or something similar) to edit the file?
3)Are there any other changes I need to manke to make this work?

Thanks

Nalman

[that1s10]

I find the ExpressGate/SplashTop Linux Distros rather marginal, awkward, and limited -- especially for their intended platforms. Distros like Slax (which also uses SquashFS), and Moblin (which has some sort of partnership and/or has coded used by SplashTop) would be a lot more functional flavors of Linux.

There's some indication that Darkstar2000 was making progress at booting his preferred Linux using the fast boot capability SplashTop/Expressgate offers, but some of the details went over my head... Just wondering if anyone else has made any progress at using Splash/Gate to fast boot an alternative Linux Distro?

So...has anyone been able to ccomplish this yet?

[aks_phoronix]

I have been able to do a minor hack on Express gate on my P5Q-E based machine. As shipped, Express gate only supports up to 1440x1050 screen resolution. This doesn't look very good on a native 1600x1200 display and I wanted to change it.

The P5Q-E has the HDD version of Express gate, so the files are installed normally to the Windows partition (VFAT or NTFS). The files making up the linux environment are in a directory called ASUS.SYS. Most of the files comprising the system have an unusual ".sqx" extension, but it turns out they are normal squashfs files and can be easily unsquashed with the normal tools.

Once unsquashed, you will find a relatively familiar assortment of system and application files. Express gate uses TinyX, and the archive with the appropriate files is bs-tinyx.sqx.

After modifying the setresolution script, re-squashing the archive, and putting it back into ASUS.SYS, Express gate now runs in 1600x1200 native screen resolution - pretty cool.

With access to the file system and apps, it may be possible to do some other things, like hack in an xterm to make it a lot easier to poke around the Express gate environment and see what's there.

Drosky, Can you paste the modified SET_RESOLUTION () script you used. I have a monitor that can display 1920 X 1080. I would like to know the script used for changing resolution of Express Gate. Thanks

[haraldich]

Hi there,

i buyed me the new Asus Eee PC 1001P (Germany) which comes with a version of Express Gate (EG). EG can be directly booted by pressing an extra EG-button.
This version seems to be not only located on the mainboard ssd but also on a vfat partition as some others experienced too.

Now i backed up the EG files, encrypted the home partition and partitioned the whole hard drive, installed my linux os instead of win xp and then tried to get the EG working again.

Therefore I copied the backed up EG files to a fat16 partition with boot flag, set the correct uuid in the idx file and run a bios update.

But EG is not working again!

I contacted the asus support which says that the only way to get EG working again is resetting the whole system and hard drive. I won't do this due to the fact of not wanting to loose all settings and files and loosing a lot of hours for this.

Does anyone have an idea how this could work again?

If not, i thought of installing EG (or Moblin etc.) on the hard drive and integrate this into my GRUB boot loader. This should work so far. Now the question is wether it's possible to use the EG button to preselect the Grub entry for the EG installation on the hard drive.
So pressing the boot button runs Grub normally, pressing the EG button runs Grub with EG preselected.
Any ideas how to manage this?

greets

[nfshp253]

Hi, can anyone help me? After editing bs-xorg-1.6.0.sqx to change the resolution using Windows and using mksquashfs (Windows) to recompress the sqx file, the file size is 1KB smaller than the original file. When I try to start ExpressGate with this newer .sqx file, it says that Installation in not complete. Why is this happening and what can I do to solve this problem?

[Kano]

The mksquashfs version you used is too new, use an older one.