The lack of the keyboard was easy to fix, it had a couple of USB ports.
To get it to run Linux was a bit more interesting. It didn't have a CDROM.
I had three options
- Copy install files to the XP disk and boot using syslinux or similar
- Boot from a USB CDROM
- Boot from a USB memory stick
On the gentoo site there were notes on how to make gentoo work on a USB stick. In particular this page http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Gentoo_minimal_CD_on_USB_stick has details on two methods for making a bootable gentoo. The images it aims to set up are install images from CDs. The first method uses the normal install CD with extlinux and the second a rescue CD with syslinux.
extlinux is a simple method for booting from a ext2 file system. syslinux is a simple method for booting from a fat/fvat/other MS filesystems.
On the target hardware I was using the first method with extlinux seemed to work well. The syslinux method didn't.
We wanted to keep the Windows XP installed and use just part of the disk for running Linux. Fortunately there was a lot of free space and there is a great howto for doing the operation I wanted here
The target machine is a little underpowered compared to my desktop. Also wasn't clear how easy it would be to connect the target machine to the network. So my preferred method of working would be to set up a fake environment on the desktop machine running gentoo "emerge" to get and compile packages and then copying that over to the target via the usb stick.
There are instructions for a similar method of working using the ASUS EE here
I used a script to copy the files to the usb stick as they changed.
Once I had this all in place it was just a case of ploughing through the listed devices and ensuring the kernel was doing the right thing and that user space things like bluez-tools were loaded
After a few days the machine was running- job done!
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