We're in good shape now for the release. The standard Lenny installer works fine for all models of Eee provided you install over ethernet. Our custom installer continues to be our recommended install method, as it adds support for (non-free) wifi working out of the box, along with handling a few other small eee-specific configuration chores. But whichever method is chosen, we've stayed true to our goal to make Debian itself work on the Eee PC, and not a derivative, unlike other popular distributions which tend to use a custom kernel not included in their parent distro archives, and often install a special "mobile-oriented" GUI by default as well.
We welcome Darren Salt and Raphael Geissert to the team. Both have been actively making contributions to the eeepc-acpi-scripts package, fixing some outstanding bugs and readying it to handle changes in more recent kernel releases.
Nico Golde, who hosted eeepc.debian.net for the first year development has turned his focus to other areas of Debian and Glenn Saberton has stepped in to provide a new home for it. We thank them both for their efforts and for a smooth, uneventful transition from one host to the other.
Speaking of the move, Glenn shared some interesting archive traffic statistics that give us a rough idea how many users we have. For the past two months of December and January, after factoring out bot hits, we're seeing about 300,000 hits from 15,000 unique users per month. The site handles roughly 60G of traffic per month, most of that from thousands of downloads of our custom installer image. It's hard to draw any firm conclusions about the size of our user base from these stats, as many users may be on dynamic IP#s, inflating the numbers, but we can conservatively say we have at least 5000 users. Other interesting statistics are that we have anywhere up to 80 users at any given time on our irc channel and over 250 users on the mailing list.
We have had some discussions with blind users about how we can make it easier for the blind to install Debian unassisted on their Eee PCs. As it was a simple change, we now include brltty in the custom installer, but we understand that some users also need text-to-speech, something for which there is no support yet in Debian-installer. We understand this isn't an easy thing to fix, but hope someone will rise to the challenge.
Like everyone else, we're eagerly anticipating the Lenny release, not only to get our work out there to waiting users, but also to refocus on some exciting new things coming up in Squeeze. Already, several team members have been experimenting with newer kernel releases and we have accepted patches to support them. For months, now, I have been successfully using ath5k on Linux 2.6.28, and this week we've just ironed out the last few issues with toggling wifi on and off with the latest kernels in git. New releases of this key package for Squeeze will also contain enhancements in the handling of sound keys, bluetooth, external displays and OSD. Lenny users can expect to enjoy some of these improvements through backports provided over the next release cycle.
The Eee PC line continues to expand, with 22 models listed so far. It is a challenge to keep up support for all of them. We're encouraged to see Asus choose a new b/g/n wifi chipset for their 1002HA that is supported by a DFSG free driver -- ath9k in this case. I haven't yet heard if the new Atom N280-based 1000HE uses the same chipset or not, but I hope so. If this trend continues, we'll be in much better shape to provide full support in main for all Eee models in Squeeze.