I got two Eee Top units in the office about a week ago to play with. The shipped Windows XP works fine, but I don't need it. I need Linux, so I tried it on... bummer, I end up with a black screen.

I turned the settings up side down, still no luck. By the looks of it, the back light is turned off when the "intel" video driver intializes, so I switched to "vesa". This worked fine. I had a picture. I then configured the touch screen and it worked perfectly. I even network booted the thing without much hassle.

Who should I hate now? Intel? Asus? Both? All that's required to get it moving is a picture with the "intel" driver

And there's no Express Gate anywhere in sight to take a glimpse at and figure out how it does its magic.

I even sent a message to the xorg list, but it passed unnoticed.

So, long story short:

- Touchscreen: works
- Display: intel driver turns the backlight off, and the backlight software controls are broken; vesa driver works
- Everything else: works
- Distros tried: Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 7.10, Eeebuntu

I tried hacking the drivers to fix the backlight issue, but I ran out of ideas of where to look. If anyone brighter than me wants to give it a shot, I can let you into one of these machines.

Regards,
    Radu C