Reflashing the BIOS of EeePC 904HD

There is always a small chance that updating your bios will brick your eeePC!
Always make sure that your eeePC has a full battery and is connected to the power before doing an upgrade!
You use this tutorial completely at your own risk!

The bios that comes with the eee pcs is updated from time to time by asus, so it can be beneficial to install the newest version. You can get the newest version of the BIOS for EeePC 904HD from the asus support site. Click the plus sign left of BIOS, and it will show all the versions from newest to oldest. Note that I'm talking about EeePC 904HD (that's what I own), if you have 901 or some other model and update it with 904HD BIOS, there's a good chance you'll make your laptop unusable. Make sure you find the page for your own model in asus's site.

Now the next step is more difficult. You have to format a USB stick to FAT16 and make sure that the new FAT16 partition is less than 32 MB (make it 16 MB to be safe, the ROM file is only 512K anyway) . Then copy the ROM file and rename it to "904HD.ROM".

Finally, leave the USB stick attached to the laptop and reboot. As soon as you see the BIOS splash screen press Alt+F2. The BIOS will read the file and reflash. You should see this message

EZ-Flash starting BIOS update
Checking for USB device
USB Device found
Reading file "701.ROM". Completed

It will take some time, during which just don't touch your laptop. After the update has finished the laptop
will turn off.

Patch for LXPanel to close windows on middle click.

I like using middle-click to close tabs in Firefox, and I would like to be able to close windows by middle-clicking their icon-entry on the taskbar in LXDE. Unfortunately, it can only be done by editing the source of lxpanel, which is the LXDE taskbar.

For Debian, you need to get the source code:

 apt-get source lxpanel  
 sudo apt-get build-dep lxpanel  

Then you need to apply this patch:

 commit ec2772ddbbf0f02e9175f195e9f234c2c305e8ee  
 Author: sashoalm <sashoalm@aspire>  
 Date:  Sat Feb 22 16:33:29 2014 +0200  
   Close window on wheel-click.  
 diff --git a/src/plugins/taskbar.c b/src/plugins/taskbar.c  
 index baf6281..95143b9 100644  
 --- a/src/plugins/taskbar.c  
 +++ b/src/plugins/taskbar.c  
 @@ -1111,11 +1111,8 @@ static gboolean taskbar_task_control_event(GtkWidget * widget, GdkEventButton *  
      }  
      else if (event->button == 2)  
      {  
 -      /* Middle button. Toggle the shaded state of the window. */  
 -      Xclimsg(tk->win, a_NET_WM_STATE,  
 -        2,          /* a_NET_WM_STATE_TOGGLE */  
 -        a_NET_WM_STATE_SHADED,  
 -        0, 0, 0);  
 +      /* Middle button. Close the window. */  
 +      Xclimsgwm(tk->win, a_WM_PROTOCOLS, a_WM_DELETE_WINDOW);  
      }  
      else if (event->button == 3)  
      {  

And install it:

 ./configure  
 make  
 sudo make install  

Now you can close windows with middle click on taskbar.