Medion Akoya Mini

Medion Akoya Mini / MSI Wind U100

This is a How-to guiding you through the process of installing and configuring the Medion Akoya Mini E1210 netbook with OS/2 and eComStation. This page also includes tips and tricks for using your netbook efficiently with OS/2 and eComStation. We will focus on eComStation 2.0.

As the Medion Akoya Mini is an OEM version of the MSI Wind U100 netbook most of the things stated here might be applied to the MSI Wind, too.

Technical Details
Especially for OS/2 and eComStation users it might be useful to know the exact technical specifications of the system (including chipsets and device/vendor ids) in order to look for drivers.

Feel free to extend this table.

To the Harddrive
Requirements:
 * eComStation or OS/2 Warp (we tried eComStation 2.0 RC4 and RC5)
 * at least one USB thumb drive (size depends on your specific way of installing eCS but 1GB should be sufficient) or an external CD/DVD drive. A USB floppy drive might be used, too but you will probably need a thumb drive in that case.

Preparations:
 * If you keep the preinstalled Windows XP, it should be sufficient for partitioning and copying tasks. Otherwise if you want to install Linux and you don't have an external CD/DVD reader, you should create a bootable USB thumb drive containing the installer CD of your distribution. Such a bootable system ("Live-system") is required for an eComStation-only installation, too. However it might also be possible to do all the stuff with a bootable thumb drive containing OS/2.
 * Instructions on how to create a bootable Ubuntu Linux installer on a thumb drive: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick
 * Information about booting OS/2 from an USB thumb drive (ie. creating a bootable thumb drive): 1, 2
 * You need to boot from some kind of USB device (either an external CD/DVD/floppy drive or a thumb drive) so "USB Legacy" support needs to be switched on (or switched to "auto") in your netbook's BIOS.
 * AHCI seems to cause problems with OS/2, so better switch it off before beginning. (There's a BIOS option.)

Step-by-step instructions: X: cd diskimgs image -H ecs0.dsk Y: where "X" is your CD drive letter and "Y" is your USB thumb drive letter.
 * 1) Prepare the preinstalled system or erase it. You will need about 800mb for the eComStation installer CD partition and empty space for the system itself.
 * 2) Create an 800 MB partition at the end of HD space (at least that's recommended if you want to delete it later).
 * 3) Format it as HPFS or - if that's really not possible - as FAT16. In the latter case you will need to install eCS a second time from a then-HPFS partition because the installer doesn't work properly (incomplete installation) if run from a FAT partition probably because of filename restrictions.
 * 4) Label the partition "ECS_CDRUN".
 * 5) Transfer all the files (including hidden and system files) from the eCS installer CD to that partition.
 * 6) Transfer the first eCS boot floppy image to an USB thumb drive. You can do this using a tool included on the eCS CD (used to write the image to a real floppy). It may be possible to create a bootable USB drive containing all the files on the floppies but I didn't try that. Also if you have an external USB floppy drive you may use the real eCS floppies. If you've got an external CD/DVD reader you might be able to bootstrap the installation using the actual bootable CD and you don't need floppies or thumb drives.
 * If you want to create a bootable eCS install floppy on a thumb drive, you can insert the eCS installer CD in your workstation, attach the USB thumb drive, open an OS/2 command prompt (or even boot the eCS installer CD on a workstation if you don't have a working OS/2 system) and type something like the following (Warning: This will destroy any data/partitions on your thumb drive.):
 * 1) If you created an eCS install floppy (see above), attach the thumb drive to your netbook. Otherwise attaching the CD/DVD/floppy drive and inserting the CD or floppy should be sufficient. Power it on and press F11 until you see a blue text box containing the name of the drive you attached. Choose it with the cursor keys and press ENTER. It should now boot from that drive. If not, assuming that you transferred the floppy to a thumb drive, something went wrong and you can try to completely erase all the partitions and data and do some clean-up using tools like DFSee on that drive and then repeat the copying procedure (step 6).
 * 2) At the eCS installer boot menu, choose to boot with custom values.
 * If you use floppies or a bootable thumb drive you will be prompted for the next floppy after the menu. Insert them as requested. You can create bootable thumb drives with the other floppies (i.e. transfer them to the same drive while you're booting) in the same manner as described in step 6. The second floppy's file is called ECS1.DSK and ECS2.DSK is the image name of the final floppy.
 * 1) At the boot-configuration screen, which will show up if the loading of the floppies (if you used them...) was successful, go to the page containing USB-related configurations and set the number of all USB controller drivers to 0. USB probably won't work and you will encounter a lot of strange TRAP screens if you've got any USB devices attached (and there's a smart card reader attached internally as well as a Webcam but it does not appear to be attached if it is switched off) unless you're running the SMP kernel and ACPI in APIC mode with the "crazy-device" (/CD) switch...
 * 2) The eCS installer should now boot properly. If you are prompted to insert the installer CD that means our installation bootstrapping went wrong because the installer cannot find the files you copied to your HD. (We actually try to fool the installer into thinking that the partition you created is the CD.)
 * In that case, confirm that the partition is labelled correctly and if yes try to clean up partition tables (and do other clean-up actions on your partitions) with DFSee or a similar tool.
 * If you're installing from a FAT16 partition, you'll have to install eCS a second time and you can skip the fine-tuning.
 * 1) Install eCS
 * both Panorama VESA and SNAP (in VESA mode) work as display drivers but I recommend Panorama because of its better performance and the ability to use widescreen activators.
 * The RTL8169 driver version included in eCS 2.0 RC5 does not support the LAN device. You can however download the latest version copy it to your ECS_CDRUN partition and use that version during installation. However, it is recommended to install it later.
 * You can use the included Uniaud and update it later or do the same as above with the latest version.
 * The WLAN device is not supported out of the box by Genmac. Not only that there's no driver package containing support for that chipset but you need a patched version of Genmac itself. So, don't choose any Genmac driver during eCS installation.
 * DOS VDMs and Win-OS/2 sessions won't work if you want to have USB support, so you may consider disabling it - which may be bad if we find a way to use both (or the issue is fixed in a later ACPI release)...
 * Even though you disabled USB for the installer boot process, be sure to enable it for your eCS installation. If it isn't selected automatically: You have four UHCI and one EHCI controller.
 * 1) At the end of phase 1 of the installation - before rebooting - choose to go to the Maintenance Console. Start a text editor via the menu bar and edit the config.sys of your newly installed system. Comment out all USB controller drivers (lines like "BASEDEV=USBUHCD.SYS" and "BASEDEV=USBEHCD.SYS") or at least the EHCI controller drivers because the card reader is attached to one of them.
 * 2) If you can complete the final two installation phases, you're basically done and can begin to set up drivers and stuff.
 * If you installed from a FAT16 ECS_CDRUN partition of course you will find that some things like multimedia (MMOS/2) weren't installed at all. You will need to reformat your ECS_CDRUN partition as HPFS (which you can do now you're under OS/2), copy the content of the installer CD to that partition again and repeat the entire installation procedure (beginning with step 6 or 7).

To a SD Card
Sorry but we do not have experience with that method yet. If you have, feel free to extend this section. In the meantime you might want to have a look at eCS on Asus EEE PC guides:
 * search at Hobbes for something like "eee pc"
 * http://web.os2power.com/yuri/HowToEeePC900==Related Links==


 * ecomstation.ru hardware page: MSI Wind
 * YouTube video