Asus EEE 900 and Ubuntu Netbook Remix

Although Tinkerbell was running fine with Arch and Openbox installed, after the install of the file server, there were some problems. For some reason, I couldn’t get samba to start, and I wasn’t looking forward to configuring cups on it.

So, just as with the file server, I took the easy way out and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. I must say, I don’t regret it. The boot is as fast as before, with the added benefit of it looking a bit better. Gnome of course is a bit slower than Openbox, but it still performs surprisingly well. Just as beforem, RAM stays below 200 MB with Firefox open. CPU usage is a bit higher in that case, around 20%. Also, while the layout leaves a little less screen estate for applications, I really love the netbook launcher, and the way applications maximise with the window bar toccupying part of the top panel.

Furthermore, and this is pretty much a given, installation and confguration was much easier and faster. I left the theme as is, deleted some of the gnome bookmarks I never use anyway, installed Comix, rearranged the “Favourites” tab, and that was it. Network surging was easy. Power management was already setup, something I hadn’t configured in Arch, which meant Tinkerbell dropped dead every time she ran out of battery life. Network connection came to life automatically when opening the lid. Little pleasures, and I could have figured them out in Arch, but I have a new-born in the house who eats all my time Things have to be fast and easy these days.

One final note: I’d have loved to try out Moblin on this little thing, but apparently the eee900 isn’t supported. It’s a shame…the interface looks really interesting.

Tinkerbell and UNR

San

Setting up a small file/printserver

Now that Jen has her new laptop, and I have a netbook, I finally came to the conclusion it might be a good idea to put my music collection on a file server. Another good idea would be to make sure that Jen doesn’t have to go to my desk and connect the printer to her laptop every time she wants to print something.

In theory, Arch would be ideal for this. In practice, I was tired, I couldn’t figure out the right Samba settings, and the server had to double as a desktop for my son anyway, so I slapped Ubuntu on it, right-clicked the map I wanted to be shared, made a small (suggested) change to /etc.smb.conf, plugged in the printer, noticed it was shared automatically, and finally made it boot into console by default.

It’s the easy way out of course, but I like easy, and it works.

San

Amarok on the right track

I’ve blogged about my dislike of Amarok 2 before, but I’ll recapitulate the main points: cluttered layout, playlist editing is too complicated, importing playlists far too difficult…

Seems like they listened to me (yeah right ). In any case, The changelog of Amarok 2.2 “Chrystal Clear” looks very good. Maybe it’s time for another go.

Now if I could only figure out how to get the window in “mini-mode” like in this rather fabulous screenshot…

San

Vista has entered the building

…and I hope it’ll leave as soon as possible. Jen’s new Dell Inspiron came pre-installed with it, and I detest it. Not only does Dell think it’s a good idea a desktop is littered with crap (taskbar, dock, moving pictures, clock, hideous wallpaper…), not only did McAffee demanded to be registered in a way I could only close it via the taskbar, not only did the bloody thing immediately need 27 updates, 3 reboots, and then some more updates, not only does it asks for an approval up to three times for the same task (install Firefox), it actually manages to be much slower than Tinkerbell, the Asus EEE900 I bought recently. Okay, it’s not a top of the line machine, but it has twice the processors and four times the RAM of the netbook, ergo, it should perform faster.

So tomorrow that Vista abomination will be replaced by a Arch + XFCE and Windows 7 dual boot.

San

Why I’m still an amateur

I usually don’t bother with installing a printer. I have one, but I rarely use it. Jen however needed to print something, her Windows Dell is broken (another story), so I installed cups and the HP drivers, and connected the printer. I tried to add it via the webinterface, but it wasn’t found.

I modprobed the right module. Nothing. I rebooted, although I knew it wasn’t necessary. Nothing. I reinstalled the drivers, but of course, nothing happened. I muttered a bit, when Jen passed and asked if I had checked the cables.

“Well, of course I did, I just plugged it in, and at the back of the printer it’s…oh. Thanks. And I’m an idiot.”

Printer was up and running a minute later…

San

The slow route to Linux

I blogged before about putting Linux on Jen’s laptop. After wring that post, I found that the new KDE (4.1 at the time, I think), didn’t really work out, so I simply slapped Ubuntu on there and asked her not to ignore the updates. That’s pretty much all I did, because she’s sick and tired of hearing me claim that Linux is far superior to any other OS

In any case, she didn’t use it much, and kept booting into Windows by default. Fine by me, but every time she had a problem (wireless simply doesn’t work, SN connection problems, weird Firefox scrolling behaviour), I asked “well, does it work in Linux?”, because if it did, that would be my solution.

Then a couple of things happened. First, she wanted to edit some photographs, didn’t find a good application on her Windows partition for that, booted into Linux, found the Gimp, and liked it. Secondly, she bought a camera and didn’t liike the software that came with it. I installed Kino for her, and although converting movies into MPEG doesn’t always work the first time, it does get the job done eventually. With Emesene being an acceptable replacement for Messenger (apart from the games) she doesn’t have much reason anymore to boot into Windows.

However, her using a video editor meant that the 5GB partition I had put Ubuntu on wasn’t big enough anymore. I borrowed her laptop for a couple of hours, made the partition 10 GB, and installed Arch on it. I chose Arch instead of Ubuntu mainly because I wanted more recent software on it, like Firefox 3.5.

I wanted to keep the system lightweight, so I tried LXDE first, but that turned out to be a bit too sparse. XFCE turned out to be the better choice. I installed the Buuf icons because she liked them on my netbook, chose a purple theme she liked (which I think clashes horribly with the icons, but who am I ), made the Volume up, Volume down and Sleep buttons work, and gave it back.

She’s been booting into Linux by default now, because at the moment it’s that or a crippled Windows. The best thing about it is that I haven’t forced her to pick Arch. She made the choice herself.

The best thing for me is that I have to do the support of her laptop anyway, and I’m much better at it in Linux. Everybody happy.

San

Arch and Asus EEE 900

My collegue bought an Asus EEE 900 about a year ago, and confessed he was a bit disappointed with the power and HD space, so he sold it to me at a good price.  It had Win XP installed, but I quickly wiped that and installed Arch on it. Mind you, at that point I wasn’t at all confident. I assumed I wouldn’t get things like wireless, webcam, suspend and resume and the function keys to work, and I expected to have to use specialist distributions like EEEbuntu or Moblin.

Well, wireless even worked during the install, so no problems there. The install itself went flawless, which meant that all I had to do was the usual configuration. There were some differences with my normal PC, since I wanted to save as much space as possible. A panel was out, the system tray is on auto-hide, I cropped the window decorations from applications like Firefox and Thunar, and that was pretty much it. Everything else was my normal install of Openbox.

The function keys I got working by adding an extra module from AUR, and although I’m not a regular user of Skype, I installed it to see if the webcam worked. It did, without any tweaking from my part. Same thing for going to sleep when I close the lid. Opening pops it back to live, without a hitch.

Battery life is surprisingly good on this little thing. I’ve been working on it for what must be over two hours now, and I’m still at 30%. CPU load is something like 10% on average, and memory usage has yet to rise over 200 MB, and that’s with Firefox open. About the only thing I don’t really know how to do is slightly adjust the keyboard layout. It’s close to be-latin, but not quite. Some of the more exotic keys aren’t really where they’re supposed to be…

All in all, I love this little thing which I named Tinkerbell, so here’s some showing off:

Tinkerbell: Pseudo clean

Thunar and audacious. Stalonetray bottom right

San

Arch + PekWM screenshots: August

Yes, no Openbox this month. I was aching to try something new, and PekWM looked inviting because it’s themes are pixmap based, which in plain English means they simply look better. As a WM it’s just a tad less good: it’s not entirely standard compliant, and configuring it was more difficult for me than when I first started using OpenBox. Most of all, PekWM’s default mouse and key configuration is just insane. In any case, I got it the way I want it. This is the result.

Arch August 2009: Clean

Arch August 2009 - Busy

San

Install Linux using a USB stick

Because something happened to my main Arch install (I don’t know exactly what I screwed up, but half the time X wouldn’t boot and I was stuck at a blank screen), I decided to download the latest release and re-install it. However, I accidentally ended up with a file with an *.img extension, which is not an image for a CD-ROM but for a USB stick. I must have clicked the wrong link somewhere…

In any case, I knew my PC is able to boot from a USB stick, and I didn’t want to wait for the “right” download to finish, so I gave it a try. “Burning” it to the stick was the most difficult part, but as always, the Arch wiki came to the rescue. The CLI command “dd” doesn’t offer much visual feedback, so I just waited until the light on the stick stopped blinking, checked if the job had indeed finished, rebooted, and installed.

The package install was quite a bit faster than usual, so I’ll keep installing distributions this way (if possible). It’ll save me a lot of CD-ROMs that’s for sure, and the USB stick can contain 4GB instead of 700 MB…should open another range of possibilities.

San

Oh noes! I haz virusses!

It’s been a while since I encountered one of these, but browsing the Arch forums I clicked a link that should have led to a ScummVM but actually gave me this:

Oh Noes!

It’s well done really, and quite clever too, since I clicked a link a second time, and the layout was different, as was the file they wanted me to download. In any case, the message was the same: Your computer is infected! Look at all the authentic looking Windows popups and security messages!

Yeah. Nice try.

San