I have just installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 beta on my EEEPC 100H and so far it’s been a great experience. Things that work better out of the box
Synaptic touch pad
LCD Fonts
Remix user interface
Network printing
Performance
Suspend/Resume
Bluetooth device setup
I also have reason to believe that the sound works better in Skype, but I’m still kicking the tyres on that
Improved Applications:
GNOME Evolution now works well on the smaller screen
Gwibber is much more useful for microblogging but it needs some work on reliability and performance
Eclipse 3.5 now installs out of the box
BOUML is now up to date
A few odd things that it would be nice to see fixed
Evolution sometimes looses it Window border. Something to do with the Remix window manager I think
Some things I had to try a second time before they settled down. E.g. 3G network management, bluetooth mouse setup (but that was probably finger trouble on my part), Skype sound
All in all a great release. I love it!
(20/Oct/09 — added comment about Gwibber reliability)
After some information from jim mcnamara I developed a script to compare two directory trees. I needed something that worked on Solaris 8 so it uses basic UNIX tools (and dircmp was not very useful). If you are using a more modern system then try this
#!/bin/ksh
# Compare 2 directories for differences (e.g. current release and new release)
CURRENT=$1 ; shift
NEW=$1; shift
CURRENTDIFFFILE=/tmp/$(echo $CURRENT | sed -e 's/[/.][/.]*/_/g')
NEWDIFFFILE=/tmp/$(echo $NEW | sed -e 's/[/.][/.]*/_/g')
# File pattens not to be included in compare
cat << 'EOF' > /tmp/patternFile
^.git/
^.*\.log
^logs/.*
^.*\.tmp
^.*\.err
EOF
for i in $CURRENT $NEW ; do
cd $i
# cut removed ./ that find puts at start of path name
find . -type f -print |cut -b3- |egrep -v -f /tmp/patternFile | sort > /tmp/$(echo $i | sed -e 's/[/.][/.]*/_/g')
cd -
done
echo New files
comm -13 $CURRENTDIFFFILE $NEWDIFFFILE
echo
echo Deleted files
comm -23 $CURRENTDIFFFILE $NEWDIFFFILE
echo
echo files that are different
# xargs has limitations so must pipe into a second shell
comm -12 $CURRENTDIFFFILE $NEWDIFFFILE | xargs -i echo cmp -s \"$CURRENT/{}\" \"$NEW/{}\" \|\| echo {} changed | sh
I’ve has my EEEPC 1000H for over a week now and I’m so totally enamoured of the small device that it’s become my sole platform for all my computing. Obviously this has involved some adjustments.
The keyboard requires considerable patience — at least for someone with my large fingers
My fingers are having to learn new positions to try and stop keep brushing the trackpad and moving the cursor to somewhere completely different. This is currently the most frustrating aspect of using the machine.
Some things to try.
Get a bluetooth mouse
Try the LXDE desktop and the Xfce4 desktop. They are both tuned for low resource use
Consider using DevilsPie to reduce the amount of screen space used by removing the title bar and forcing all screens to be full maxiumum, partucurly of your screen is smaller than 10″
Configure Skype to use the hda sound devices
Carry a short USB cable for thumb drives etc. Thy can’t always fit in space you have at the side of the netbook
Get used to using keyboard shortcuts — it mush easier than using the trackpad
Try using Vim and it’s plugins rather than a large IDE
Try using an alternative email and PIM program to Evolution. Thunderbird for instance works better on the smaller screen and is faster
Use multiple desktops and flip between them using <ctrl><alt><arrow> (Gnome default), for instance when referring to other material in the middle of witing an email. It’s an easier way of switching back and forth between two applications that using something like <alt><tab>
Use the <F11> in Firefox to move into full screen mode (many other applications have a similar feature)
The 10″ EEE PC 1000H makes a good choice for people looking for a notebook with a little more storage and bigger keyboard than Asus’ previous model. Unfortunately, whilst the local Harvey Norman had a good price, I was still forced to pay the Microsoft tax. So the third job after I got home (after upgrading the BIOS and checking the hardware worked ) was to install Ubuntu 8.10. The process was pretty straight forward because I had a current Ubuntu system to create the USB boot disk and a wired network connection so that I could install the wireless tweaks. However it took a fair mount of Googling to hopefully this should save some folks a bit of time.
Get a copy of the 32-bit Ubuntu 8.10 ISO image. I used the Desktop version, alternative should work fine as well
Use the Ubuntu System->Administration -> Create Startup USB tool to copy Ubuntu to a USB stick
Shutdown Windows on the EEE. I had to do this via Windows shutdown to get the correct prompts on power up
Power up the EEE with the ESC key pressed. You should be prompted for a boot device
I recently decided, despite using nothing but Linux on my laptop, that I had become a suite using purely graphical Office tools (Evolution for calendar, email etc, OpenOffice to write documents and presentations and so on). I was becoming a very rusty geek!
Time for Plan A. Migrate email, task management etc to emacs, start using Docbook for presentations and document creation (in Emacs of course) with git to protect my precious work.
However so far it all feels a bit hard… There is no consensus on the best way to configure Emacs for laptop email using IMAP services (mix and match any of Dovecot, fetchmail, Gnus, RM, procmail, etc etc); and getting a decent fop processor working is harder than it should be (I got going instead with dblatex in the end) — now writing Docbook documents seems hard as well — all that XML *sigh*. I’m not even feeling at home with git yet .
Update 29/Aug/08: Sacha Chua has some great advice to share on using Gnus for email
I’m using a Windows XP desktop running Virtual Box under a Gnome Linux (Ubuntu 8.04). It’s quite handy to dedicate a virtual desktop to the Guest, or each guest if you have enough memory for more than one.
Using my default Compiz keyboard I can jump into the guest using <ctrl><alt><arrow>, if the guest is in full screen mode then I get put straight into Windows and can type away, use a mouse etc.
Going back to Linux is a little more difficult as Windows throws away the Compiz key shortcuts. Howevever if you preface the Compiz shortcuts with <RightCtrl> (assumes you are using the default VirtualBox hot keys) then you can jump backwards (or fowards).
Now that there is an AppStore with applications in iTunes, why wouldn’t Apple move next to distribute all applications through iTunes
A very cogent comment from ionix5891 on /. warning us no to sleep walk into the arms of another monopoly power. As I said before, Steve Jobs can be a very scary guy!
Personally, now that Ubuntu 8.04 (or Spiny Norman as I call it) is so polished I’m not feeling such an urgent need to rush back into the arms of Cupertino. Mr Shuttleworth may have made life a lot less exciting, but now it all ‘just works’. Well, except for some proprietary media formats still.
Having said that, the family is still happy plugging away on the iMac (except when my son wants to run games)
Currently I am feeling very cut off as the latop is at the menders having it’s drive electronics diagnosed. However as soon as it gets back I shall be off to the land of Git after re-reading Sam’s updated (and excellent) git-svn tutorial. Git is designed for distributed use, is fast and I’m assured very flexible…
Of course I may not wait that long as I’m being tempted to purchase an HP 2133, despite it having a Broadcomm wireless adaptor and all the bloody aggro that entails.
First off I’d like to thank Broadcomm for being such a bunch of peasants as to make life hard for people not running operating systems from the West Coast USA.
Here is my contribution to the many, many, comments on the web on how to get the bmc wireless hardware working. Note that there seems to be a lot a variation in peoples’ experience — you would probably be advised to slaughter a chicken and sprinkle the warm blood over your laptop first (it can’t hurt) ndiswrapper I used the ndiswrapper route as the native OSS driver did not work for me. Also note that I am running KDE (kubuntu)
Download the latest driver package from hp.com. NB This is distributed as a Windows exe file but you can extract it using wine (sudo apt-get install wine), the file will end up in somewhere like ~/.wine/drive_c/SWSetup/SP34152A/
Make sure the native driver is disabled (instructions on URL above)
Run ndiswrapper -i … (as explained in URL above) but use the HP driver package you downloaded
In System settings/Network settings/ make sure the eth1 interface is configured for dhcp and then disabled.
Use kWifi Manager to confgure your WiFi connection and then activate it.
Please note that I did not follwo such a direct route so I have limited confidence this would work exactly as documented. I took me 3 days of fiddling around so please be patient.
I have recently been setting up an old PC as a backup system for my office enviroment. However 10 year old hardware does have it’s limitations so I had to go through a few hoops to get it to my liking.
Install latest Debian as Ubuntu got a little upset with the old BIOS and disk drives
Make sure that the system has sshd installed, i.e. apt-get install ssh
Stop the graphical login running by executing update-rc.d -f gdm remove
Install xfce4 (it uses less resources than KDE or GNOME), apt-get install xfce4
Make xfce4 the X window manager by creating a file ~/.Xsession with the line ‘exec xfce4-seesion‘
Now you can log onto the Linux console and type startx or use a remote X server display, e.g. X11 on OS/X using ssh X tunnelling.
e.g. ssh -X -l <userName> <machineName>
When using a remote X server there can be problems if you do not start some programs in an X term displayed by the X server and for which you started your X tunnel. e.g. xclock does not care, GNUCash crashes the X server. So make sure your X server displays an X term of some description.
The C programming language and the UNIX operating system both came out of Bell Laps in the 70’s. I and many other owe a big debt to Dennis and the teams that he was part of. I have used UNIX, Linux and OS/X for years; and for a long time earned a living as a C programmer. The influence of the C language is still being felt after more than 30 years.
Dennis’ home page lists a lot of resources for those with a historical interest.
I was lucky enough to meet and chat to Dennis for an extended period when he visited the UKUUG Winter conference in 1997. A very interesting man who never tired of answering my questions.
A useful shell hack to compare two sets of directories for differences. Should work on Linux as well.
Updated Jan/09: if your diff does not support the -q option then try this
Jonathon Oxter has a video on Google showing how to connect the real world (electric lights, RFID chips embedded in the body etc.) to things in the Second Life game
It’s an hour long and very, very, geeky — but it’s Oh So Cool.
I know I’ve waffled on about this before, but with 98% of the world running Windows it’s becoming a pain in the posterior to be running a technically superior operating system, especially with coLinux being such a great solution for those times when you need a proper platform (plus someone seems to have fixed the link to the Windows port of svk). As well as the issues relating to mobile device synchronisation etc. I often run into problems because evaluation software is only supplied for Windows.
I think by the end of the week I shall be in Windows land, with coLinux used for GnuCash and Linux development. I’ll use MS Outlook (supplied with my Smartphone) as a PIM and Windows OpenOffice. Of course I’ll need to add a stack of goodies to get something almost as good, things like a shell, a decent editor, a PDF driver, some development tools etc., etc.
Update — well it appears that Optus/Samsung does not supply MS Outlook with their phone, so I might as well stay with Linux and Evolution with Windows under VMware
These instructions let you connect your Windows Mobile 2005 device, via USB, to your computer, using the usb-rdnis-lite kernel module
I whined a few days about the prospect of having to downgrade to Windows (from Linux) in order to get proper use from my new Windows Mobile 5 phone.
However it appears that people have trod the path before for me and I hope to running a fully integrated desktop/phone soon. My expectation is that I should be able to synchronise:
When looking at technologies like .NET my constant whine is that they are not cross platform unlike J2EE (I don’t really consider Mono to be a full plug in replacement). i.e. .NET only runs on Windows. There are other examples of course.
However the problem runs both ways — many tools (e.g. svn, git, GNUCash, etc) do not run as well on OS/X or Windows as they do on Linux.
For a wandering minstrel such as myself , this makes the choice of personal tools for accounting, development, etc. a curious set of compromises.
Or usually, to hell with compromise and just pick the one that looks cool on Linux (and of course Linus is the father of Linux)
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