Asus Eee PC mini review

I've just spent a full day using the new Asus Eee PC as my main desktop computer. It was a surprisingly smooth experience.

This tiny laptop, with just a 4Gb solid state drive and 512Mb of RAM is amazingly snappy to use.

The built-in screen and keyboard are tiny but usable if necessary - today I plugged in an external USB keyboard, mouse and screen. The video output goes up to 1280x1024 and looks just fine.

All the applications I need are built right in, including:

• Firefox web browser
• Thunderbird email client
• OpenOffice word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package.
• Pidgeon instant messenger client
• Skype telephone
• KDE's excellent file manager
• KDE's nice terminal

The Xandros linux distribution browsed my network well and found printers and samba shares with ease. Sometimes finding the local WiFi network was a little slow but worked in the end.

While there is only 1.3Gb of disk space free for documents, it was easy to mount a shared file system (included NFS) or plug in an SD card for document storage.

As a command line user, I welcome all the standard utilities such as ssh, wget, python (regrettably only 2.2.4), nano, java, and about 1600 others.

Criticisms

It's hard to complain about a highly portable notebook that costs just AU$500. Of course it would be nice if the screen was bigger and took up the available space, you can't make the keyboard larger without increasing over all size, the trackpad defaulted to a very insensitive setting but that was soon fixed.

Scanning for wireless networks seems a little slow, but gets there in the end. There are rather a lot of icons in the system tray and the overall look of the KDE based desktop looks unnervingly like Windows XP.

I'd like to leave a large SD card in the slot all the time, but each time I start up it pops up a dialog asking what I want to open it with - probably a work around involving fstab but this needs a gui solution

The single click button below the track pad seems very stiff and I've just realised that it's because it's actually a rocker switch with a left and right button part. Perhaps a little clue such as a line in the middle would avoid this mistake.

Conclusion

I'm writing this post on the device right now, still getting used to the keyboard, but certainly very usable. The only moving part is a small fan so it's very quiet, strange not to hear any disk activity at all.

I think these low cost but feature packed Linux based devices represent a new category of consumer devices. Cheap enough to give to the kids without taking out extra insurance, powerful enough for real work.

Linux on a low end laptop

This weekend I've been playing with an old IBM ThinkPad 600X. It has 300Mb of ram, 12G hard disk, 450Mhz Pentium 3 processor, dead li-ion battery and no built-in ethernet or wireless.

My goal is a machine for use on ham radio, most likely running one of the psk31 software packages. I'd also like to be able to use a web browser and check imap email.

There are some very tiny linux distributions around but I figured I'd like something fairly rich so I've been playing with xubuntu which can run in 128Mb of ram. My approach was to use the Ubuntu 7.10 (release candidate) alternative install - as the live CD wouldn't install and then install xubuntu-desktop as explained here.

The normal Ubuntu desktop, Gnome, eats 250Mb before you start up any extra applications. Xfce, used in Xubuntu, eats 244Mb so I don't see much benefit in not running gnome. (I must be missing something here...)

The show stopper has been sound. Sound out works fine, sound in doesn't seem to function. I can see lots of other folks running old hardware with the same problem. I'm using a Lucent PCMCIA wireless card that Ralph kindly sent me. (It actually has an antenna socket on it!). This was detected just fine and works really well. Ubuntu seems to be lacking some user interface for seeing wireless networks though.

Bottom line: A 450Mhz legacy laptop is perfectly usable with Ubuntu. Firefox is everything I want (with a plugin it even plays YouTube videos reasonably), OpenOffice is great and just gets better every month, Evolution email is fantastic, and the overall desktop experience is really solid.

If I wasn't addicted to MacOS and hanging out for Leopard, I could use this desktop every day.

Oh, and I really hate that little IBM nipple mouse thing. Trackpads are much better.

Cleaned the very dusty case up with eucalyptus oil which can dissolve all the sticky gunk under the silly "made for windows 98" and "Intel inside" stickers.

Bonjour/Zeroconf fun on Linux

I have a headless Fedora linux box that plugs in to my home network and gets an IP address from DHCP.

To find it I've been pinging the broadcast address, in my case 172.16.1.255, and then trying to ssh to each of the IPs that answer until I find it. Very agricultural. Seems like a great reason to use Zeroconf.

To advertise the sshd service, put this in /etc/avahi/services/ssh.service:

<?xml version=\"1.0\" standalone=\'no\'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM \"avahi-service.dtd\">
<!-- See avahi.service(5) for more information about this configuration file -->

<service-group>

<name replace-wildcards=\"yes\">ssh on %h</name>

<service>
<type>_ssh._tcp</type>
<port>22</port>
</service>

</service-group>

Here's another example showing how to include the path in the http url:

<?xml version=\"1.0\" standalone=\'no\'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM \"avahi-service.dtd\">
<!-- See avahi.service(5) for more information about this configuration file -->
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards=\"yes\">myservice on %h</name>
<service>
<type>_http._tcp</type>
<port>80</port>
<txt-record>path=/0/1/</txt-record>
</service>
</service-group>

It's a good idea to set the hostname to something reasonable in /etc/sysconfig/network and reboot.

As root:

# chkconfig --level 35 avahi-daemon on
# service avahi-daemon start

Now you can Command-Shift-K in the MacOS Terminal to browse for the sshd service.

Even better, you can use Chicken of the VNC client to browse for a VNC desktop by putting this in /etc/rc.local

# start vnc for my username at boot
su -l username -c "/usr/bin/vncserver -geometry 1200x900"

(Replace username with YOUR username).

As you, run vncpasswd and set a password. You probably want to edit ~/.vnc/xstartup to uncomment the two lines that give you the full gnome desktop. Reboot.

Now run Chicken of the VNC, do an "Open Connection..." and you'll see the host in the list. Mine comes up as Display 1, your's might be different.

I wish this stuff was just on by default.

Fedora 7 final review

Here are my initial impressions of Fedora 7 final on a modern Intel motherboard with built in video, ethernet and sound. I grabbed the torrent today.

Install was smooth. After that you create a user account and configure sound, then for some reason you need to reboot.

I set the machine to get an IP address via DHCP so the first thing I wanted to know was the IP address. Usually I run terminal and do a /sbin/ifconfig but terminal has moved to the "System Tools" menu. Fair enough I guess. I tried to find the IP address in System/Administration/Network but I couldn't find it there.

It might be good to make the IP address easy to find. The Places menu has a bunch of new locations, not just Documents but Music, Pictures, Videos, and Downloads. Seems like a good idea, but these are all folders that already exist in the home directory which does rather clutter things up. I'm unlikely to be doing much video on my linux box.

The updater killed the machine for a little while and then told me there were a number of updates. When I asked for them it said "Unable to retrieve software information" presumably the fedora updates site is being hammered right now. Still, the message wasn't informative.

First launch of OpenOffice was a bit slow, but after that it was really great. If someone wants a computer to to web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets and simple presentations then this Linux distro would do the trick. For everything else, get a Mac.

Under look and feel, there is something called "Desktop Effects" that can make windows wobble and do the Apple cube effect when switching desktops. This is surely a waste of time and just a pointer to what's to come in the future. I tried it but quickly turned it off.

Now that we have Firefox, one computer operating system is pretty much as good as another. I went to cnn.com, it said I needed Flash, I agreed and it was installed smoothly without re-launching the browser. Great stuff.

At work we deploy on Fedora 6, 7 comes with Python 2.5 so I'm pretty confident everything will just work (but I'll let you know).

My IDE of choice Komodo 4.1 seems to work just fine (actually a bit better than on MacOS).

So far, so good.

Webdav server with lighttpd

MacOS and Windows clients can mount fileservers using WebDAV. This runs over port 80 so it will probably work anywhere on the interweb. It seems really efficient too.

I couldn't find simple instructions on how to set this up so here's my mini howto for Linux. (Sorry for the rather technical content on this one, it's really just a note to myself).

• Get lighttpd
• ./configure --with-webdav-props --with-webdav-locks
• make install (as root)
• mkdir /var/run/lighttpd
• mkdir /var/log/lighttpd
  
• /usr/local/sbin/lighttpd -f lighttpd.conf

Here is a minimal lighttpd.conf that will share your docroot for read & write.

# lighttpd configuration file for a webdav server
#
# in MacOSX you can mount this with http://host/
#
# See:http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/wiki/Docs%3AModWebDAV

server.modules = (
"mod_access",
"mod_webdav",
"mod_accesslog" )

server.document-root = "/var/www/"

server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/access.log"

webdav.activate = "enable"
webdav.is-readonly = "disable"
webdav.sqlite-db-name = "/var/run/lighttpd/lighttpd.webdav_lock.db"

server.pid-file = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"

# at least server html pages
mimetype.assign = (
".html" => "text/html",
".htm" => "text/html"
)
----
Update: After using this as a server for a few days, I have to report that there are two issues:

• Re-naming folders takes ages, reports an error, but does work
• You can't cancel a file copy
  

Fedora Core 6 - linux for my mother

FC6 seems like a great release. Install is smoother than ever, not quite as beautiful as ubuntu, but no hitches.

I've tried it on a Dell desktop, a Dell laptop, and my MacBook (via BootCamp). I couldn't get wireless going on the Apple laptop which is a showstopper for me, but the cool new "Desktop Effects" did work while they didn't on the other two machines.

Desktop effects so far seems to make windows and menus "wiggle" in to view. I guess this is the beginning of the effects we've come to expect in MacOS X and soon Vista.

The web browser is Firefox and is as good an experience as it is anywhere. Now that I use Google Browser Sync, I can jump from machine to machine and feel right at home with all my bookmarks and even cookies following me around.

On the software side, I enabled IPV6 and have had trouble with WebService clients that used to connect to "localhost" that now need "127.0.0.1" for some reason. Yes it's in /etc/hosts.

What a great set of default apps you get. The OpenOffice suite is looking fantastic and any MS Office user would feel right at home.

Recommended.