Feckoff.net

Since I got my Asus Eee 901 last week, I’ve been fiddling around with Ubuntu 8.04.1 on it, as the preinstalled Xandros OS on it was a bit too restrictive for my liking. Installing Ubuntu was easy enough, as there are tools out there to make bootable USB flash drives that you can use to run the installer from.

When Ubuntu finished installing there was still a lot of work to do, with both the ethernet card and wireless card not working, as well as some other less important components like the integrated webcam and keyboard hotkeys. There are some pretty comprehensive instructions on how to get everything working here.

That got me a working Ubuntu desktop, which is nice but it doesn’t do anything special to cater for machines with limited screen real estate like today’s sub-notebooks/netbooks. That’s where the Ubuntu Netbook Remix comes in. Netbook Remix is a project at Canonical to build proper support for these machines in co-operation with OEMs, so that you will eventually see Ubuntu available as a preinstalled option in the future.

There are some fairly quick-and-dirty instructions on what you need to do to get netbook remix installed here. This is still in beta with no release date announced, but I would expect something to ship around October, when Ubuntu 8.10 comes out.

Despite being beta software, I’m finding it very smooth and polished. The only problems I have encountered are when I run it with Compiz visual effects enabled.

Here are some screenshots. Click them for full size in the Eee 901’s native resolution of 1024×600.

The wallpaper image you can see in the background is one of my own photos.

Update: Uh-oh, found a bug already! It doesn’t seem to return from standby very well. When I just had basic Ubuntu installed with the various steps taken to get the Eee hardware all working standby/resume worked fine.

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I just got my shiny new Asus Eee 901 delivered at lunch time today. Its the 20GB Linux model. I am most impressed with the fact that it worked with my Huawei E270 3G device out-of-the-box! That’s not a familiar experience for me with Linux and these devices.
This thing is tiny and very light. The battery is a bit heavier and bulkier than the one in the older Eee models but the extra weight brings with it much longer battery life. Apparently 6 hours should be easy to achieve on this, and 7+ if you turn lots of stuff (wifi, bluetooth, screen brightness etc) off.
Oddly, both the onboard bluetooth and webcam were disabled by default in the BIOS but both have been functioning perfectly since I enabled them.

I haven’t had much time to play with it yet as I am in work. It’ll get a decent go when I get home this evening

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I installed OpenSUSE 10.3 on my laptop last night. It had been running Ubuntu 7.04 and then 7.10 successfully for about 8 months. All was going well until I used the nice GUI tools to install nVidia graphics drivers from the repositories. Restart X and bang! Its broken. I seem to recall this exact same thing happening last time I used SUSE, about 3 years ago. Nice to see they’ve not fixed it yet then. I was planning to stick KDE 4 on it too, to see what its like. Maybe not now!
It was late by then so I just shut it down. I’ll attack it again this evening.

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I upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 yesterday. I’m pretty impressed with it - particularly with the compiz eye candy. This is the first time I’ve ever had compiz working without it crashing after I reboot

I do have a couple of issues though - The Azureus BitTorrent client worked flawlessly with Ubuntu 7.04. It immediately crashes upon startup now in 7.10. I have read that manually downloading it and installing it from the Azureus website will remedy the problem - I had installed it from the Ubuntu repositories. In the mean time I have been using Deluge instead, which does the job but is not as feature-rich as Azureus.

My only other big issue with Ubuntu 7.10 is that suspend still does not work for me, just as in 7.04. The laptop will suspend just fine but it is impossible to get it to resume without forcing a hard power off.
Another minor issue is that the built in VNC server STILL does not support clipboard sharing. It is possible to replace this with an alternate version but its a proper pain in the arse.

Nice things:

• WiFi support is really slick now, with painless GUI configuration of WPA2 networks. It also seems to automatically connect to my wireless LAN before I log in, which is nice.
• It now has a fast indexed search engine (Tracker)
• Adding package repositories is now really, really easy and does not require editing of config files
• It detected my laptop’s screen resolution (1280×800) correctly, unlike 7.04.

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I found this quite useful. Ever since I installed Ubuntu 7.04, “Feisty Fawn” on my laptop a couple of months ago it was always bugging me that the fonts looked so utterly shitty on it. I actually went googling and found a solution tonight.
The flow of the instructions given on the ubuntu forums thread is a bit arseways, so here’s how to do it in a nutshell:

1. Add the repositories you need to get the relevant packages to Synaptic:
   From a terminal, run the following command to bring up Synaptic’s repository list in gedit:
   sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.listNow add the following two lines to the end of this file:
   deb http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu feisty fonts
deb-src http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu feisty fontsSave it and close gedit.
2. Now you need to import the gpg keys that Synaptic needs to trust the new repository. Run the following command from the terminal:
   wget http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu/937215FF.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -Don’t forget the - at the end of the line!
3. Now configure Ubuntu to use the new font smoothing technique. Again, run the following command from the terminal:
   sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-configThe options I chose are the same as mentioned in the Ubuntu forums thread linked above - Native,Always,No.
4. Now get it to use the settings you just configured. From the terminal:
   sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

That’s it! To actually see the effect of this you will need to restart the x-server (i.e. the whole GUI). You could log out or reboot, but I just pressed ctrl+alt+backspace. Save any stuff you have open before doing this!

Looks much nicer now!
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The latest release of Ubuntu Linux is out, known as “Feisty Fawn”. My first impression (having installed it on the same laptop that I had version 6.10 “Edgy Eft” on) is that it certainly has improved but there is still a long way to go. The single best improvement I have noticed so far is that WPA security for wireless networks works from the get-go, assuming your wireless card is supported. That was one of my biggest gripes with pretty much every Linux distribution I’ve tried. Fair play to them for getting that working.
Pretty much all of my laptop’s hardware with the exception of its integrated multiformat card reader works fine with Ubuntu 7.04. I still experienced the same annoying problem with screen resolutions that I had with 6.10 though. My laptop has a wide screen with a resolution of 1280×800, which is very, very common. Ubuntu only offered three resolutions, all 4:3, even after installing the nVidia graphics driver.
I had to go and manually edit xorg.conf to add 1280×800 to each display mode that I might possibly want to use it with. My laptop’s Synaptics touchpad also doesn’t behave properly (scrolling, typing detection and so on), but I think there are packages out there to sort that out.

All in all, its getting better, and I’ll continue to use it on my laptop but I think for the average user there’s still a ways to go.

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