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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Your line will be upgraded on the weekend of the 9th August

\o/

…

Pity my line noise stats are so awful that it is unlikely to go any faster than the 3Mb I have already!

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I’ve been driven crazy over the last few days trying to figure out why the hell my Windows Vista PC won’t go into standby. Every time I tell it to stand by it goes through the motions and then immediately wakes back up again. I had set up various bits of hardware in device manager (network cards in particular) to not wake up the computer. It turns out the problem was my crappy USB keyboard. Even though I never pressed any of its keys after telling the computer to go to standby it would keep waking it up again and again. Disabling its wake up ability in device manager did the trick - I just have to use the computer’s power button to wake it up rather than pressing a key.

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My favourite game of all time is still the classic TIE Fighter Collector’s CD from LucasArts, released for DOS back in 1994-1995. I remember spending many, many hours plugging away at it back then.

Today I got it running again on my modern, 64-bit Windows Vista system

What you need:

• The game CD or an ISO of it - ISO is better since DOSBox can just mount that so you don’t need to have the CD in your drive all the time.
• A copy of the latest version of DOSBox, the free MS-DOS emulator.
• A joystick. This game really sucks with keyboard and mouse. I got a cheapo Logitech USB one from Argos for €30. It has a load of programmable buttons that I will probably never use.
• Lots and lots of free time. This game will consume it all.

DOSBox really has come on in leaps and bounds since the last time I tried it, which was about 2 years ago. It has proper sound support now, and I can play Tie Fighter in its uber-high-for-the-time 640×480 mode. The game runs flawlessly in DOSBox - I completed the first battle this afternoon. It really brought me back - all the keyboard controls from the game came flooding back from some dark corner of my mind.

Best game ever.

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I’m writing this post via Windows Live Writer on Vista x64. I’ve heard people talking it up on podcasts recently so I thought I should have a look and see what all the fuss is about.

First impressions are that it is actually very good. It has full support for WordPress 2.5 and earlier versions and a bunch of other blogging systems. As I edit this post now it is fully WYSIWYG - as I am editing I see exactly how it will be formatted when posted, including the fonts and colours my chosen WP theme uses.

The GUI is very much like Word 2003, including the red zigzag lines indicating that you can’t spell.

Its pretty nice for a free product and is available for Windows XP as well, but not the 64 bit version.

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I got a free upgrade from 3 last week after being a bill pay customer for a year. Whatever about their rubbish mobile broadband products, I am very happy with their phone service. I got a text message last Thursday telling me I’m now entitled to an upgrade. Off I went to their website to check out what was on offer. I ended up selecting a Nokia 6120 classic as it was one of the handsets that was a totally free* upgrade. The phone arrived the following day, which was impressive considering that I placed the order at 4 in the afternoon and the next day happened to be Good Friday!

Its a nice piece of kit. The built in camera isn’t up to much but I don’t really care about that as all mobile phone cameras are pretty rubbish, Sony Ericsson K850i notwithstanding. It is a slim, light device that runs a proper Symbian S60 R3 multitasking operating system so there’s plenty of scope there for installation of your own applications. I’ve tried Google maps and the GMail app on it, as well as Fring and an S60 PuTTY client. Apparently you can get S60 version of ScummVM and some old console emulators. Nice.

Here’s the bad bit. 3 seem to be traffic shaping the crap out of VoIP stuff that goes outside their walled garden. There’s a Skype client bundled with the phone that works perfectly but can only call other Skype users, not SkypeOut. If you try to use Fring or any of the other alternatives to make SkypeOut calls, the call will either be instantly disconnected or there’ll be such ridiculous latency and jitter that its completely useless. Bastards.

Moving swiftly on, the 6120 has a decent email client built in, with proper support for SSL-secured IMAP, making it perfect for GMail. It took me a bit of Googling to figure out how the hell you get it to use IMAP in a push mail fashion, but I eventually hit paydirt and it now works flawlessly :).

This phone looks like a pretty decent media player too, with support for a load of different audio formats like MP3, AAC, AAC+, M4A, etc. There’s a built in FM radio too, which as usual requires you to use the Nokia headset as it uses that as an antenna. It also has a slot for MicroSD cards, meaning you can load it up with lots of dirt cheap storage. I have a 2GB MicroSD on its way to me for less than €20 including VAT and postage.

Here’s what’s in the box:

• 6120 classic phone
• USB cable (which won’t bloody charge it)
• Battery
• Mains charger
• Radio headset/wired handsfree
• Manual
• Nokia PC Suite CD

For a freebie upgrade I can’t fault this phone at all.

* free but requiring a further 12 month contract, standard fare in any mobile upgrade scenario.

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Dodgy patch panels = massive troubleshooting time wasters.

Akismet has caught 10,463 spam for you since you first installed it

Tá sé go maith.

Incidentally, that is about the extent of my Gaelige.
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I’ve just updated my Wordpress installation to the latest version. Some things might be broken or otherwise abnormal for a while!
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