Asus EEE PIM

Asus 4g

Writing this on the new Asus 4g. It´s the 4 gig ssd m0del running a modified xandos Linux. The wireless is excellent, better signal strength than any other laptop. The keyboard is small but better than typing on a ipod or psp or badberry. Just upgraded the ram from 512 to 1 gig.

Ram upgrade

Very simple, unplug and remove the battery. Remove 2 screws from the bottom compartment and take out the ddr2 sodimm. Replace with a bigger sodimm. I had to reset the system using a very thin needle to get it to boot back up and thenF2 to go into the BIOS to turn on the web cam as the default is off.

Trackpad is a bit jumpy like all the new ones - will have to adjust it. Also need to add another repository to the apt pkg mgr and buy a 16gig sd for storage.

Update

Started configuring the system to my needs. First up was to add some storage with a 16 gig SDHC card.

Problem 1 - cannot write to 16gig sd card

We think about adding a line to fstab, something like:

/dev/sdb1 /mnt/disk vfat auto,exec,rw,async,user 0 0

And then discover a simplier fix - the switch on the SD card was set to read only! Problem solved. We are able to copy the my documents folder to 'drive d' which is the sd card. Later we will figure out how to change the location of my documents to point to the sd card (which is going to stay in the machine for all time) and remove those folders from the SS drive. This will both free up space for more appz and seperate documents from the system drive - which is something i always do.

Problem 2 - Some packages appeared broke -could not install he asus-update pack 105

Some packages appeared broke,we could not update open office.
So we opened terminal with ctrl alt T and did:

sudo apt-get update

But we still can't install the update . We open a terminal shell with CTRL ATL T and do:

sudo synaptic

to get to the package manager. We try and install asus-updatepack-105 and find it fails on a dependency of:

atheros-swan-modules

Which is listed as installed. So we mark the package for re-installation and apply the changes. No joy - more research needed on this one. Not impressed by Asus with this - broken packages on a shipped product is a bit lax. We see the manual is available in .chm format - let's give it a read...wait there is no chm viewer.

Problem 3 - cannot view manual

We need the excellent gnochm reader as the included manual is in .chm format but no chm reader is installed. Trying to install gnochm resulted in 'couldn't find package' error. Let's add some repositiories to the package manager. In the terminal window we do:

sudo kwrite /etc/apt/sources.list

We add a new repository with this line:

deb http://www.geekconnection.org/ xandros4 main

And save the updated list. Back in the terminal we type:

sudo apt-get install gnochm

but it couldn't find gnochm either! Since this asus distro is a custom jobbie we are somewhat hesitant about installing things without a bit more research. It would also be useful to have icons for the text editor and terminal added to the 'desktop'. The use of kwrite implies this is a KDE environment undeath and i am a Gnome but that is probably killer for such a lightweight machine. We would need more space on the internal 4 gig ssd.

Problem 4- move home directory

Move from the internal ss drive to the external sdhc card. Free up space and seperate
document files from the system drive. We need to research this.

Problem 5 - Add icons

There is no terminal icon or text editor icon. Need to research this.

TODO

Install XAMPP

Summary

Thinking that when ubuntu comes out with a netbook version i will switch the eee to that. Actually, i discovered that some people have installed ubunutu on the machine, there basically seem to be two approaches:

- install regular version and then tweak for the small screen and limited storage
- install eeeXubuntu, a customized version of ubunutu 7.10

The first option provides a more recent version plus updates but requires more fiddling, the second is an older version but should work 'out of the box'. What to do?

We decide to install eeeXbuntu first and see how it goes, if we don't like it then we will try regular ubuntu. Time to find the external usb cd rom and download an ISO of eeeXbuntu.