Something that I have been meaning to blog about for a while, but stupid university assignments kept getting in the way.  I have a Nokia N73 with 3G and bluetooth.  With my new Eee901 it seemed the perfect opportunity to attempt to get wireless internet access.  After a lot of fiddling and failing, and very simple and very easy solution presented itself.  I'll try to keep this as generic as possible, because it should work with most phones that have the capability. 

I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 on an Asus Eee 901 as the starting point.

The first magic step required is to install blueman.  It's a GTK+ bluetooth manager with many bells and whistles.  I'm using version 0.6, which is a beta, from the launchpad ppa found here : https://edge.launchpad.net/~blueman/+archive/ppa.  Before I go any further, PPA repositories are normally pretty bleeding edge and not fully supported by Canonical, so use with caution.  I'm using the beta because it features brilliant integration with network manager - you will see why later.

Once installed, you may need to reboot. then run blueman (should be under accessories). With the bluetooth switched on on your mobile phone, run an inquiry, and your phone should show up in the list.  You'll want to bond it, to make future connections quicker and easier.

Select your phone and click properties.  This will give you a run down of what bluetooth communications your phone is able to do.  The one you will be looking for is "Dialup Networking" and the channel number.  If you have this, you're one step closer to wireless internet heaven. 

We now need to get blueman, dialup networking and network manager talking - sounds impossible, actually really easy.  Hit Edit > Services and turn on "Serial" and go to the configuration settings.  Select "add new serial port", select your phone, and under the service, choose dialup networking.  you may need to add the channel number under advanced, but think that it will do this automatically anyway.  once you have added the port, highlight it and tick the box, "This is a GSM/GPRS etc" box.  It's this little option that makes the magic happen in network manager.

Save all of that, and hopefully network manager has given you a notification that you have a connection available.  If not, click once on the network manager icon and choose configure under "mobile broadband" and follow the instructions and select your internet provider.

That's it, it should now be as easy to turn bluetooth on, open blueman, and select the connection on network manager!

Good Luck, any issues, comment or email and I'd be willing to help as much as I can!

Alright, so I've had the 901 now for a week and I thought it would be a good time to put up a post giving my thoughts on actually running it.  (also, I started preparing this blog entry whilst sitting on the tube at 7am on a Sunday morning - how cool is that)

Firstly, and probably most importantly was the email I received from Sam on Tuesday regarding a fantastic package called eee-control.  I think this is a little bit like the ubuntu eee holy grail.  It requires that you are running adamm's customised kernel, and one or two extra python packages, but nothing too stressful due to the joy of deb's dependency solving.  Once installed and rebooted I can now turn on/off my wifi, bluetooth, camera and sdcard reader (all good when maximising battery potential).  I can also reconfigure the 4 hotkeys to do whatever I want them to... brilliant.  Very chuffed with this, and the system-tray icon is a very snazy Eee.

One of the things that I forgot to mention about the Eee 901 previously is the amazing touchpad.  I think that it is a really good size for this machine, but the coolest thing is that it is multi-touch.  Using 2 fingers on the touchpad means that you can scroll up and down, you can 'pinch and pull' images to zoom in and out.  What I also discovered this week was that you can use three fingers on the pad as well, and this relates to a right click.  It takes a bit of getting used to, but all in all fabulous.

I'm still getting used to the keyboard, but it really is not all that terrible.  I wouldn't like to try and type up a thesis on it, but for emails and and perhaps a couple of hours typing,  It's not all that bad.

Now for the issue - and only one so far which I believe might be a small manufacturing defect on my physical machine.  For whatever reason, randomly, the OS gets the signal that the lid has been closed, and opened.  I initially had the Eee set to go into standby when shutting the lid.  As you can imagine, this started causing serious havoc.  I would be working away and suddenly the machine would go into standby.  I've disabled all power management features with regards to the lid, so for now, it doesn't appear to be an issue, although every now and then the screen flickers on and off.  Below you can see an image of what my power history looks like.  Note all the lid open and lid closed notifications.  Although at this time the lid was fully up. 

The question I'm struggling with, is do I send the machine back to Asus for a repair - I have a year manufacturers warranty, or do I just live with it... I'm not sure about it because I have put ubuntu on...  plus it has a few stickers on it as well.

Finally, I have bitten the bullet and decided to buy myself an Eee PC. Those that know me personally, will know that I have been harping on about getting one for quite some time now. A couple of weeks ago I walked into my local PCWorld to discover that they had the 904HD. This started to get me very excited, although it left me with a dilemma... do I go for the 901, the 904HD or the 1000 version (link to see the differences). 

In the end I decided on the 901 and here where my reasons. 20GB of SSD hard drive space is more than enough for what an Eee PC is for and a 10" screen I think is the upper limit for a netbook and possibly even too big (plus I couldn't really justify the extra £100). The next question was black or white... no really, did I go for the 'Fine Ebony' or 'Pearl White'. The decision was black, because as much as I initially wanted a white one, the black one is so much sexier (yes, I used the s-word).

After unpacking it, adorning it with selected Ubuntu stickers. It went on charge for about 3hrs. Then it was play time!

Ubuntu Installation

I decided that I wanted to run a 'normal' Ubuntu OS. There are some good Eee derivatives (such as Ubuntu-Eee or eeebuntu), but I felt more comfortable using a normal Ubuntu install. Luckily for me, Intrepid has a funky 'create a USB start disk' application for just this sort of occasion. Pretty easy, put USB stick into my desktop, downloaded the newest ISO, point click, point click and I theoretically I had a bootable USB live CD.
(As an aside, it appears that you can also set aside an amount of space on the USB stick for settings and documents. I think this means that you can effectively have Linux on a stick that will work on a USB bootable PC and then have your personal settings and applications already installed?? I will research this further.)

Plug into the Eee, startup, hit F2 for BIOS. Here I had a few issues. The boot selection had 'removable media' as an option. This did not work. I fiddled a little bit more and in the boot -> hard drive disk section, an option for USB drive (make sure that your USB stick is plugged in when doing this). Turned this on, reset the boot order, saved BIOS and restarted. Weehee! Ubuntu install started! 

If I were to do this again, I would do it differently. I opted for the normal graphical install - be warned, not all the installation option windows fit on the small resolution screen. I had to be careful and use the TAB and ENTER keys selectively to hope that I was on the 'next' button. This model has 2 SSD drives, one 4GB and one 16GB. They have been formatted EXT2 with the 4GB mounting as / and the 16GB mounting as /home. Wasn't too bad in the end, and a cuppa tea later I was installed and ready to go! 

Wifi

Yip, that old chestnut! Didn't work out the box, then again, who ever expects that it will, but UbuntuForums are your friend. After a little research, it seemed that one of the best solutions to all things Ubuntu and Eee was to use a customised kernel provided by array.org. I added the repositories (plugged into the router via an ethernet cable), added the medibuntu repositories, selected a number of packages to install, hit apply and made the second cup of tea! Rebooted to the new kernel, and Bob's your Uncle and Sarah's your Aunt, everything worked. Wifi, webcam, sound, bluetooth, shortcut keys. You name it, it worked! (just a point here, the webcam, wifi and bluetooth were disabled in bios, apparently the default xandros ignores this and still works, I had to enable them). 

Overall thoughts

I LOVE THIS MACHINE! It is everything that a netbook should be, small, light, fast (the atom processor has so far seriously impressed me). I can scale the CPU, choosing between 800MHz, 1.00GHz, 1.2GHz or the full 1.6GHz. Also has the on demand setting so that the CPU will scale as required. So far, and this is only on the second charge cycle, I'm getting about 5hrs of normal usage (with the wifi turned on and being used). Suspend and resume works, very cool. Now for a bit more usage. I had it up a the University library today and it was stellar, it fulfilled it's purpose, 110%. I could even connect to the Uni's wifi network!

I am a very very happy Eee owner!
 

The guys over at eeeuser.com highlighted this very interesting piece of news from pcworld.com.

In an attempt to stop vendors using linux based OSes for their sub-notebooks, Microsoft has apparently slashed the price of WinXP to manufacturers.  However, as only the money hungry Microsoft can do, they are limiting the design specifications to a maximum of:

• 10.2" Screen (cannot offer a touch screen)
  
• 80GB hard drive
• 1GB of RAM and
• Single-core processor running at no more than 1GHz. (The program makes an allowance for some chips, including Via Technologies' C7-M processors, which run between 1.0GHz and 1.6GHz, and Intel's upcoming Atom N270)

I think it's a very sad day when a software provider is attempting to control what hardware vendors produce.  With Asus seemly showing some MS love on their new Eee 900's, it appears that we will not be getting a touch screen version anytime soon.  Although, it does leave the option for Asus to produce 2 seperate versions, but the marketing department will have a tough time selling that if you ask me. Already the 900's have an 8GB storage space difference between the Linux and Windows versions, can you imagine adding slower CPU, less RAM and no touch screen to the difference list.

On the plus side, this may prove to be another nail in the MS dominance coffin as the public starts to wonder at the audacity of MS to try to control these things, and hopefully make them realise the power and freedom that open source can offer.  The Eee PC and it's followers, such as the HP 2133, have proven that the Linux Kernel and open source software is a viable out-of-the-box technology for consumers. The battle of OS dominance in the sub-notebook market is far from over, but I think that open source software is leading already and will win.

A day out in the park in Leamington Spa, about 20km south of Birmingham in the UK, lead to bike rides and the inevitable picnic. The sun came out for sometime that day and one of the most enjoyable parts of the whole experience was the fact that within my backpack for the duration of the ride, was my Eee PC, fully charged and pre-loaded with it's usual music flavours. We sat down to picnic, I took out the Eee, fired up Rhythmbox and started filling the air with some great music. It made me smile because of how I keep on telling people about it's portability. I decided to take some snap shots of the Eee in it's element... Sitting on top of a shoe to make sure that it didn't touch the wet ground, it gave us some chilled out tunes for the duration of our picnic and upon it's closure, it was folded up, placed in it's neoprene sleave and dropped in my backpack. Some random days I question whether I have a use for the Eee and if it was a good buy... other days like these... I don't.

Don't you find posts with pictures of good looking women in them usually get more attention? Same with videos these days... Check out the "Most watched" videos on YouTube and you'll see that they have a reasonably good looking woman/man as the thumbnail, even if they don't even feature in it. Well, this post may get the same reponses with this lady-luck but what will make it even more appealing is the little Eee PC that she's working on. An Eee PC on the beach? It's rugged, but not *that* rugged.

At the end of November last year I ended up in PC World at 6:30pm fiddling around with an Eee PC on display. It was white and the 2Gb "Surf" version (Most probably the version in the picture). I had spent the whole day looking at it on the web... "New worlds smallest notebook preinstalled with Linux". Who wouldn't read up about it? And in the following months the world would be reading a whole lot more about this little notebook. Now sold out in almost all suppliers across the UK, it's gone far beyond the expectations of their manufacturer, Asus. Of course now they're bringing out the 8Gb versions, bigger screen versions, and Windows preinstalled versions. Yes, it's true... Asus totally sold out on the Linux thing and decided to preinstall Windows XP on the larger versions. In Linux's defense, it was most probably used on the smaller original versions because of, amongst many other great reasons, it's sheer small size of installation and ease of use in the Xandros flavouring. It does bleaken me somewhat that now that they've got a market for them, they've come up with larger sizes and decided to now go along with the sheeps needs and give them the Windows option. It will be interesting to see which models sell more - the smaller cheaper ones, or the bigger more expensive ones. They must be careful not to lose sight of the main reason for it's high volume sales - price. £200 (end of last year) for a handheld-notebook hybrid. Not a notebook... in fact because I have both a notebook and an Eee PC, I can solidly say that they serve very different functions. Browsing the web on an Eee PC for hours is one of the more painful things you can do with a computer. It's temporary and throw-around usage is what makes it appealing.

Getting on to more technical things. Being a more "advanced" Linux user, I just got frustrated by the preinstalled Xandros operating system. If you're an average user, you'll love it. If you're used to doing more fancy things with Linux, it will make you keep saying things like "In Ubuntu I would just...". So, the first evening I had it I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on to it. There were tons of guides and such on the eeeuser wiki and other 3rd party sites. The installation was a breeze and within about two hours I was all tweaked and fully installed. Changed all the fonts, window borders, Firefox themes and a host of other things to make sure that I maximised the constrained space. Having a wifi router in our house made the Eee an unbeatable tool. Not only is the whole PC smaller than an A5 book, it's wifi capabilities make it the ideal "Coffee table PC". I have a media server that's connected to our TV to watch stuff off of and I set up the Eee so that I could just connect to the media server and tell it to play me something, all without having to get up from the couch. The portability of the Eee over a normal 15" or even 14" notebook is only understood when you own one. A few people have come up to me when they see the Eee and asked if it's worth spending a little more for a 14" notebook because "they're almost the same size". My usual response is, "Well, no." They are two different ball games... A 14" notebook will undoubtedly have moving parts (not for the new SSD versions though) which means that although it's "portable", it's always a risk. It will also come with a big hard drive that you'll end up filling up with family photos or something and then on the day you drop the notebook whilst transporting it around your busy day, you'll curse the fact that you lost all your photos on this "should be portable" device. The Eee's hard drive isn't nearly large enough for you to do these sorts of things, though you can store a good deal of things on it. It means that everything that I keep on my Eee is 100% disposable. This is where portability comes to fruition. Computer portability isn't just based on size and weight, it's also based on information storage these days.

Another part of my response is also to tell them to try compare portability when they see me throw my Eee in my backpack every afternoon after work and then cycle home. Try do that with a 14" notebook. You'll carefully put it in your specially designed backpack and, whilst feeling the now reasonably heavy notebook strapped to your back, you'll cycle home so carefully so as not to damage the notebook. I've never even contemplated bringing my 15" notebook to work if I'm cycling. I would rather just knock it off the desk every morning before work.

So Ubuntu was running nicely on the Eee and although the bootup time of a standard Ubuntu install on the Eee is around 1 minute, I decided to try out the widely acclaimed Xubuntu which would be lighter on space and more economical on services and boot up. Within a few days I realised why I would be reinstalling Ubuntu... not because Xubuntu isn't a great operating system, but rather because of all the features I was so used to in a Gnome environment. All the features that were non-existent for Linux three or four years ago have now become a part of my daily usage and Xubuntu just either didn't have them, or didn't have suitable replacements. One example being playing media files over network shares. It's do-able, of course, by samba mounting the share and then pointing to the local share. This always comes up when people say that it's missing from Xubuntu. "Oh, just open a terminal and...."

I'm a huge terminal user... in fact, in most situations I turn to terminal far quicker than GUI in Ubuntu. But for some things, like browsing around my 1Tb shares, I would rather prefer to just point and click at the network shares. Of course other factors to consider are things like making sure that your girlfriend is also able to do these things effortlessly and the things is... Ubuntu is that. Xubuntu has it's place - like on my actual media server - but not as a common desktop for an medium-advanced user.

If you fit that profile, then when you buy an Eee, install Ubuntu and don't bother with Xubuntu. The benefits don't outweigh the costs. And when you buy the Eee, don't be conned into thinking you need more than 512mb RAM or more than 4Gb of hard drive space. It's not a replacement for a standard notebook and never should be seen as one.