code meets music

I’m not normally one to buy things on impulse, but the EEEPC from Asus just seemed such a nice product that I went and ordered one yesterday evening and, after it arrived (too) early this morning, I’ve spent most of the day playing with it. If you’re not aware, the EEEPC is small. I mean really small. It has a 7” screen and sits in a 9” (or thereabouts) case and weighs about 1kg. This, naturally, doesn’t come without some sacrifice; the processor is only a 900MHz Celeron; there’s only 4GB of storage; and there’s only 512MB RAM. Despite that, I find it to be responsive enough for the basic tasks I’m planning on using it for, web-browsing and occasional typing.

The device comes with Linux pre-installed; it’s a Xandros-based system that Asus have put some work into to make the most of the hardware. They’ve also wrapped it with ‘AsusLauncher’ which makes it really simple for people not used to Linux to get started, it gives you 5 tabs across the top for the different categories of application (‘Web’, ‘Work’, ‘Games’, ‘Learn’ and ‘Settings’) and then a short list of the applications within each category once selected- there is no application-branding, everything is named for it’s task (so ‘Internet’ rather than Firefox, ‘Mail’ rather than Thunderbird etc.).

It is a nice interface, but I decided shortly after hitting the ‘buy’ button that I’d be putting some form of Ubuntu on it. In the end I went for the XFCE-based Xubuntu, as it takes up less of the precious hard-drive space, and bar a couple of hiccups, installation was straight-forward. I followed these instrucions but with these ‘hiccups’, listed here mostly in the hope it helps others who might be searching:

• when trying to make the bootable USB device on my main machine, I followed instructions that told me to run ‘syslinux /dev/sdX1’ (where X is ‘a’ or ‘b’). I got the error ‘sh: mcopy: not found’. It seems there was a problem, in Feisty at least, with syslinux not listing ‘mtools’ as a dependency, despite it clearly depending on it. A quick “sudo apt-get install mtools” later and things were working.
• if, when trying to boot from a USB key, you get the error “missing operating system” after selecting the device, then it’s a problem with the key, not with the system. I fixed it by running ‘testdisk’ (package-name as well as app-name) and following the steps for ‘analyse’.
• once (X)ubuntu was installed, trying to boot resulted in an error due to it looking in the wrong place. To fix it in the first instance, hit ‘e’ (for ‘edit’) repeatedly on the GRUB menu pages until the command appears on a command-line, where you can edit it. change the ‘root (hd1,0)’ to be ‘root (hd0,0)’, then press ‘enter’ and then ‘b’ (for ‘boot’). This should make things work, but the change won’t persist for the next time you boot. To make it do so, you want to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and change the line ”#groot=(hd1,0)” to be ”#groot=(hd0,0)”. You then need to run “sudo update-grub” to have this change take effect- debian-based systems use an ‘automagic’ system that uses the commented bits in the menu.lst file to build the actual grub config.
• initially, the EEEPC didn’t recognise the wireless interface, but following the instructions here made it work.

The small screen is taking a bit of getting used to, putting Firefox into full-screen is helping a lot, but the keyboard will be more noticeable. I don’t see the lack of hard-disk space as being that much of a problem, as with either USB drives or SD cards, it can be increased quite significantly without costing too much.