After the initial installation, I found a few more glitches with the default Gutsy install on the Eee PC. I’m sure these are general issues with Ubuntu 7.10 and they were easy enough to sort out.
Fix Flash
Letting Firefox install Flash didn’t work. The installation goes OK but Flash is still broken afterwards. In the end I had to download and install it manually as described here and here.
Fix Totem (aka. Movie Player).
Not sure why, but a one-liner (found here) fixed the Totem movie player. It used to crash trying to play anything before.
Get Rails 2.0
As far as I can tell the Gutsy repositories only go up to Rails 1.8. So the trick to install 2.0 was to do it via gems instead.
May 26th, 2008
I was very chuffed to see the Eee PC on South African shelves so soon after it was announced. It’s a neat little computer on its own but can also function as a full-fledged desktop, especially when connected to an external display and usb peripherals. I decided to replace both my PDA and desktop with one of these and eliminate always having to synchronise them.
I was very impressed with it right out of the box and hooking it up to wireless was a snap. It comes with Open Office and Firefox preinstalled but relies on links to Gmail and friends for everything else. I thought I’d be able to install more applications from the online repositories but there was no additional software available for this model. You have to change the apt sources to later model repositories, which is easy enough, but I feel sorry for Linux newbies who will get stuck there. While I was at it I decided to just bite the bullet and replace everything with a standard Ubuntu instead.
The 2G Surf (700) was one of the very first Eee PC models and the only one I know of that is currently available in South Africa. You can pick one up for R2,799 at Hi-Fi Corp or R2,999 at Incredible Connection. I decided to fly in the face of larger displays and disks (which are just around the corner) with this model because the later ones are quickly approaching regular laptop prices.
I had to roll my own bootable USB with Gutsy Gibbon as the isotostick route didn’t work (for me, at least). A standard Ubuntu install comes in at just over 2Gig so I also had to buy an additional SD card to mount /usr on. Luckily there is a slot available for this. The installation went fine and running the ubuntu-eee scripts took care of the kernel, configuration and setting up special drivers. The only problem I still have is that it doesn’t wake up after a suspend/hibernate, but I’ll try to fix that later. For the time being I simply disabled suspending in the /etc/acpi config to prevent it from falling asleep when I close the lid.
Physically, the Eee PC is a pleasure to work with. The 7” screen is more than enough for everything I do and ditto the keyboard for touch-typing. The only exception is the right shift button which is just smaller than it should be and caused some trouble until I got the hang of the little stretch.
This model does not have a built-in web-cam, telephone modem or the protective black sheath that is rumored to come with later models but handled all the hardware I’ve thrown at it.
April 23rd, 2008
