The Rambling Chronicles: Notes

Posts Tagged ‘eee pc’

  1. Moblin on my eee PC 901

    22nd May 2009

    Just tried out Moblin 2 on my eee pc, and apart from a couple of things, I was very impressed:

    The Good

    • Very fast boot 1
    • Very nice, easy to use interface
    • Plays nice with my eee pc 2

    The not-so-good

    • Wireless doesn’t work – it is a beta though, so hey are forgiven
    • They seem to have missed out a shutdown button, would be nice to have one
    • No office apps – I know it’s cloud based but offline apps are better when your not online
    • Pain to install – I have a solution though!

    My Install Solution

    For some reason you have to use the dd if= of= command to transfer the file over, something I really don’t like as it wipes everything off the memory stick. So this is what I got from various sources:

    You will need

    1. A USB Stick
    2. Unetbootin
    3. A Mac

    Steps

    1. With the Moblin .img file, drag and drop it onto the left of the Disk Utility app.
    2. Click on the file and choose convert from the toolbar.
    3. Change the image format to CD/DVD master
    4. Save it somewhere you can find it (maybe to another USB Stick)
    5. Change the .cdr extension to .iso
    6. Use Unetbootin3 to create a bootable USB stick
    7. Make sure the drive order for booting from USB is first in both of the BIOS sections on your eee pc.
    8. Enjoy Moblin!
      1. Once you get the damn thing to boot. See below for why ↩
      2. Mostly, see not so good points ↩
      3. either use the windows one through Darwine or transfer the file to Linux and use that one ↩
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  2. eee pc – Easy Peasy 1.0 (Ubuntu 8.10)

    16th Feb 2009

    eee PC upgrade time – Ubuntu-eee 8.04 to Easy Peasy 1.0.

    Installation

    Clean install: 4gb drive mounted as / and formatted, 16gb drive mounted as /home and formatted1. Once set up, install all of the updates before you do anything else.

    Initial Thoughts

    The whole interface has changed to be much darker, but it doesn’t seem very well implemented. Things don’t seem to match up, and the Easy Peasy logo has some serious white fringing. Not professional looking. However, one major plus: wireless now works. Flawlessly as I see it. However, the netbook remix styling still doesn’t; The colours are off and the icons still respond in unexpected ways.

    Getting Rid

    There isn’t a way of doing this in one click, but you can get rid of the netbook remix style interface and revive the “standard” Gnome desktop.

    Bye Bye Netbook Remix

    Once you get rid of the netbook remix interface you appear to have no way of getting to your programs. Don’t panic – pressing Alt-F1 will allow you to get up a floating program menu. Found that out myself through random panicky key pushing.

    Getting rid of the interface is as simple as disabling Netbook Launcher and Maximus in the Session Preferences. This, once you have logged out and back in again will have removed the launcher. However, you are left with some rubbish lying around that does nothing. The first thing to remove is the now very useless Ubuntu Icon in the top left of the screen. You do this by right clicking and selecting “Remove from panel”. Do the same for the application Tabs next to it.

    Hello Gnome Desktop

    Now, your left with very little. Click in a space and select “Add to Panel”, then select “Menu Bar”. You now have a Gnome menu, so no more Alt-F1 clicking. Next thing is to do is to add a bottom bar, right click, “New Panel”. To this I added workspaces, window list, deleted files and the shutdown applets.

    All complete – nearly

    Simple steps lead to one near complete Easy Peasy-less desktop. The last thing to do is to go rummaging around in /usr/share/background for easy-peasy-4.png and to replace/rename it to get rid of another white fringed easy peasy logo, this time on the suspend lock screen. Your netbook is now a tiny desktop. One without the power and a tiny screen.

    1. I’d messed around too much on it, including a poor install of open office and flaky wireless drivers ↩
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