I finally found some time to install Ubuntu on my Eee pc 901, and it’s a good thing I’ve waited for the holidays (if I can call them holidays — despite what some lady friends tell me, hunting for Christmas presents in shopping malls is hard work), because the entire process sure took a lot more time than I was initially expecting.

I’ve followed a a post over on tombuntu, while also referring to Rui Carmo’s post on the subject and to a series of other resources that address more specific issues:

• Found out that noatime is actually a superset of nodiratime, so I only ended up adding the first one to fstab.
• I hadn’t fiddled with the kernel’s I/O scheduler before, so although I’ve seen a couple of recommendations towards using elevator=deadline as a kernel parameter, I’ve only understood it better by going through this other post.
• I’ve mounted /tmp as a memory filesystem, as instructed, but soon found it taking 500MB of memory (even though only 26MB where being effectively being used), which seemed more than reasonable, specially considering I’m not using a swap partition. So, what I did was to limit the size of /tmp using an extra parameter: tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777,size=250m 0 0. Got some insights on the use of tempfs on this article.

So everything was going great… that is, until I tried to establish a connection to my wireless router at home. Network Manager refused to cooperate — it kept asking for authentication credentials, even though he already had the right ones — and I took a while to understand I was facing some sort of bug in NM, and not an incompatibility with the Eee hardware (at least, this is my theory for now). This seems to be reproducible with hidden WPA networks, like the one I had at home. I just ended up changing the router settings to broadcast the SSID, and all is working fine now. Still, this worries me, I wonder if I won’t have trouble connecting to eduroam networks — will have to try it.

Btw, I have to say I now strongly agree that Network Manager badly needs a refresh feature.

Another difficulty I add was finding a convenient way to quickly configure VGA output, as I frequently need to connect to a projector, either for classes or the occasional presentation. Again, this has nothing to do with the Eee 901 specifically, although the fact that it uses a 16:9 resolution does add a bit to the challenge. I ended up using LXRandR, that is provided by the Ubuntu repositories, but also found two other promising applications that do mostly the same: uRandR and aRandR.

At this point, I realized I had very little space left on the 4GB SSD, as it was to be expect. I’ve done two things to get some space back: first, I’ve used this setting on synaptic packet manager: Settings -> Preferences -> Files -> Delete Downloaded Packages After Installation; second, there are loads of pre-installed documentation that typically never get used: /usr/share/doc told me what was taking too much space, and I got rid of some of these docs by using apt). I still have 1.1GB free now, which is quite reasonable, since I kept almost everything, including open-office, and installed texlive and several other smaller packages.

Bought myself an Eee PC 901 yesterday.

Buying a netbook is something I have been considering for a while now. I found that getting a real laptop would be too much of a burden (on my pocket on the short-run, and on my back on the long-run), but I can find real usefulness on these “new” ultra-light, long-lasting battery, network-centric “toys”.

My N95 has been doing it’s part mobility-wise, but my expectations have been changing over time. The N95’s browser behaves quite nicely, but it’s still very limited (given the memory limitations it’s wise to keep only one page open at a time, and the rendering speed is usually slower than what I would find reasonable), and sometimes buggy (not in the rendering itself, but occasional crashes do happen).

I was interested on the Dell Inspiration Mini 9 for a while, but a few things diverted my attention to the 901, starting by a second look at it’s specs, finding out about Ubuntu Eee — an Ubuntu-based distribution that is fine tuned for the Eee models –, and finding out about the eee-control utility, which solves a number of Eee bugs that usually come up if not using the variant of Xandros that comes bundled with the machine. This utility helps to switch hardware on and off, configure hotkeys, switch between performance levels and better control over the fan, among other niceties.

But I can’t really evaluate this Ubuntu Eee + eee-control setup yet, as I haven’t found the time to fully install and configure the system to my liking (and probably won’t in the next weeks). So the plan for now is to wait for Ubuntu 8.10, which is due on the beginning of the next month.

But while I’m talking about this, I must add that I have nothing against the Eee’s version of Xandros — it seems to work very well — but it does try hard to hide complexity, which is fine for the regular user, but makes me feel like being in a sandbox, with only a handful of tools. I think Ubuntu strikes a nice trade-off in this regard.

Of course, Rui Carmo’s insights have been very useful. I’m a little more confident I’ll be able to stay away from Windows though (I would really like to avoid that — I can’t say for sure for how long, but it has surely been more than a year since I’d regularly boot into Windows at home), but only time will tell. Windows is still an option, if I can’t have an equally good experience on Linux, except for the slightly lower battery, which I believe to be one of those things which won’t get any better on the foreseeable future for Linux on the laptop.

I could really use one of these new toys everyone is calling netbooks.

I’ve been looking at some options, and I’m quite liking the new Dell Inspiration Mini 9. One big plus for me is that it’s available on a Ubuntu flavor, in which I will be much more comfortable, comparing with the Xandros distribution that comes with the Eee PC, or the Linpus that comes with the One. I admit the battery life could be a little better, but it’s reasonable, given the size and weight of the thing (and the price tag, of course).

I’m not finding a store in Portugal that sells the Mini 9, nor one that may ship them here (anyone knows of such a place?). I could risk buying one online, if I could somehow get a portuguese keyboard layout too.

There are US prices available, for different configurations:

I wonder why isn’t there a different price between the Ubuntu and Windows version on the 16GB/1GB configuration…

Anyhow, if it all goes as usual, prices in Europe will unfortunately be higher than these :\

Eu cheio do que fazer, com imenso trabalho em atraso, e o computador há-de me morrer nos braços. “Ok, não ha-de ser nada”, penso eu, “ainda consigo rapidamente substituir a peça que for preciso, sem que me afecte muito o andamento do trabalho”.

Infelizmente, estava errado. Passei ontem o dia em torno do PC sem perceber o que se passava. Os sintomas eram um computador com ventoinhas e leds ligados, mas com um ecrã preto e sem quaisquer avisos sonoros.

Uma substituição de motherboard depois (juntamente com memórias e processador..), os sintomas não eram exactamente os mesmos mas continuava sem funcionar, e já eram horas de fechar o dia.

Conclusão? A mais insuspeita. O interruptor do botão de reset avariou! Tendo em conta que não uso este botão tantas vezes quanto isso, ficou desligado da motherboard, e não penso mais no assunto.

Se têm de perguntar ;), a motherboard foi uma Fatal1ty F-I90HD, o processador um Core 2 Duo a 2Ghz, e as memórias umas OCZ DDR2 CL3. Nada de super-máquinas, apenas o suficiente para o dia a dia.

O melhor de todo o processo; o Ubuntu aguentou as mudanças de hardware apenas com um ligeiro pestanejar. Precisei de reconfigurar a placa gráfica, mas tudo o resto continuou a funcionar sem problemas. Já a partição do Windows, devo precisar de a reinstalar, e à conta disso não lhe pegarei tão cedo.