Eee's are good, Eee's are good

I got an Asus Eee PC the other week, and spent the weekend and the last few evenings putting Ubuntu 8.04 on it (compiz, Ubuntu studio themes, several desktop tweaks, scite text editor, installing wifi and other drivers). It's small and cute. The screen is surprisingly legible, even for tiny text at arms length, and it's smoother than my big laptop running compiz.

As I don't have a USB DVD drive, I installed off of a USB stick, which took a bit of persuading to boot, and then used rsync to copy the installation over to the flash drive on the computer. The various installation guides weren't much help getting it to boot off the internal drive - various settings around grub-install seemed to update the USB stick rather than the internal drive, but following the instructions from the grub manual to do a 'native' install did the trick. Once I'd done that it seemed to be OK, but it believed it had mounted /dev/sdb1 (the 16G internal drive) as /, whereas it had really mounted /dev/sda1 - the 4G internal 'system' drive. That was cured using UUID rather than /dev/sda1 in the grub menu.

Getting wifi to connect is still rather hit and miss - Wifi-radar seems to be the application which works for it. There are far too many wifi controller apps for Ubuntu, and the few I tried didn't seem to do anything. None have particularly good indication of why a connection isn't working.

[2008/06/14 - the issue was two-fold: instead of running cables everywhere, I was connecting into a wifi gaming adapter through a router, as I had two machines sharing the adapter, and that router appeared to be giving out DCHP addresses, even to other wifi devices, which mean DCHP wasn't working. As far as Wifi-radar and the network selector, wifi-radar was setting up the wifi correctly, but still needed network selector to turn off the ethernet. Doing that using sudo ifdown eth0 worked as well, and putting that command as a connection command makes everything work just by opening Wifi-radar then hitting connect.]

The GPS works fine with it. I haven't tried getting the web-cam working yet.

One odd thing is how rough the texture of the keys feels - I've had my larger laptop a couple of years now, and the home row is polished smooth. You can hold it at an angle to the light and see that Dvorak was right about letter frequency, except for the modifier keys.

Misc Admin - Laptop PCI, Bubba Static IP, More Disks

Laptop PCI Conflict

For a while, my laptop BIOS had been sporadically reporting a PCI conflict on boot, with no other symptoms.
It's dual boot Windows XP Home and Ubuntu, and after the latest Window Update it lost its on-board network adapter, both in XP and Ubuntu. Rolling back the update fixed Windows, but somewhere some persistent state made the PCI conflict happen around half the time, and if it did happen Ubuntu would not see the card, or be able to recover.
The logs said 'try pci=assign-busses', so I did (in GRUB use e to try it once, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to make it permanent), and the adapter reappeared and (so far) there have been no conflicts on rebooting. In addition, Ubuntu can now see the SD card, (presumably that is what it was conflicting with) which means I don't have to boot into XP to snarf the photos from my camera.
Now if only the wifi button was broken enough to appear in the logs and explain how to fix it...

Bubba and Static IP

On Friday my new excito Bubba home server arrived. I plugged it in, switched it on and all was good.

Mounting Bubba Shares

There was a little playing around to get Ubuntu to see the Samba shares, which I also put on the excito forum thread which gave some clues:
The server appears in Nautilus when you choose Places > Network, as ftp, sftp and is also under Windows network.
Browsing into the server, it requests user and password as expected, adds them to the keychain, then shows the files.
For a one-off mount:

fortinbras# mount -t smbfs //bubba/home /net/bubba/home -o username=*****,password=***** 

Following the instructions at justlinux.com for adding to /etc/fstab, the following works with mount -a when run as root:

//bubba/home    /net/bubba/home     smbfs credentials=/home/pete/.sambacreds,uid=pete 0 0
//bubba/storage /net/bubba/storage  smbfs credentials=/home/pete/.sambacreds,uid=pete 0 0

On next reboot, the mount points appear in Nautilus, but you can't mount them as a user.
To get mount working for users, you need to set suid root on smbmnt and ensure that the mount point is owned by the user doing the mounting.
I haven't tried enabling mounts for more than one account; if you add lines to fstab for each user, it adds icons for the mount points to everyone's accounts; trying to use ~ for the mount point and credentials doesn't seem to work either.

Backup of tincancamera.com

I couldn't find a recursive authenticated ftp client for the Bubba - its version of wget doesn't accept the --ftp-user arguments - so I've used wget with htpp to crawl the site, which gets everything except the access logs. I hadn't read the access logs, and they were putting me over the hosting's quota (they just grow rather than rotating as I'd expect them to), so I got them and deleted them off the server, so I'm using 3MB of the 5 I'm paying for rather than 11.

Static IP

I'd like the Bubba to be on the net, but I don't have a static IP. I'm with Pipex, who are fast and reliable if not the cheapest at the moment, but in addition to their stated charge of £1.25 a month require that my existing service be upgraded to a current plan (the current plans are 8MB instead of 1MB for the price I'm on), but would mean a new 12 month contract. I'm moving in three months, so that would mean paying for nine months I'm not here at £26.24 a month, which is silly - it would make adding a static IP for three months cost £79.97 a month, 1p less than twice what Pipex charge for a dedicated server. I've mailed them to see if they'll give me a static IP on my current £24.99 a month for a reasonable set-up fee, but haven't heard back yet.

More Disks

I'd bought three more 18.4GB disks for my Netras off ebay (Seagate ST318437LC x 3 for £29.89 including p+p), which arrived this morning. After popping down the road to AJM Micro for two dozen mounting screws, they are now installed and (following the guide here - docs.sun.com is nearly as slow as del.icio.us) each give a 16.7G zfs file system for use as a data area for mucking around with:

tercel-1# zpool create data c0t1d0
tercel-1# zfs create data/fs
tercel-1# zfs list
NAME                   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
data                   104K  16.7G  24.5K  /data
data/fs               24.5K  16.7G  24.5K  /data/fs
tercel-1# df -h /data/fs/
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
data/fs                 17G    24K    17G     1%    /data/fs

TME

OS Update frenzy

I'm not actually off having a life this weekend, and have run out of space on my laptop's linux partition, so am in the process of an upgrade frenzy.

I've archived all the data off the laptop onto my mac, and repartitioned the laptop from 45GB Win/45GB Ubuntu to 20 Win/ 20 Ubuntu/ 55 Data partitions, and will re-install ubuntu and an ext3 driver for Windows so I don't have half my data on one partition and half on the other. It's a real pain that it doesn't come with media for XP, as there's a lot more crap on it that I could get rid of if I could do a clean install (not only in terms of disk space - installing and un-installing some DVD software has left the audio system in mumbling mode), but I don't want to have to pay Microsoft to re-install an OS I've already paid for when I bought the laptop. The two things I use Windows for are games (mainly Runescape these days; maybe the next version of Ubuntu's Java plugin will be more stable) and to stepwise debug C++ code in Visual Studio - I haven't found anything like as good a debugger for linux yet.

My iPod battery died in Romania, and it's still not holding any charge; I'm not sure whether to upgrade that or not - it mainly gets used in my car on a 30 min commute each day, which charges it a bit, and the battery doesn't seem to be designed for that use (or the UI for that matter - you can't change albums either through the iPod or the head when it's plugged in, otherwise it wouldn't be an issue).

Having thought more about nodes for the quad-store, reconnected the three netras in the loft and am installing a clean version of solaris 10 on them, so I can see how it works on true 64bit hardware and server class disks, and don't cook my groin running the cpu in the laptop.

The main reason I don't use the netras much is that they are noisy and use lots of electricity, so I've also ordered an excito bubba, a fanless home server which draws 10W at full load, so can be left on in the corner behind the telly and used for file sharing.

Depending what happens to the laptop and bubba combination, and whether it's worth fixing the iPod, I may get rid of the mac, since the only thing I use it for that's OS X specific is re-installing the iPod's software when it goes wrong (which it does a couple of times a month), and archiving my mail accounts (which the bubba does automatically).



TME