Re-route power through the secondary systems!
With the death of my desktop motherboard (an Asus P5K3) and a site launch imminent, I was left in a bit of a quandary. I had 3 days to turn my Asus EEE into a working development system.
The Asus operating system
The first thing that had to go was the toy operating system Asus installs on their machines. It may be built on Linux but they've taken out anything that might make it dangerous (ie powerful and useful). It's designed to run whatever is pre-installed but adding new software (eg Bluefish code editor) is not feasible. It's literally a case of what you see is what you get. In addition, the wi-fi software is too old to handle WEP2 encryption so trying to connect using Joel's network was not possible. Thanks to whoever owns the "netgear" unencrypted network out by his place - it was a lifesaver!
Thumb drive
It's designed to boot from a thumb-drive but the one we had was configured with U3. This is another Microsoft dead-end technology designed to work with their operating systems (the wave of the future, until they give up and move on to something else). It had to go before I could boot from it. There are uninstaller programs for it (which only work under windows) so I had to use Sarah's laptop to get the damned thing working.
Ubuntu - netbook edition
I downloaded the ISO image for Ubuntu netbook edition and burned it onto the drive. There is a program that comes with Ubuntu called usb-creator but 1. It's in the disk image and 2. It doesn't work. Instead, I used UNetbootin to burn it onto the thumb drive, having backed up the original contents to a 120Gb USB drive.
The Asus Bios
The Asus bios is a pain in the tuckus. Having gone out of its way to pretend it's not a computer, it hides the boot sequence. Hitting the power and then repeatedly F2 brings up the BIOS settings. It took a day's work to figure out how to make it boot from USB. Ignore the "boot drive order" option, instead find the USB stick in the list of drives and move it to the top of the list. When it does boot, repartition the hard drives from scratch.
The hard drives
The Asus comes with two solid-state hard drives, 4Gb fast and 16Gb slower. Mount the 4Gb as the root ('/') and the 16Gb as /home (I ended up doing this by hand afterwards). Solid state hard drives wear out every time you write to them so don't include a swap partition and turn off caching in Firefox. Having said that, it's been calculated that if you did nothing but write to them, it would take 5 years before they broke which is longer than any hard drive I've owned for years so don't stress too much.
Ubuntu - Netbook
I decided to stick with the main branch of Ubuntu rather than the device-specific eeebuntu because of the regular updates and other features that might not be considered suitable for a netbook. I was a little worried when the track-pad didn't work when running from the memory stick but once it was installed, it worked fine.
Bluefish 2.0 installed with no problems and the FTP environment (ie saving stuff to a remote server) works well with the limited resources of the EEE. I also downloaded the drivers to allow uploading pictures from my camera and gcc (see later).
Wifi problems
The wifi (based on the Ralink RT2860 chipset) worked fine on unsecured networks but failed to make a connection under WEP2. This, it turned out, is a known bug with the drivers and I found a twelve-step solution to the problem. It does involve changing the code for the drivers but that's what open source is for and the instructions are plain enough for anyone to follow, coder or not. One snag was that by default, gcc (gnu c compiler) is not installed in the netbook edition. A quick visit to the synaptic package manager fixed that.
One more thing
If you plug in an external keyboard via USB, turn on num-lock and then try to use the built-in keyboard later on then num-lock is still active! My passwords weren't working because the letters on the right hand side were being interpreted as numbers (at least it let me login initially). This would have been obvious if it weren't for the fact that passwords are blanked out as you type.
So now I have a 1.6GHz machine with 1Gb ram and 20Gb disk space and it's not as bad as I thought it would be. It's not like typing in code or browsing the web is particularly CPU-intensive. It's the kind of spec we had a few years ago and I got work done then. Speed-wise, it's about on a par with the bloated XP you get on a pre-install disk on a much higher spec machine before it's been running a few months and slows right down. It can even play video (so long as nothing else is running) and plug in a monitor, speakers, full-size mouse and keyboard and 120Gb external hard drive (not at the same time without a usb extension bus).
What I can't do is play 3d-rendered games which I never did anyway so that's got me thinking - why am I throwing lots of expensive power through expensive hardware so that it overheats and burns out faster? The latest NVidia graphics cards have 2048 graphic processors on them and consume 650W. Great if you are doing real-time 3d modeling or producing a CGI movie but most of the time, it's being burned up so you can surf the net or check your email.
The Asus, while usable and and an interesting experience, is a little too small but I definitely think that the next time I change my motherboard it will be, for the first time, a downgrade. One that can keep cool by convection without the need for a CPU fan.
The Asus operating system
The first thing that had to go was the toy operating system Asus installs on their machines. It may be built on Linux but they've taken out anything that might make it dangerous (ie powerful and useful). It's designed to run whatever is pre-installed but adding new software (eg Bluefish code editor) is not feasible. It's literally a case of what you see is what you get. In addition, the wi-fi software is too old to handle WEP2 encryption so trying to connect using Joel's network was not possible. Thanks to whoever owns the "netgear" unencrypted network out by his place - it was a lifesaver!
Thumb drive
It's designed to boot from a thumb-drive but the one we had was configured with U3. This is another Microsoft dead-end technology designed to work with their operating systems (the wave of the future, until they give up and move on to something else). It had to go before I could boot from it. There are uninstaller programs for it (which only work under windows) so I had to use Sarah's laptop to get the damned thing working.
Ubuntu - netbook edition
I downloaded the ISO image for Ubuntu netbook edition and burned it onto the drive. There is a program that comes with Ubuntu called usb-creator but 1. It's in the disk image and 2. It doesn't work. Instead, I used UNetbootin to burn it onto the thumb drive, having backed up the original contents to a 120Gb USB drive.
The Asus Bios
The Asus bios is a pain in the tuckus. Having gone out of its way to pretend it's not a computer, it hides the boot sequence. Hitting the power and then repeatedly F2 brings up the BIOS settings. It took a day's work to figure out how to make it boot from USB. Ignore the "boot drive order" option, instead find the USB stick in the list of drives and move it to the top of the list. When it does boot, repartition the hard drives from scratch.
The hard drives
The Asus comes with two solid-state hard drives, 4Gb fast and 16Gb slower. Mount the 4Gb as the root ('/') and the 16Gb as /home (I ended up doing this by hand afterwards). Solid state hard drives wear out every time you write to them so don't include a swap partition and turn off caching in Firefox. Having said that, it's been calculated that if you did nothing but write to them, it would take 5 years before they broke which is longer than any hard drive I've owned for years so don't stress too much.
Ubuntu - Netbook
I decided to stick with the main branch of Ubuntu rather than the device-specific eeebuntu because of the regular updates and other features that might not be considered suitable for a netbook. I was a little worried when the track-pad didn't work when running from the memory stick but once it was installed, it worked fine.
Bluefish 2.0 installed with no problems and the FTP environment (ie saving stuff to a remote server) works well with the limited resources of the EEE. I also downloaded the drivers to allow uploading pictures from my camera and gcc (see later).
Wifi problems
The wifi (based on the Ralink RT2860 chipset) worked fine on unsecured networks but failed to make a connection under WEP2. This, it turned out, is a known bug with the drivers and I found a twelve-step solution to the problem. It does involve changing the code for the drivers but that's what open source is for and the instructions are plain enough for anyone to follow, coder or not. One snag was that by default, gcc (gnu c compiler) is not installed in the netbook edition. A quick visit to the synaptic package manager fixed that.
One more thing
If you plug in an external keyboard via USB, turn on num-lock and then try to use the built-in keyboard later on then num-lock is still active! My passwords weren't working because the letters on the right hand side were being interpreted as numbers (at least it let me login initially). This would have been obvious if it weren't for the fact that passwords are blanked out as you type.
So now I have a 1.6GHz machine with 1Gb ram and 20Gb disk space and it's not as bad as I thought it would be. It's not like typing in code or browsing the web is particularly CPU-intensive. It's the kind of spec we had a few years ago and I got work done then. Speed-wise, it's about on a par with the bloated XP you get on a pre-install disk on a much higher spec machine before it's been running a few months and slows right down. It can even play video (so long as nothing else is running) and plug in a monitor, speakers, full-size mouse and keyboard and 120Gb external hard drive (not at the same time without a usb extension bus).
What I can't do is play 3d-rendered games which I never did anyway so that's got me thinking - why am I throwing lots of expensive power through expensive hardware so that it overheats and burns out faster? The latest NVidia graphics cards have 2048 graphic processors on them and consume 650W. Great if you are doing real-time 3d modeling or producing a CGI movie but most of the time, it's being burned up so you can surf the net or check your email.
The Asus, while usable and and an interesting experience, is a little too small but I definitely think that the next time I change my motherboard it will be, for the first time, a downgrade. One that can keep cool by convection without the need for a CPU fan.