Seems it’s been a month since the last post. Haven’t consciously abandoned making entries but I am going to have to try and rebuild the habit. Let’s try this …
I have been working with an Asus eeePC 1000 quite a bit lately and it’s a great machine. I remain a fan of the original (4G aka 701) but the 1000 keeps almost everything that was great about that unit and improves the one area that kept me from making more frequent use of it: a larger keyboard.
Like: larger keyboard (92% of a full-sized keyboard), 1024×600 10″ screen, 1.6Ghz Intel Atom N270 CPU, bluetooth, longer battery life, 40GB SSD and 802.11n networking.
Not: It’s larger and weighs more (the 701 was 7″x 9″ and weighed just 2 pounds; the 1000 is roughly 7.5″x 10″ and weighs 3 pounds).
I went with the icon-happy Xandros default distribution for several weeks–spending way too much time getting Firefox 3 to work (turns out it needed a newer GTK+ toolkit install) and kept getting frustrated by the cruft that the Asus-Xandros OS seems to have accumulated since the 701’s release. I did finally get Firefox working and will point anyone working on the same problem to this helpful link: http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:installfirefox3.
Earlier this week, I decided to give ubuntu-eee a try. Following these instructions:
http://www.ubuntu-eee.com/index.php5?title=Get_Ubuntu_Eee
I kept running into this problem when I tried to launch Unetbootin:
/lib/tls/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.4′ not found:
A problem with the Xandros distro on the 1000, I guess. Fortunately, one of my colleagues had recently put ubuntu-eee on a 701 and still had the install USB key ready to go. I borrowed it, rebooted, pressed ESC, selected the USB key as my boot device and sat back as the 8.04.1 installation progressed flawlessly…
Wow! What an improvement. Partly it’s the difference between a KDE interface (Xandros) and Gnome (ubuntu-eee) but the real winner is the Netbook-Remix desktop that’s included. Visually it’s properly scaled to the eeePC’s screen (fonts too) and access to everything you need is represented in some form on the desktop.
Well, to be honest, it wasn’t all wonderful. For some reason while my SD card showed up on the desktop, I couldn’t access its contents. I kept getting error messages saying only “root” could mount external drives. The fix?
Open /etc/fstab and delete (or as shown here, comment out) any line that mentions a cd-rom:
#/dev/sdb1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec 0 0
On reboot, my SD card was accessible.
With everything working so well, I was afraid I’d run out of things to mess around with (which is more than half the fun of this little computer). I guess that’s why I wasn’t too upset to discover that for some reason or other I can’t get VLC to install via Synaptic.
9/23/08 update:The latest round of updates fixed whatever the VLC problem might have been. Installation via Synaptic went without a hitch.