Ben Hughes

7 Mar 2009

Linux on the 900HA revisited

As a follow-up to my last post on installing Ubuntu on an eeePC 900HA I thouguht I'd do a quick write-up on eeebuntu, which as you can tell from the name is a Ubuntu derivative customised for the eeePC. The current version is based on Intrepid Ibex, so you don't miss out on any of the cool stuff. The main benefits of eeebuntu over Ubuntu is that the majority of the hardware has support compiled into the kernel. That means no messing around looking for wifi drivers and having most of the function keys work without fiddling. An added bonus is that Gnome has been minorly tweaked for the smaller resolution screen, it's got a good-looking theme and they have bundled quite a few useful apps, like CCSM, Pidgin, msttcorefonts and the OSX-dock-like AWN. There was still some minor tweaking needed after the install, like changing the fonts to verdana (or one of the other true type options), enabling hibernation (via gconf-editor) and setting up Compiz to my liking. Unfortunately the 900HA is not yet supported by the "eeebuntu config" utility, however the vast majority of things seem to work. One thing that doesn't is CPU scaling. This seems to lead to around a 1/4 loss in battery time over XP (which uses the bundled ASUS power management app). For general browsing with the screen brightness turned down a fair way I can get around 3 hours under eeebuntu and at least 4 under XP. These days I very rarely boot into Windows, unless the extra hour battery life is vital. One thing to keep an eye on is Firefox CPU usage - for certain sites (and with some plugins) CPU usage went up to 100%, which is a sure fire way to kill battery life. Overall I'm very pleased with eeebuntu - it's slick, works out of the box, and introduced me to some cool things like AWN. Highly recommneded for anyone running an eeepc.

4 Feb 2009

Installing Ubuntu on an EeePC 900HA

Now that I've got a new toy of course I have to fiddle around with it a bit, and the best way is to see how various OSes run. On my list I have Ubuntu, Windows 7, and perhaps OSX. First up will be Ubuntu, because 1) it should be easy enough and 2) I can download the ISOs without chewing through my quota. One of the fiddly things about OS installs on netbooks is of course that they don't have optical drives, so you can either buy one, or install from a USB drive. Most of the guides, for all 3 OSes, have a fairly fiddly method for creating a bootable USB drive that contains the installation media. The Ubuntu live CD comes with a utility to do this, but it requires booting from the live CD. Which, of course, requires either having an optical drive, or another PC with one.

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2 Nov 2008

Benefits of dual booting

For the last few days I've been at Mum's, where dial-up only access essentially means no internet access, so I decided to get some long overdue video editing done. Because I've got little more than a clean install of Vista and Ubuntu on the laptop, it was an interesting experiment in using the out of the box/bundled tools provided with the two OS's.

From what I can see, there's no video editing software bundled with Ubuntu. That left me with Windows Movie Maker, which I must say did a quite OK job, given that I have almost zero video editing experience. There were a few things that were non-obvious or not possible, but on the whole it was quick and fairly easy.

When it came to making 25 DVDs of the completed movie however, Vista didn't seem to have an easy answer. Movie Maker did allow the burning of X copies to DVD, but seeing as it corrupted the second disk I decided to look for another option. Booting into Ubuntu I found Brasero, which did a flawless job of cloning the one successful burn from Movie Maker.

Of course, in regular day to day life it wouldn't have mattered either way - I would have downloaded a video editor for Ubuntu, or a burning app for Windows. But it sure was handy to have both there, with their respective software bundles, when working offline.