EeePC 900

I don't have a huge amount of luck with laptops. I spend easily 6 hours a day (sometime much more) using mine and I guess I expect quite a lot from it - high performance, long battery life light weight small footprint. You know. The things you pay an absolute fortune for. Only I refuse to pay and absolute fortune for a laptop. I guess £800 is about my maximum. Let's face it, if I go and buy a £2000 laptop and around about half-way through my third day of ownership, I'll drop it.

So that's why I chose my HP Pavillion DV2000. 14.1 inch, 3 hours battery, powerful enough, looked nice. Two years happy computing later and the hard drive finally dies, which was only to be expected really as I commute for between 3 and 4 hours every day, which means may laptop gets thoroughly shaken about.

New hard drive, take the plunge with Linux (Ubunbtu then OpenSuSE) and all is good. Then last Thursday I turn my trusty laptop on to the sound of random crackles from the speakers and nothing else, no bios messages, nothing. OK. Time to do two things: replace my laptop with something temporary, repair my old laptop.

A number of people I know have bought (and are universally happy with) eeePC 701s. Given my recent switch away from MS Windows and onto Linux the idea of a small Linux based laptop is very attractive. The screen was a bit of a sticking point though. A little small. But not on the 900 series. The other fact that sold me on this was the solid state disk - 20GB, no moving parts (so less prone to breaking).

One shopping trip later, and for the quite reasonable price of £329 I'm the owner of an EeePC 900, Linux, 20GB.

The initial OS runs in tabbed 'wizard' mode. I have to say this was a little uncomfortable as it makes the eeePC as easy to use and accessible as mobile phone, but makes it hard to get beyond the default set of applications. A quick search of web gives a number of pages that provide access to relatively (assuming you know a little about Linux) easy methods for switching to a standard KDE window manager referred to as 'advanced desktop'.

One thing that I did try was installing an alternative Linux distribution. Installing OpenSuSE 10.3 went rather easily, and worked exactly as you would expect it to. Drivers were easily available for just about everything, and the experience and Gnome (my preference over KDE) worked fine.
One reason has made me reinstall the default OS and use the KDE advanced desktop: speed.

A boot under OpenSuSE was taking nearly 2 minutes. I've just timed a boot and it's taking only 28 seconds to get to the point where the OS has finished loading and is offering me a dialogue asking me how I want to open the 4GB SD card I have in at the moment. That kind of speed difference seems to be consistent across all the applications starting up. I don't know anywhere near enough about Linux to be able to say why that might be, but it is enough to make the eeePC easy to use for the 1 thing I want to look up quickly, rather than waiting an age for it to boot. If I wanted to wait, I'd go back to MS Windows!

My one issue exists because I installed OpenSuSE. The 20GB solid state disk appears to be made up of a 4GB onboard unit supported by a 16GB secondary disk. I have no issue about the fact that the two are separate. My problem is that the recovery disk provided with the eeePC doesn't reconfigure this disk for you. As it stands, I have only the 4GB internal drive configured. The solution to this problem is trickier than I expected - I have created a partition, used fstab to say what it is and can now use mount /dev/sdb1 to mount it. But these doesn't seem to be any way to get it to automount. Even setting two linux gurus that I know onto the problem hasn't yielded a solution. I'll post one when / if I find one.

The eeePC offers a good enough screen and enough performance that I can do the image, layout and web based work I always have done. The screen is a little small but at 1024x600 pixels is just large enough to be usable. Gimp and Scribus work fine (if a little cramped). Even the Second Life client runs fast enough to be usable when all the settings are turned down. Thunderbird and Skype are already installed and Flock works well and is easy to install.

Oh, and battery life is over 2 and a half hours. Long enough, and longer using less taxing applications.

My next task is to find out if my HP can be repaired and how much / how long that will take. In the mean-time, I'm happy and productive with my eeePC.

Alan

Going Open Source - Part 4: The Pale Heretic Way

To put it simply: I have found a solution for Linux on my Laptop that works for me.

An important fact about me (and therefore my approach to this) is that I'm not a systems administrator, but I do have 15 years experience working with computers as a designer, new-media developer and animator. I don't use Linux in my day-to-day work. I've just had enough of MS Windows (and never got on with Macs) and want an alternative. So what I need is something that works more-or-less from the point where it is installed and that my limited knowledge will allow me to cope with any things that I need to configure or fix.

The laptop I use (every day) is an HP DV2130ea.

Having left Ubuntu a few weeks ago when the new version decided to forget all about my hardware, I proceeded to try out a range of distributions, quite rapidly, to see if I could find one that managed to identify my hardware (critical requirement was it had to find and configure both my Intel WIFI and Nvidia Graphics Adapter). PCLinuxOS and Dream Linux both looked interesting but failed to work for me.

As part of this I discovered a very useful site: DistroWatch. A great site that lists most of (if not all) the available distributions and provides links to reviews, community sites and download locations. They also provide a hot-list of the most viewed distributions on their site – a good rough indicator of usage / popularity.

It was from this that I found OpenSUSE. A linux distribution funded and developed by Novell.

It got my interest from more-or-less the third screen of the installer, where it correctly identified my Wifi card and Graphics adapter and also managed to cope with the fact that my laptop has a widescreen display.

The rest of the installation was exactly what I had hoped it would be: uneventful.

OpenSUSE itself is easy to work with in the same sense that any of the Linux versions you choose to install are just about similar to MS Windows that you can find the application / control panel you need. The interface is clean and the pre-installed set of applications covers most things that you'd need, with a good range of applications available from the application installer with a minimum of fuss.

The list of applications that I'm running includes Open Office, Flock, Skype, Second Life, Blender, Thunderbird , Vmware, Remote Desktop.

The installations for all of these was relatively simple, as was creating menu icons for those that didn't do this themselves (seems to be a common thing in my experience).

Even the installation and configuration of VMWare Player wasn't too tricky and made much easier by a good walkthrough that can be found on the OpenSUSE website here.

So what I now have is a laptop that works, with the software I needed and so far (on the limited sample of 2 weeks) It's been reliable to the point where I can forget about it and just work. You can see samples of the graphics that I've produced below.

An that I guess was the biggest wrench – leaving the Adobe suite of applications behind. Despite their high cost, they are a great set of applications. What is encouraging is that the open source alternatives are very good and nearly offer all the required functionality.

A brief note to the GIMP community – can we have vector objects (multiple in one layer) and layer folders please, because these are the only things that I have missed having moved from Photoshop to GIMP, and that says something right there.

Right now, I'm on a train to meet a client, and I will be demoing some bespoke MS Windows applications in a VMWare virtual machine on this laptop. That's about as good as I could have possibly hoped for.

OpenSUSE has a new version 11 out in about 30 days. I'll let you know how the upgrade goes.

PH

Going Open Source - Part 3 update

I'm going to keep this short, because I want to go into the details in Part 4.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron proved impossible. No wireless and no graphics card driver was just enough of a problem to make it really annoying. A complete clean install didn't fix it so I decided to try some other distributions - www.dreamlinux.com.br : as slick as using a Mac, same wireless + graphics problems, www.pclinuxos.com :Even more problems. Then I tried openSUSE 10.3 www.opensuse.org Amazing stuff - everything worked first time. Wireless was working from installation onwards, NVidia make drivers for openSUSE specifically for my graphic card.

In the next part I'll run through my first week's experences, but so far? Wonderful!

Going Open Source - Part 3

I spoke too soon. I've found the first pot-hole on my road to open source nirvana.

Ubuntu release their linux distributions on a fairly regular basis. I was working with 7.10 'Gutsy Gibbon' and have just upgraded to 8.04 'Hardy Heron'.

I did this by hitting the friendly little button within the update manager that said something like 'there is a new version click here to upgrade'. How cool is that? Nice and easy, click, wait for the download, off we go.

Not.

Having got the files required for the upgrade downloaded, the updater failed to work. This was rapidly followed by it telling me I had something like 930 updates waiting to be installed. It also politely noted that there was something wrong, and so it wouldn't be able to install all the updates but I could do a partial update.

No.

Turns out the failed upgrade had left my laptop in a state where no updates could be installed. Some forum hunting later (on a handy Windows machine) and I discover that quite a few people have had this error in one form or another. By starting the update from the console I was able to understand that a circular dependency in the Audacity plugins libraries (one of the bits of audio editing software that comes included in Ubuntu Studio) was causing the updater to fail. OK. Un-install offending libraries at the command line and hey-presto the updater works perfectly. OK, so this isn't what I'm used to for what is the equivalent of installing what Microsoft Windows users know as 'service packs'.

Still, it's installed now right? Back to the happiness!

Nope.

It's installed all right, but that doesn't mean it's going to boot.

Boot into recovery mode, reset x-windows client. Laptop boots, moans that the login screen theme it was expecting to load is missing and thankfully shows me the login dialogue. Great. I'm in.

It turns out that the NVidia display drivers that are required to make reasonable use of the graphics hardware in my laptop don't work with 'Hardy Heron' despite working perfectly well.

The next step form here is fairly obvoius – download the updated version.

You guessed it, no.

Where did the wireless network go? I can see it in the network manager dialogue, I know the right values are in here so why isn't it working.... back to the forums and I find that there are a lot of posts about this. Apparently there is something up with the version of the hal (hardware abstraction layer) that means the network manager fails to work with a good range of common wireless cards.

Great.

Now please bear in mind that this is stuff that was working before the update. It also becomes apparent that this was a bug that had been picked up during the beta test stage. I also found that there is a work around. It basically involves winding the version of all the bits involved with with managing the wireless network and the HAL back to the versions from 'Gutsy Gibbon'. The process to to this I am piecing together from a number of forum posts and I'll let you know how it goes when I manage to get it to work. It's surprisingly hard to fix your network when it breaks, because the one thing that makes it really easy to fix the problem is having the network.

I guess, all in all I've spent about 3 hours so far to get from 'Ubuntu broke it' to potentially working, but it's going to have to wait until I can get to a cabled network line I can use to actually try this out (the download the files onto a USB memory stick version of the fix just didn't work).

I'm still trying to fix this. If anyone knows either how to make it work, or how / why this happened please post it here!

Going Open Source - Part 2

It's now been 3 weeks since my laptop munched it's hard disk and I took the (long overdue) opportunity to try and take all my studio functions onto an open source platform.

The install went well, most things worked with little or no tinkering.

Now we come to software. There is a set of software applications that I need to find open source alternatives to, because if I don't then I can't work.

My list of essentials is:

• Photoshop, illustrator, Indesign, Flash, Director and Dreamweaver, all by Adobe
• Blender, Open Office, Flock, Skype, Thunderbird and Second Life
• Some decent fonts

First let me say that the latter all come with Linux versions, Blender and Open Office are either pre-installed with my chosen distribution (Ubuntu Studio) or are available via the inbuilt application installer service. Easy. Worked first time. Apart from one annoying thing about blender in that it doesn't recognise my ALT key, so some of the key combinations don't work properly.

Originally I was planning to find a solution for the Blender / ALT key problem and post that in part 3, but thanks to Dan Kegel at http://www.winehq.org I now have an answer to this and a mostly working copy of Photoshop.

For the ALT key problem: Go to System >> Preferences >> Windows, and under Movement Key, pick "Super (Windows Key)" instead of "Alt". Worked perfectly for me.

Flock and the Second Life client are both worth noting in that whilst they were both very easy to download and install, the hardest part (ironically) is the process for making a desktop icon for each application. This involves writing a short text file in the following format:

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Second Life
Comment=Second Life Linux Client
Exec="/home/alan/secondlife/secondlife"
Icon=/home/alan/secondlife/res-sdl/ll_icon.BMP
Path=$HOME/secondlife
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=
Categories=Network;Application;
GenericName[en_US]=Second Life

This example is taken from my Second Life desktop icon, but the format is the same for any. The file itself needs to be saved in the root of your home area and needs to be named appname.desktop where appname is replaced by the name of your chosen application. I'd be very interested to hear if someone knows of an easier / point and click way of doing this?

Finding replacements for the assortment of Adobe software that I use has been a trickier task, compounded by the fact that some of the technologies are proprietry and won't be available from anyone else. My experience of finding replacements is something like this:

Photoshop: this is the hardest one of the bunch and also the tool that I use the most. There are a number of packages out there that give up to about 70% of the features available from Photoshop. Gimp and Xara Extreme are both high on my list, and Paint.NET looks to be very promising if I can get it to work (no success yet).

Again I need to credit Dan Kegel at http://www.winehq.org for pointing me to their Wiki page on running Adobe Photoshop under Wine. Which after a complete removal and reinstall of Wine, worked perfectly apart from two things. First, I'm installing from Creative Suite which includes all the Adobe software and comes on 5 CDs. Problem is that the installer fails to recognise when you change from disk 1 to the next disk. Thankfully, Photoshop is on disk 1. The second problem is that the Activation and the Updater both fail. The activator throws an error exclaiming “not enough disk space available to run this program” and promptly closes, but leaves Photoshop running, and the updater just sits there and does nothing. Neither are exactly catastrophic problems – the software works just fine.

I'm still going to try and get Paint.NET working though. If there is an option to use native Linux, opensource alternatives then that's my preferred solution.

Illustrator: Inkscape pretty much has this one covered. It's fairly easy to use and is similar enough that finding the equivalent tools in the software is not too much of a problem. This piece of software came as part of the Ubuntu Studio basic installation.

Indesign: Scribus is on first glance (and I haven't made much use of it yet - just a simple A5 flyer layout) a good replacement for indesign. Again, this application came as part of the Ubuntu Studio basic installation.

Flash: To be honest, Flash is what it is and I wouldn't attempt to find an alternative. Flash 8 installs fine under Wine. Works exactly as you would expect. Installing Wine is very easy, as it can be found in the application installer service.

Director: I use director for a lot of CD-ROM based materials and a fair amount of legacy stuff. The installer worked fine, but I haven't yet managed to get the application to start. I'll update on my progress in Part 3.

Dreamweaver: There is an alternative – Quanta Plus. It's available via the application installer service. This one isn't as good a fit as the other alternatives. Whilst it has a good functionality and includes templates, site management and all the usual stuff, inluding an in-window preview render of the page, that preview is not editable. Personally speaking, I use dreamweaver because of the ability to chop between editing direct into the rendered representation of the page and the underlying code at will. This is why Quanta Plus doesn't work for me. Not because it's a bad piece of software, but because it isn't a fit for the way I want to work. This is also compounded by the fact that Dreamweaver 8 installs and works perfectly under Wine. So for web page work, I know which one I'm choosing.

BUT (and this goes for any of these applications) if anyone has a recommendation for any alternative applications, or ways to make things work then please post them here and I'll follow up on them in Part 3.

And I suppose it's worth making a point about that too: there will be a part 3. I've been using Ubuntu Studio for 3 weeks now. It's not perfect. I still spend time sorting things out. Making odd things work that really, just ought to work. I have yet to finish with printers, fonts, laptop mode and drivers for things like my MP3 player and Wacom tablet. But despite this, there is a very solid alternative to anything by Microsoft and I have no desire to go back.

Pale

Going Open Source - Part 1

For a few months now I have had the idea that I would force myself to spend some time and see if it was yet possible to replace all my software with open source equivalents and get to a state where I could work as I normally would. Now, I've had this idea for a while but never quite managed to get round to it.

Then my hard disk on my laptop decided to crash the heads on the disk right into all the files that it needs to start Windows. OK then. Faced with the choice of reinstalling Windows, and the opportunity to try something else, I seized the moment.

To make sure that I can actually work, though, I am allowing myself a get out clause: I can use MS Windows software, but on the condition that I can get it running on my Linux installation (and not in a virtual machine either).

Next comes the choice of which of many flavours of the Linux distribution to use. This is a hard choice: there are a lot of good distributions now which provide for easy installation and a good user experience.

I have some experience with Ubuntu Linux distributions (I have my backup service running at home on an old PC with a lot of disk space under Ubuntu) and was interested to see that they now have Ubuntu Studio – a distribution aimed at creatives and packed with graphics, audio and video tools.

The download of 800MB went smoothly, as did burning the image onto a DVD-R.

I assumed that this wasn't going to go smoothly. I thought that this was going to take more than one go. I guessed that I would end up with a mostly working laptop but things like graphics drivers, remote control, web cam, maybe even audio would not be working right.

I'm amazed to say, 2 days after doing the install, that everything works. And more-or-less from the moment it's installed.

Now, there are a few differences between a Linux install and a Windows install that a habitual Windows user (that would be me) will find interesting.

First and foremost, you don't have to answer 40 or so questions to get the install completed. I went with the defaults and opted to configure the network elements later. All went smoothly first time.

Secondly, because of the wealth of open source software available for Linux, the operating system comes with its own application install manager that already knows about a large proportion of the software (and drivers) that are available and can just go ahead and install it for you.

My wireless network card was automatically identified and installed, and my NVidia graphics card was identified and 'safe' drivers used. All I had to do was ask the application installer to add the drivers for my graphics card, and hey presto, one re-boot later, working graphics.

Audio needed no attention and worked straight away.

Then it came down to applications. Ubuntu studio comes with a huge amount of software: 3D modelling and animation, 2D graphics, print document layout, audio and video editing to name just some of the things that are catered for.

My problem is that I love Dreamweaver. And what I am still struggling with (and will take any recommendations for) is a Linux native web page design tool with a good interface and site management and ftp tools built in. This is where my get out clause comes into effect: until I find an alternative I want to use Dreamweaver.

Windows software on a Linux OS? Yes, with the help of a compatibility library called Wine. This is available via the application installer and allows Windows software to be run under Linux. Essentially, you just run the installer from a terminal window, and the application installs, icons appear in your application menu and it just works. Amazing huh?

So, where I am right now is writing this, in Open office Writer, I have Flock, Second Life, Thunderbird, Skype, MS Remote Desktop client and Dreamweaver all installed and working.

The most important thing for me is to find a good graphics package that is as close as possible to the way Adobe Photoshop works. Photoshop is probably the main tool that I use because of it's versatility. Then I need to sort out fonts and printers. To find out what happens, watch the Pale Heretic site or blog for part 2.

Pale