Ben Hughes

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.

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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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.

We’ve just bought a new laptop (Inspiron 1525) so I thought I’d give both Vista and Ubuntu an run. My old laptop was too under-spec’d to run Vista decently, and the hard drive was small enough that I needed to kill the Ubuntu partition to make room for data.

Firstly, the laptop itself: Dell seem to have come a long way in the last couple of years. Build quality and features are good, especially for an entry level model.  3GB RAM, Core2 Duo 2ghz and a 1400×900 truelife screen for AU$950 is a bargain in my books, expecially when it comes with a webcam, card reader, HDMI and firewire.

After quickly messing about with the pre-installed Vista, I decided that it was fast enough and pretty enough that I wouldn’t bother tri-booting XP. I re-installed Vista from the standard install disk, and without too much hassle was up and running.

One thing I found though - Vista will choose the largest partition when installing. Because I want a couple of small OS partitions an a large data partition, I needed to create a single partition as part of the Vista install, leave the rest of the disk unpartitioned. After the install, I created the data partition using Disk Management.

Because it was a bare-bones install, I had to install a heap of drivers that thankfully are provided by Dell. It was a bit of a painful and manual process though. I’m pretty impressed with Vista.  Aero looks great, and it overall seems stable and fast enough.

As with Vista, it’s been a couple of years since I’ve tried Ubuntu. Although I had it installed for a while, a couple of niggles kept me from switching and I eventually deleted the partition to make way for data. I decided I’d give the 8.10 beta a run, and my oh my was I impressed.

Firstly, the hardware detection. It was literally flawless. Not a single driver needed to be installed manually, not for my webcam, wifi card, touchpad, multi-card reader… nothing! The correct display resolution was chosen and even the ‘function’ keys for volume control, screen brightness etc work (along with a nice little heads-up display). In fact the only things I needed to do to get confortably up and running were enter my WPA key and adust the touchpad/mouse sensitivity. So we were off to a good start.

And then I started playing with Compiz, the 3D window manager. This is serously good - think Areo but configurable and prettier. This youtube vid does a great job of demo-ing the basics. The nice part is that it’s plugin based, so its very configurable. I’ve re-mapped most of the keyboard shortcuts the the ‘windows’ key (which actually works these days!) and I’m absolutely loving it. My wife liked the look of Aero over my shoulder, but when she saw some of the Compiz stuff she decided it was work making the switch to Linux.

It’s not just eye-candy either, some of it is seriously useful. My favourite plugins are Scale (re-sizes all windows on the current desktop so you can see them - OSX has something similar but I forget its name) and Expo (shows all desktops, allows you to drag windows between them etc). Then of course there’s the desktop cube, which is fluff, but damn pretty fluff. Plugins like Reflection add an extra bit of awsomeness too the others.

To get the most our of Compiz you really need to install CCSM (compizconfig settings manager) - available through Add/Remove.. (synaptic).

Then there’s the little things - like NTFS write support out of the box, and most of the major Aus ISPs that mirror Ubuntu being pre-configured in Software Sources. More so than ever before, Ubuntu makes things simple. Sure, not all the software I need is available in the repositories, but most of it is, and there’s usually .deb’s available for what’s not.

The one area where Ubuntu isn’t easy is colour management. It’s relatively niche, so to be expected, but as a photographer being able to at least partially calibrate my monitor is vital. With some reasearch, and using an profile already created in Vista, xcalib was able to relatively successfully load the profile. This is a big step up from 7.04, where I couldn’t get xcalib to work at all. That was the main thing that kept me from switching. That said, Vista has its colour management problems too - with UAC dialogs un-loading any loaded profiles.

So what’s the conclusion? I have to wait and see. I really like Vista, but I think it will be my fallback in case I run into some insurmountable problem in Ubuntu. Getting everything set up in either environment will be a bit of a task, with Ubuntu probably taking more effort because of the software differences. For example, I’ll have to use rsync rather than robocopy for backing up. But so far it’s just that much of a nicer place to be that it’s worth the effort.