asus 900

I have wanted a sub notebook computer for a long time now. The first computer I ever owned was a Tandy 1110HD laptop. It was very small, but booted fast into dos or deskmate. I could flip it open turn it on and start editing text files so fast it was unbelievable.

Since then, I have been trying to have a similar experience on a more up to date system. I think someone finally has gotten it right.

When I first heard about the Asus EEEPC, it tickled the gadget area of my brain. I looked the specs and reviews over. I was impressed with what people were doing with them. But...the low resolution was holding me back. So when I heard about the 900. I knew I had to have one.

Very shortly after that, they announced the 901 and 1000. But the 9 inch screen hit the sweet spot. It suddenly put a check mark on every line of my requirements list.

Linux? Check. Tiny portable? Check. Wired and wireless networking? Check. Lots of IO ports? Check. High-enough resolution for comfortable web viewing? Check.

I had to buy it. I ordered it on a Thursday from Newegg. And even though that was one of the fastest processing and shipping of an order I have ever seen, I could hardly stand the wait.

I don't think I have been so impatient for a delivery in my life. I was very excited about my new computer.

It finally came the following Monday. That was a tough day at work.

Unboxed. Setup with no problem. Got it up on my wireless network as soon as I put both mac addresses in my routers filters. Speedy. Small. Just works. Didn't like the Easy Desktop interface so much...but I knew there were tutorials out there to fix that sort of thing. I started making a list of the capabilites I wanted for it...and the software/hardware I would need to do it.

The first thing I did after initial test drive was install Google Docs offline and del.icio.us add-on for Firefox. The Google Docs offline install went pretty well...I enabled it twice...it seemed I missed something the first time. But it works like a charm so far. Del.icio.us installed perfectly.

My plan is to use the 900 for work and for my writing projects. So I needed a fully functional desktop environment, the ability to access windows networks, remote desktop, Cisco vpn, and usb-serial for consoling into cisco switches and routers. I might even put Audacity and a podcatcher on here to take a few more functions off my work-provided laptop.

Advanced Mode

I went to http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:getkde and used the Easy Method to switch to advanced desktop mode. Now it looks like a real desktop. I was able to customize background, icons, colors, key shortcuts, and launcher icons. Very nice.

Remote Desktop

I initially had some trouble with remote desktop. The Remote Desktop Sharing-Connect to Desktop app would segfault as soon as I connected to a windows server. And it had problems in higher resolution settings. I couldn't type anything in unless I made the window smaller.

I looked around on eeeuser.com a little and found the solution...add a repository and update rdesktop from deb. No more segfaults. And I can start it from the command line with "rdesktop -f x.x.x.x" to go into full screen mode.

VPN client

Next up was vpn access. I went back to eeeuser.com for the info. Added repository and installed vpnc with no problem. I was going to install the kde gui frontend...but it scared me when it told me how much stuff it was going to uninstall...some of it was stuff I planned to use. And I am not scared of a command-line...so I decided to forgo the guit.

Next up you have to configure your cisco .pcf files to a format usable by vpnc. Luckily some kind soul made a perl script that does this. It's called pf2vpnc.pl and is pretty easy to find. It actually comes with some downloads..or you can google for it like I did.

Run the perl script against the pcf and it creates a conf file. Then move the conf file into /etc/vpnc. If you don't move it....vpnc will complain that it can't find the conf. You may need to "sudo -i" to get access.

At the cli, type in "vpnc filename" don't put the .conf extension though.

To end your session, don't just kill the process. Use "vpnc-disconnnect". If you just kill the process it will mess up your routing.

USB-Serial

Once again, the awesome community at eeeuser.com helped me out here. A quick search came up with good pointers on how to get this going.

I went to Best Buy and got a dynex usb-serial adapter. Plugged it in and ran "dmesg".

dmesg tells me that it found the adapter and attached it to ttyUSB0 and that it is using Prolific PL2303 driver. The "lsusb" command tells me similar information.

Next... "apt-get install minicom" or use synaptic package manager to get a terminal program called minicom.

Run minicom from a command line. Do ctrl-a then z to get configuration screen. Then press O. Arrow down to Serial Port Setup and enter. Press A and enter /dev/ttyUSB0.
Press E and set to 9600 8N1 and turn off all flow control. (This may vary depending on what you are connecting to.) Then go back to Modem and Dialing. Remove the init and reset string, if you don't do this..the program will send weird crap to your console when you connect and disconnect...it probably wouldn't hurt anything...but at the least it's annoying. So go ahead and get that modem string stuff out of there. Save setup as dfl. That saves your settings as default.

Now....whenever you open up minicom...it will open up on port /dev/ttyUSB0 with settings compatible to cisco equipment. Then just hit enter to get a prompt.


There is a package to install Audacity, and it works just fine with built in mic. I would suggest using a plug-in mic for any real use. The built-in sounds really scratchy.

I will mess around with Podcatchers later.

-Leganto