Eee PC Setup

Here’s how I’ve set up my Eee PC, which I’m using mainly for web-browsing, email and writing, as well as watching telly and listening to music while travelling, and transferring photos from my camera to Flickr on the move. Oh, and simulating absent babies.

I tired of the standard Easy Mode in about five minutes—it’s perfectly usable, but the toytown icons, awkward tabbed interface and limited opportunities for customisation do what is a fairly powerful device a disservice. So, I switched to ‘Full Desktop Mode’.

You don’t need to be a computer whizz to achieve this, just open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T in Easy Mode) and type the following, hitting return after each line, while connected to the internet:

sudo bash

apt-get update

apt-get install ksmserver kicker

Then restart the computer. Getting Full Desktop Mode to stick, and boot as quickly as possible, is a little more tricky, but is explained in detail on the Eee PC User Wiki, and shouldn’t be too much trouble, even for users who’ve never seen a command line before.

Once the Full Desktop Mode is in place, the interfaces of a few programmes need tweaking, so that they suit the Eee PC’s tiny wee screen. For Firefox and Thunderbird (the default mail application), this involves installing new themes, and editing each application’s userChrome.css files.

For Firefox, I went with the Littlefox theme, for Thunderbird, Minibird fits the bill. Easy-to-follow instructions for setting a smaller font size for the user interface of Firefox are available here, while tips to slim down Thunderbird can be found here.

Neither application is much use unless it synchronises with your main desktop or laptop, so I switched all my mail accounts over to IMAP, which caches copies of mail messages locally, but leaves them on the server, keeping all your inboxes in sync.

Then, to keep Firefox bookmarks, cookies and such consistent across different machines, I installed the Google Browser Sync add-on, which, so far, has worked flawlessly. I also installed Google Gears, which allows some web applications to work offline—it works very well with Google Reader, letting you update RSS feeds when you have access to the network, then read them when you don’t. It’s a shame that it doesn’t yet work with Google Calendar. (Google looms pretty large when using the Eee PC in my experience—at times it feels like I’m using the laptop as a client for their web services.)

When it comes to adding applications to the set bundled with the Eee PC, I’ve been fairly restrained:

1. VLC - the stock MPlayer is fine, but I’m used to VLC, and it can play pretty much any video you throw at it.
2. Abiword - the default word processor, Open Office, is a big pile of poo, taking an age to launch, and hogging memory once it has. Abiword launches almost instantaneously, and offers a more user-friendly, stripped-down space for writing.
3. Bittornado - I tried a few Bittorrent clients, but this is the only one that just worked for me, and it does the job (though it’s probably unwise to do much torrent downloading on a machine using with a flash drive).
4. Various odds and ends, like the latest Flash player and browser plugins, and some gubbins to make printing to PDF files easier.

Things I’ve yet to do:

1. Investigate methods of syncing information between my Newton MP2100 and the Eee PC. Not urgent, as the Newton is regularly sort-of-synced with my Mac, which is synced with Google Calendar.
2. Work out if it’s possible to install the OpenEinstein Newton emulator on the Eee PC. This would be spectacularly pointless, but good fun.
3. Get filesharing between my Macs and the Eee PC over my wireless LAN sorted out. I’m getting a bit tired of transporting larger files via a USB thumb drive and emailing myself documents.
4. Buy a whopping great SD card, so I can store more music and video on the Eee PC.

(I’ll post a proper review of the machine and its OS soon—I just wanted to get all this down first in case anything goes horribly wrong and I end up having to start again from scratch!)

Posted at 5pm on 13/12/07 by Jack Mottram to the linux category.
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Tags: applications, eeepc, linux