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