So, here are the steps I took to turn a stock Eee into the perfect machine for writing on the move.

1. Enable Advanced Desktop Mode, because Easy Mode is just silly.
2. Add extra repositories, from which to download applications not provided by Asus.
3. Install SSH server, so you can connect your Eee from other computers: sudo apt-get install openssh-server
4. Install Subversion, to keep all your files in sync: sudo apt-get install subversion (setting up a Subversion repository is left as an exercise for the reader).
5. Install AbiWord, because OpenOffice is too slow on the Eee: sudo apt-get install abiword.
6. Install VLC, for playing telly programmes on the train when you can’t be arsed working: sudo apt-get install vlc
7. Tweak Firefox to make it more Eee-friendly:
   1. Install the MiniFox theme.
   2. Install the Fullerscreen add-on.
   3. Install the Google Browser Sync add-on, to keep your bookmarks, passwords and history synchronised with your main computer (optional, but well handy).
8. Remember to keep all your stuff on a removable SDHC card, not on the Eee’s internal memory card.

That’s it. The whole procedure takes under ten minutes, most of which is spent waiting for the list of repositories to update and the 15MB AbiWord to download.

I’ve been running the Eee like this for ten days now, and haven’t missed any of the gizmos I’d installed over the last few months. More importantly, the Eee is now as fast as crikey, and I haven’t had a single application crash on me yet.

Just in case anyone thinks I’ve lost the will to tinker, I feel moved to point out that I wrote the above while waiting for a Puppy Linux CD to burn.

For transferring files, I’ve tried SMB, NFS and WebDAV, which have all worked, pretty much, but were all also fiddly to set up, unstable and generally bloody annoying. (Interestingly, most of the problems have been on the Mac side.)

Today, I happened upon ExpanDrive, a new application for OS X that installs, and provides a simple setup interface, for MacFUSE and SSHFS. In plain English, that means I can mount the Eee PC - and any other computers on my network - just like an external disk drive, SMB or AFP, so that it is completely integrated into the Finder.

Setup is easy.

If you haven’t already, install openssh-server on the Eee PC:

1. Install it: sudo apt-get install openssh-server
2. Then start it up: sudo /etc/init.d/ssh
3. Then make it start up whenever you switch on your Eee PC by opening /etc/fastservices in a text editor - eg. sudo nano /etc/fastservices - and adding a line that says ssh.

Then, back on the Mac, install and launch ExpanDrive, and fill in your server name, username and password. For some reason, your username for SSH purposes is ‘user’, not your actual username, though your password is the same one as usual (I have no idea why, and it took me bloody ages to guess that it is when I first started using SSH to log in to the Eee PC).

That’s it. As far as your Mac is concerned, your Eee PC is now part of the filesystem, so you can open and edit files on it, move stuff between the computers, even play MP3s stored on the Eee on your Mac. Very nice.

As well as the simple setup - especially when compared to getting MacFUSE and SSHFS set up using more manual means, which is a right sodding chore - ExpanDrive scores points for speed and stability. In terms of speed, I really can’t tell the difference between working on a file stored locally and one on the Eee, which wasn’t the case when using other protocols. And ExpanDrive is rock solid, much better than the Finder when it comes to dealing with stuff over a network: you can put your Mac to sleep, or disconnect from the network, without having to fear the spinning beach ball of doom. ExpanDrive will just silently reconnect when you wake up the computer or rejoin your network. Very clever.

When it comes to keeping stuff in sync, I’ve taken a slightly peculiar route: Subversion.

This is a very clever synchronisation thingy, usually used by groups of people who write code, so that they can all make changes to files they’re all working on without buggering everything up. It’s probably overkill for one person writing reviews for the paper, but I’ve really taken to it.

Subversion works by keeping all your files on a server in a “repository”¹. You can then “checkout” the files, work on them, and “commit” your changes, which updates the copies on the server. It doesn’t matter what computer you’re on when you do the checking out/editing/committing routine, as long as Subversion is installed, which it is by default on Macs running Leopard. To get it on the Eee, you just do the usual sudo apt-get install subversion thing. And, because your files are living online too, you can access them through a web browser on any old machine you happen to be sitting in front of.

This is, obviously, fabulously convenient, and for a basic user like myself, there’s only a handful of commands to remember. On the Mac side, though, after the first time you import your files into your repository and check them back out, you don’t even need to open a Terminal, let alone remember any commands, thanks to three of my fave applications, Path Finder, TextMate and Quicksilver², all of which have Subversion support built in.

So, it’s taken a while, but thanks to the release of ExpanDrive, and the (er, relative) ease of use of Subversion, I have everything set up to easily share and sync files between my Eee PC and Macs over the network.

The days of walking around the flat carrying an SDHC card like some primitive data-ape are over!

Now, I really must start reading up on rsync and Unison…

1. Donny very kindly made me a repository on his server, but I only saw his email after I’d set up my own. Cheers Don!↩

2. Textmate and Path Finder both cost money, Quicksilver is open source. Free alternatives to using Path Finder’s Subversion support include SvnX, SCPlugin and this collection of AppleScripts ↩

I think this post sets a new record for TLAs and other acronyms on Submit Response!

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!)

This is mainly for my benefit, but since I know absolutely nothing about using Linux, they might be helpful for people in the same boat. Folk who do know something of Linux, feel free to point, laugh or suggest alternative methods.

Anyway, before I installed YDL, my old iBook was mainly used to download files with P2P applications and play MP3s over the WLAN in my house, from the new iBook and the external drive plugged into it, so these are the things I’m keen to get up and running as soon as possible.

First of all, here’s how I’m streaming MP3s over the network. What follows will doubtless be heresy to experienced Linux users, but it works. (Reading forums and mailing lists I am beginning to suspect that anything one Linux user does is considered heresy by all other Linux users, and vice versa).

The following assumes you’re have one Mac running YDL 3.0 and another running OS 10.3.4, though they may well work with other versions of the two operating systems.

First of all, you need to get the YDL computer and the OS X computer talking to each other. There’s lots of ways to do this, but the only one I had any luck with was using Samba which is installed by default with YDL. (And, just to confuse matters, is meant for connecting Linux computers to Windows computers.)

Here’s how to set up Samba so your YDL computer can use files on your OS X computer:

1. On the OS X computer, open System Preferences > Sharing and check the box next to Windows Sharing.

2. On the YDL computer, first you need to make a directory where you can mount your OSX computer as if it were a CD or drive. Since there’s a mount directory already there, it seems reasonable to put it in there. Open up a terminal and type:

   mkdir /mnt/ibook

3. Next, you need to get your mount on. Turn back to the OS X computer, and at the bottom of the Sharing Preference Pane, it’ll say something like this:

   Windows users can access your computer at \192.168.1.2\yourusername

   Take a note of that, and turn back to the YDL computer.

4. On the YDL computer, in a terminal, type the following (all on one line):

   smbmount //192.168.1.2/username /mnt/ibook -o workgroup=WORKGROUP,username=yourusername

   As you can see, that’s the smbmount command followed by the address given in the Sharing Preference Pane, followed by the directory you made in step 2. The last bit tells Samba what workgroup you want to join - wittily called ‘WORKGROUP’ by default on OS X - and your username on the OS X computer.

5. After you type the smbmount command above, some information about the OS X computer will appear on screen, followed by a password prompt. You want the password associated with ‘yourusername.’

6. Now, if you didn’t get any error messages, you’ll be able to navigate into the /mnt/ibook/ directory you made before, and inside will be everything found in your Home directory on OS X. I’m guessing that if you’ve bothered to read this far you’ll know how to do that. If not, to see a list of everything in your newly-mounted Home directory, all ready to be used by the YDL computer, you could type something like:

   cd /mnt/ibook

   ls

With your Home directory mounted, you can now happily add MP3 files from your Music folder to whatever MP3 player you’re using on YDL. I’m using something called XMMS, which isn’t exactly iTunes, but does the job.

If you keep your MP3s on an external hard drive, there’s another step to make them available to the YDL computer. (Never having heard of symlinks, this is the bit that took me a while to figure out.)

1. On the OS X computer, open Terminal, cd to the Desktop and type something like this (again, all on one line):

   ln -s /Volumes/ExternalDrive/MusicFolder/ FakeMusicFolder

   The ln -s bit tells the computer to make a Symlink, which is the same as an Alias but works with all sorts of computers, not just Macs. The next bit is the folder on your external hard drive you want to make a link to, and the last bit is the name you want to give your Symlink.

2. That’s it really. Have a look inside /mnt/ibook/Desktop/FakeMusicFolder, or whatever you chose to call the Symlink, and you should see all your MP3s waiting and ready to be played over the network.

Other options I’m looking into: using web-based streaming apps like Netjuke or Andromeda (which would maintain the playlists I have in iTunes) and getting Appletalk running. Yes, Appletalk.

Next up: installing Bittorrent. I’m finding it increasingly ridiculous that when using Linux I can work out how to stream MP3s over a network with relatively little trouble, but haven’t yet managed to install the one application I really need!

Amazingly, installing it was a breeze - I was under the impression that Linux was a text-only hell where a careless bit of typing could make your computer turn into a frog, but it turns out everything is GUI’d up the wazoo nowadays. The Yellow Dog installer even recognised my Airport card, and configured it correctly, so I was on the internet as soon as I booted up. Nice.

Other things, though, have had me tearing my hair out. Since I’ve never used anything but a Mac, everything seems wildly counter-intuitive. For example, when I put a CD in the drive, I pretty much expect an icon to show up on my Desktop so I can start dragging files off it. This is not the Linux way, and it took the assistance of the geekiest man I know to get a CD working at all (cheers c0NZ!). For the record, you have to type mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom mnt/cdrom. Which is not exactly something you’d guess by yourself.

Once c0NZ gave me a couple of tips, though, everything started to fall into place a bit, and I’ve now sorted out accessing files from my new iBook over the WLAN, and am happily playing MP3s and audio CDs as I type. Funnily enough, it’s simple things like that that are hard on Linux (or at least this version of it) while complicated things like getting an Apache webserver running are a piece of cake.

Despite all the head-scratching, installing Yellow Dog looks like it will be worth the effort of getting used to Linux beyond the occasional bit of tinkering in the Terminal on OS X, simply because the computer is now lightening fast. When running OS 10.3.4, my old iBook (a Graphite SE with sod all RAM) wasn’t exactly speedy, but now it’s snappy as can be, only getting a wee bit sluggish when launching big applications like OpenOffice or the GIMP (the Linux equivalents of Word and Photoshop).

Apologies in advance for the inevitable slew of posts in the coming weeks about just how fabulous and exciting Linux is.