Amazing -- my EeePC is working perfectly again!

It's almost a week since my dualboot system on the EeePC 901 stopped functioning (as described here) and I was back to only having Xandros (advanced mode) working.
I had contacted Asus about sending the machine back to them and was waiting for a response which, according to their 48 hour policy, was actually due this morning.
My feeling up to now was that some unfixable hardware problem had arisen which caused the screen to go black when the DCIn cable was plugged in or unplugged which situation was only recoverable by rebooting.
Then today I came across this thread referring to a similar, but not identical, problem which offered this solution reported to work for many poeple:

1. Unplug power cable and remove battery
2. Hold down power key for 30 seconds
3. Leave the battery out and plug in power cable
4. Hold down power key for 5 seconds during whuich time the machine should boot
5. If everything looks good, shut down as normal and replace the battery

So, I tried this and when the computer rebooted in step 4, the Grub menu came up. Afetr replacing the battery, and booting into Ubuntu, it seemed that everything was back to normal. Even unplugging and replugging the power cable caused no problems.
Looks like everything is completely back to normal which is marvelous given that I had totally lost all hope of a recovery.

How does it look for my ailing EeePC ?

Not good, unfortunately.
It seems now that the principle problem involves the black-screening when the DCIn cable is plugged in or unplugged. This problem is still present after three days and is definitely not right.
My own feeling is that this has somehow messed up the Xandros OS (or could it have been Xandros' Grub?) so that nothing othr than Xandros is available. No Grub menu is available and no menus result from holding the ESC, F2 or F9 keys during the boot.
Essentially no replies were received to my forum post on this issue which generally means that the problem is not resolvable.
I sent a private message to what seems to be a key EeePC developer from the forums so it'll be interesting to see if any reply is received.
However, the most likely outcome is that this is a hardward problem which requires the machine to be replaced.

Major problem on EeePC.

Yes, this looks very serious and I have a feeling that perhaps it means that I need to recover via the EeePC DVD that I don't even think I have with me. This means I would have to wait more than three weeks until I get home before I can recify this -- presuming that I can.
Details are provided in this post to the forum to which I have not yet received any replies.
I can't even think what might have gone wrong here, or worse, how to avoid it in the future.
Let's see if anybody responds to my post.

Installing Tasque in Ubuntu Eee

I had already posted on the installation of tasque in Ubuntu but, as I discovered in trying to install it today on my EeePC, I didn't write it very clearly.
So here are steps again with more precision:

1. Download the tasque deb (tasque_0.1.5-1_i386.deb)from here and install.
2. Add this repo to /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/banshee-team/ubuntu hardy main
3. After updating, install these three dependencies:

mono-gmcs
libnotify0.4-cil
libgtk2.0-dev

...and that's it. Tasque should now work although you will have to connect to RTM first and login.

Ubuntu Eee now looking fabulous.

Yesterday I had some reservations about Ubuntu Eee particularly due to problems I had with 3D effects and Yakuake.
Know what the culprit was? Yes, the so-called Netbook Remix which seems to have been designed to make Ubuntu Eee as ungeeky as possible and probably ties in with EeePC's originally targetted audience of schoolkids.
Luckily this is easy to get rid of although I did run into a small problem which is explained in this post.
Essentially, the solution was, as it often is, to reboot.
After this, Ubuntu Eee started to look amazing. In everything I've done today, I cannot see anywhere where Ubuntu Eee is lacking anything in comparision to the full blown Ubuntu Hardy on a full-sized box.
Simply, everything works great -- 3D effects, Yakuake, AWN, Livestation, Brazilian characters
I installed AWN from the Reacocard repo and. again, everything worked fine.
The only problem I had, if you can even call it a problem, relates to a slight, but easily resolvable, difficulty to get sound working when an audio app starts up. I posted to the forum on this but have yet to receive a reply.
I also had another sound problem in that the headphones gave a lot of static-type noise even with no audio app playing. However, to resolve this was just a matter of muting the Microphone in the sound mixer.
All-in-all, a very pleasing day.

Yes, we're dual-booting on the EeePC

Once I had managed to get the new partitions on the 16 GB drive, installation of Ubuntu eee from a USB key was relatively easy.
The same precautions are required every time you want to boot from anything other than the internal HDs as the Boot Device Priority setting is not remembered from boot-to-boot.
Interestingly, the /dev/sdb3 partition that wasn't seen initially by Xandros presented no such problems to the Ubuntu installer.
The install went smoothly (without any of the "no-migration-assistant" problems experienced with Intrepid Ibex). Note that I chose to install no bootloader.
he problems started when I tried to configure the /boot/grub/menu.lst of Xandros to take care of the Ubuntu boot. I first tried this from within Xandros. Everything seemed to go well but when I rebooted (after having commented out the "hidden menu" line in /boot/grub/menu.lst), no grub menu appeared no matter how many times I tried it.
I eventually found what the problem was when I stumbled on this guide (see the section titled "Changing the original GRUB menu"). It seems the changes I had made went to /dev/sda2 while the only changes that will have an effect must be made to /dev/sda1. This device can only be accessed from another partition.
So, I had to go into a LiveCD version of Ubuntu eee (from the bootable USB key) and ad this line to the /etc/fstab

/dev/sda1 /media/sda1 ext2 defaults 0 0

Then I created the sda1 folder in /media and mounted it. Then I could cd into that folder and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst.
Having done this, it was also necessary within the same folder to store the vmlinuz and initrd.img files of Ubuntu eee to /boot/ubuntu. It seems that /dev/sda1 views the 16 GB HD as an external drive.
With this done, I now got a grub menu on starting up and could boot into Ubuntu eee by choosing it from the menu.
Ubuntu eee worked fine and, after adding 36 new updates, I was able to install Opera 9.60 (note that this time, libqt3-mt was downloaded and installed by Opera itself rather than me having to do it as was the case with the LiveCD version).
I installed Yakuake from the repos and Livestation from here. Livestation works pretty well bu Yakuake doesn't seem to like being at 50% width as pressing F12 drops down the 50% width consle but a "shadow" console also drops down in the remaining 50%.
I aso tried 3D effects but, although, I got the wobbly windows and emerald themes, I couldn't get the cube to rotate. I have feeling that /etc/X11/xorg.conf might need to be modified.
All in all, however, this was a major stpe forward and looks very promising.

Adding new partitions to EeePC 901

To get another Linux OS installed on my EeePC 901, I needed to add two new ext2 partitions to the 16 GB drive. So, I used Unetbootin to prepare the bootable USB key with Parted Magic installed on it. Note that Parted Magic didn't work for me on the EeePC due to the version of glibc being older than 2.4 so I had to do this on another computer.
To get the USB key to boot the steps are as follows:
1. Plug the key into the operating computer
2. Reboot and hold down the F2 key until you see the TTy1 screen show up
3. When the BIOS screen is available, tab over to Boot
4. Arrow down to Hard Disks -- now you should see two HDs followed by a USB Flash drive
5. Use the controls (the '+' sign) to move the USB Flash to first position
6. F10 to save and exit

Now you should be on your way to booting from the USB key
However, in my case at least, I kept getting kernel panics. The error given was

EXT2-fs error (device ram0): ext2-get-inode: unable to read inode block

In googling around, it seemed this problem may be due to ramdisk_size being too small.
So, on the next boot into Parted Magic, I used the Tab key to edit the default option. As it happens, the last entry in the command line was

ramdisk_size = 25000

So, I just changed this to 250000 and booted.
Now it started fine and I was able to use Gparted to generate the needed partitions on the 16 GB drive without any problems.
When booted back into Xandros, I found I was only able to mount one of the two new partitions. I posted to the forum about this and it turns out that even though the unmountable partition /dev/sdb3 had been generated in Gparted, it still needs to be created when back in Xandros.
I used the mknod command given in the post and this worked fine.

Just a little closer to dual booting my EeePC 901

One of my short-term goals is to dual boot Ubuntu eee with Xandros on the EeePC 901.
I achieved these goals today as part of what I need to do t6owards this end:
1. Formatting and wiping a USB key
This guide clearly outlines how to delete partitions on the USB key. One very important thing to ensure before you try this is to make sure the little switch on the side is set to unlock (in my case this is towards the bottom of the key). If not, you will get a "You cannot write to the partition table" error.
Another thing is that removing one partition (of two) will not delete any of the fils/folders from the undeleted partition.
Howeverm the key can be easily cleaned of unwanted files/folders with the

rm -rf *

command.
2. Booting EeePC from a USB key
Today this worked fine despite the problems I had yesterday. The key thing is that the Boot Device Priority list seems to revert back to the Internal Hard Disk first maybe after every boot. So, if you want to boot from a USB key, you have to hold down F2 while booting which will bring you to the BIOS. Here, move to the Boot tab and move the USB drive to the top position in the Boot Priority list (Of course, your USB key musst be plugged in for this to work.
Now, reboot and you should boot to the key.
However, this still doesn't explain why holding down the ESC key during boot does NOT bring me to a boot menu.
3. Unetbootin
I've used this quite a bit over the last few days and it really does work very well. It allows youu to create a bootable USB key for a wide range of Linux (and PSD) distros. Small distros such as Parted Magic are also included.
A comprehensive guide is provided.
4. Ubuntu Eee on the EeePC
I got Unetbootin to prepare a bootable USB key containing the Ubuntu eee ISO. This boots fine (on a 1 GB key) and gives access to the Live CD version of Ubuntu eee.
Ubuntu looks really great on the EeePC and I can't wait to get it installed.
I couldn't get 3D effects as Compiz wasn;t available in the repos. I'm sure this is only a matter of putting in the correct repos.
Also, when I tried to install Opera 9.6, I got a dependancy error as libqt3-mt was missing. However, I was able to quickly find a Ubuntu version of this (as a deb) and once I installed this, Opera also installed fine.

Time for a F9 restore on my EeePC?

Quite a number of annoying little things happening on my EeePC now that are perhaps indicative of the need for a F9 restore.
Here's a list of them:
1. Must start from Easy Mode and then go into Full Desktop (FD) to prevent sound server problem on booting into FD (however, it seems like today that problem doesn't occur any more)
2. Similarly, need to start in Easy Mode and then FD to get the symbolically-linked Autostart of VoiceCommand to launch on boot.
3. Couldn't install two updates (Asus Update System Update and Ralink_WLAN Patch). More details in this forum post.
4. Now get a segfault on booting into FD which seems to prevent the Desktop background from appearing.

Of particular concern is that no really helpful replies were received t my forum posts on the first three of these problems. This generally means that the problem is not widespread and very possibly is peculiar to myself.

Other than that, however, everything works fine but it has become worrying.

What can and cannot be installed on EeePC

Over the last day or two I've attempted the following installs on the EeePC.

1. Despite the major problem I had trying to install the KDE Full Desktop by the manual method, the so-called Easy Way worked perfectly. The whole thing took 2-3 minutes whereas just the download in the Manual Way took 15 minutes.

The KDE Full Desktop is much more useful in my view. Also, the previous problem I had with the desktop web apps only opening in Firefox has been eliminated as I mentioned in this thread.
Also, ctrl-alt-n no longer opens Opera and ctrl-alt-t no longer launches a terminal. However, it's easy to put these icons on the bottom panel which is much more useful.
I also put the CXChromium browser icon in the panel as this had previously to be launched from a terminal. Nevvertheless, despite being readily available, I'm not very inclined to use it as I don't find it at all as convenient as Opera.

2. After my failure with Compiz, I tried Beryl from here. This installed without problems. Operation was, however, disappointingly unpredictable. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Even at that, I never managed to get everything to work together as it would, say, in Ubuntu. I'll do more research here.

3. Couldn't get kcheckgmail to install. Sudo apt-get gives this error:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
kcheckgmail: Depends: libqt3c102-mt (>= 3:3.3.3.2) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: xlibs but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages

I believe I could probably get this installed by doing some judicious pinning changes but I haven't tried it yet.

4. I wanted to install gparted as it will be of use in my goal to get Foresight Linux installed on the 15 GB SSHD. However, it too gave an error about gksu wouldn't be installed.
Turns out that there are two versions of gksu available

sudo apt-cache policy gksu
gksu:
Installed: 2.0.0-1
Candidate: 2.0.0-1
Version table:
*** 2.0.0-1 0
500 http://download.tuxfamily.org p701/etch Packages
700 http://http.us.debian.org etch/main Packages
700 http://ftp.us.debian.org stable/main Packages
700 ftp://ftp.uk.debian.org stable/main Packages
700 http://http.us.debian.org stable/main Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
1.2.5-3 0
800 http://www.geekconnection.org xandros4/main Packages

So the desired higher version was in the lower pinned repos. So, I overcame this by temporarily increasing the pinning of the deb repos to 975. With this, gparted installed fine.

Further adventures of the Eee

So, yesterday, I tried the manual installation towards the Advaanced Full Desktop using this guide.
The installation was long (15 min d/l with the 235 kB/s speed I have here) but seemed to go fine until I got a last minute error. Unfortunately, I saved it to a sticky note and not online which was subsequently lost when I was forced to clean restore (ie BOTH hard disks had to be re-formatted).So, I have no record of what the error was.
However, after rebooting, no evidence whatsoever of KDE being available, installed or active was available -- in particular, no Full Desktop Button was visible.
So at this point I did a terminal " startfull.sh". This semed to disable X and I couldn't get it back even after a reboot (just a black screen with a regularly reappearing white X on a black screen -- nothing more.
So at this point there was no option but to do a restore which consists of rebooting while holding down the F9 key.
The first time I chose to reformat only the /user partition but this did not make the system bootable again.
Then I reformatted both disks and this went fine.
Now I set about getting things back to where they were before I hosed my system (although I don't understand what went wrong as I believe I followed the instructions to the letter).

1. Installed Opera from this guide. However, rather than the 9.52 version of Opera mentioned in the guide, I installed the 9.60b1 Debian Etch version (as a .deb) from here. I then installed it with this command

sudo dpkg -i opera-version.deb

I had earlier installed the same fileusing the Eee GUI installer and this seemed to go fine. In addition, it actually put a Opera icon under the Internet tab. (In this case ctrl-alt-n opened a Firefox preferences page)
However, I subsequently found that the text-to-speech install as described below, just not work with this install of Opera.

2. Text-to-speech in Opera allows you to highlight text, right click and choose Read This to get the computer to read the text aloud. I had a problem getting it to read Portuguese text as described in this post which also shows how to do the full install.

3. Gimp install using the guide in this thread which also gives a lot of useful information on additional repos and repo pinning. Note that no Gimp icon shows up but it can be launched with Ctrl-Alt-g
A further very useful and thorough article on repo addition is here.

4. Chromium browser was installed from here (I d/l'ed the Ubuntu/Debian package as a .deb and installed it with
sudo dpkg -i
Got some minor install error but doesn't seem to have affected anything. Chromium must be launched from a terminal as no icon nor ctrl-alt-x is available for its launch.

Can't make Opera the preferred browser on Eee

Well, I haven't posted anything for the last three days due to my journey to Brazil. But, now I've arrived and things are settling down again and I've been able to spend some time getting acquainted with my new netbook.
I'm still enormously impressed with this little machine but I'm starting to see some of its limitations.
For example, although Opera 9.60 is installed and works fine, I can't make it my preferred browser. So, the web-apps that show up on the Desktop always open in Firefox.
I posted to the EeePC forums on this one but none of the recommendations helped me.
I subsequently posted to the Opera Linux forums but have yet to receive a reply. This seems to suggest that a solution just isn't available.

My Eee arrived!!!

My long awaited Asustek Eee 901 20 GB White finally arrived today.
Because I was so busy today, I can only really give here my very first impressions. Unfortunately, with my travelling later this week, it could be quite some time before I can get some serious time with this very welcome addition to my hardware.
My first impression was that this is a very good looking machine. Looks solid, durable and well built. I had seen a remark by someone recently that all but the black version of the 901 looked cheap. I honestly cannot at all see how this conclusion was arrived at.
Configuration consisted only in keying in the WEP key for my wireless which was imediately detected.
Everything that I tried seems to work fine. The keyboard is just a little small but it's really no problem for me and I'm not noticing any significant increase in typos. Were my fingers a bit fatter, however, things could get awkward.
I tried Skype (built-in) and had a problem with the microphone. Even when turned up full, the test call replayed my voice only faintly. I'll probably post to the Eeeuser forum about this.
The Xandros Linux OS seems almost like Linux disguised as Windows. Obviously, somebody is trying to make this appealing to a general, non-geeky clientele by simplifying use and hiding nasty things like the terminal.
Indeed, it took me a while to find how to get into the terminal (ctrl-alt-t or File Manager>>Tools>>Open Console Window) but got almost immediate answers when I posted to the Eeeuser forum. Good to know that there's a vibrant forum associated with this great new tool.
There's also an extensive wiki.
I installed Opera 9.60 with just a little difficulty. I had to use the .deb for Etch and this worked fine. I get the impression that Opera is held in high regard by Eee users.
Yakuake doesn't seem to be available for Eee but as the terminal has to be opened with ctrl-alt-t, it's really not a lot different to pressing F12.
Incidentally, to start Opera you press Ctrl-Alt-n.
Didn't really do too much else on this my first Eee day but I'm very excited about what I'm going to learn in the coming weeks and months.

Am I ever going to get my Eee?

I had ordered this from dabs.ie on 13-08-2008 because they were the cheapest (€396). At first they only had black Eee 901 20 GB in their catalog, so I ordered it anyway and got an email saying they would receive this in stock on 8-09-2008. OK, that was reasonable.
Then about two week ago, I saw in their online catalog that they were now selling white Eee 901 20 GB so I changed my order having "chatted" to a representative who told me the delivery would be the same as the black one.
Then on 2-09-2008, I got another email saying the delivery to them was now changed by one day. OK, no big deal.
Then last Monday I noticed in their catalog that the white 901 20 GB was still 3-4 weeks away from being in stock. Hmmmm...
So, I chatted with another rep who told me, after what I assume was some research, that the delivery to them would in fact be 30-09-2008.
Oh well, I'd have it waiting when I came back from Brazil.
Then on 10-09-2008, I got another email saying that they now expected delivery on 11-09-2008.
Now this is getting puzzling, so I sent them an email detailing the varied info I was getting from them.
Today, I got another mail telling me that delivery would in fact be 30-09-2008.
Notably none of my communications with them lead to any apology on their part.
Disappointing.

Edit (12-09-2008):
Got another email from dabs.ie today telling me that the delivery time for the Eee has changed again to 24-09-2008 this time. That's the third change this week. Wonder what it'll be tomorrow.

Finally bought the Asus Eee 901

I've talked about this for a while and today I did it.
Well, it's more correct to say that I ordered it. Unfortunately, I still have no firm indication as to when I'll actually get my hands on it.
Let me explain. It seems these things are selling here like hotcakes with the result that many online suppliers just don't have any.
The other thing I was interested in, as always, was in getting as low a price as possible.
I bought it from dabs.ie and what I bought was a black Asus Eee 901 20 GB w/Linux.
I had actually intended to buy a white one but this dealer doesn't do white, only black in this model. But as the price was good, I said I'd forget about the colour particularly as I wasn't buying it to admire it's outside.
The major problem is when am I going to get it? Well, right now they have none and have 48 back-orders (49 if you include mine). However, they're expecting 70 on 23-08-08 although they were at pains to point out that they're was no guarantee about this date. so, it looks like it's a matter of hope for the best but at least I'm on the list.
I paid €382 (incl.delivery) which is not too bad. Other prices were in the range of €412-€440 including delivery.
One problem I have is that I'll be going to Brazil in about 4-5 weeks for a while and hope to be able to bring the Eee with me. Let's see what happens.

Asus Eee -- strongly thinking of getting one

I'm seriously looking into these machines which seem to be getting very good reviews. Here's one on the earlier (and smaller) 400 (4 GB SSHD, 512 MB RAM) where there seems to be (or, at least, have been) a wifi connection problem.
Another review concerns the 901 (20 GB SSHD, 1 GB RAM) and goes into a lot of detail.
I'm currently looking at this model and it's cost (including delivery) to me would be about €425.
This is a guide on using a USB key to install Ubuntu (possibly on an Eee -- as it doesn't have a CD drive).