Asus eee PC 1000 and Ubuntu

Is I mentioned earlier in my review of the "Asus eee PC 1000 " I attempted to install the Ubuntu eee distro on my Asus eee PC 1000. I really like how it is organized, better than the Xandros distro, but it had some issues with the webcam, wireless network, and bluetooth. The latter two which I needed to be able to operate in my classroom. To limit my downtime and provide a backup in case of hard drive issues I ordered a 16GB Extreme III SDHC by Sandisk from Newegg. It came in the mail last night and I was able to install Ubuntu-eee with only a few bumps. To my delight most of the issues that I was having with the previous install were automatically fixed by running the system update. The wireless now works as well as my Wacom Bluetooth tablet. A small issue remains with the tablet to increase the resolution when I'm drawing with it and to get X to recognize the eraser and other buttons and such.

This appears to be a great solutions since Ubuntu is a truly open source distro that I can update on my own instead of waiting on Asus or Xandros.

After adding the following list of software I believe that the eee PC is definitely a viable solution for the technically savvy teacher.

• xournal
• audacity
• Inkscape
• KFig
• VLC
• MPlayer with the ASF pluggin
• Celestia
• KStars
• Virtual Box for those proprietary windows apps.
  
• FreeMind

Ubuntu meets ASUS F3Sa

As I mentioned in my previous entry I'm working on getting Ubuntu installed on my ASUS F3SA-A1 laptop. Initially I had some problems with the discs, I kept getting errors. I finally resolved this by burning the disc with ISORecorder on the laptop under Vista. The install appeared to have smoothly at first, but there were two major problems: the video and audio drivers.

The screen resolution was 1024x786 not the full wide screen resolution. Upon further investigation this was due to the fact that XF86 was using the vesa drive instead of the ATI Radeon driver. After several failed attempts I finally got it working using ENVY a handy little utility that can help you install ATI and NVidia drivers for XF86.

The next issue was getting the sound to work. I'm still working on getting it to work completely but so far I've at least gotten it working via a suggestion from Luke Hollins to set model=lenovo in the alsa-base file which doesn't make a whole lot of sense but it works. I haven't tested the mic yet. The speakers work but not the headphone jack. I'll have had a chance to test the micphone yet.

I've been installing Linux since 1995 and found Ubuntu to be the easiest install so far. It feels a lot more responsive than the previous install of Vista on this computer. I was even able to get a few windows applications installed with Wine. I'll post more about that later.

At this point the todo's are as follows:

• Finger Print reader
  
• WebCam
• Explore the TurboMemory options