The Netbook Thread

[Governmentyard]

I've been to every computer shop in cardiff and bought the only usb dvd drive in town, how do I make the eee recognise it? Is it an atapi cd rom or a removable dev?

Nothing seems to make it work. I'm ready to return this one and get the windows version instead. Apparently I have a 7-day race period and I feel inclined to use it.

I am very, very angry that there's nothing close to a full-featured OS on this thing, no way of easily getting FF3 on it. Biggest disappointment in my computer buying career to date.

/edit OK, I can now ge the bios to detect device#01.... sat there doing noting since, but it's a start

[Governmentyard]

PC World will not take it back, as it 'isnt faulty'.

[HGFB]

The user is sadly.

Seriously Goatboy. The *only* thing wrong here is you currently don't have a clue what you're doing. I've got a 900 and I've used a USB cdrom drive to install XP on it. I've also ran Ubuntu on a 701 with wifi fully working.

Have you read the instructions? Press escape while it's going through the bios crap and it should give you a boot menu that includes your new cdrom drive.

[Governmentyard]

I've read the instructions... I'm pressing escape. When the usb drive is connected, it makes no difference. The drive is powered up, connected and tested on other machines, and has a working 8.04 disc in it.

I'm happy to install ubuntu elsewhere, or run a live cd elsewhere, and make a bootable sd using the live usb system creator. But if I install ubuntu and it goes wrong, I can't recover the shitty xandros from the dvd because the dvd unit isn't being detected, though if it were I'd not need to do a bootable SD anyway.

[Governmentyard]

OK, I'm giving up on installing something newuntil I can get hold of a usb dvd drive the Eee will recognise.

In the meantime I'm trying to configue xandros to the best of my ability - get FF3 on there, compiz, etc. I've got full mode to boot as standard and followed the following instructions to get compiz on:

Compiz desktop effects

When in KDE, open a terminal by clicking Launch/Applications/System/Console and follow the steps below.

Enter the following to start editing your X-server configuration:
sudo su
nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Under the section "ServerLayout" add the line
Option "AIGLX" "True"

Under the section 'Module' add the line
Load "dbe"

Under the section "Device" add the line
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "True"

Under the section "Extensions"
Change the line Option Composite to "Enable"

Now save your xorg.conf file and exit Nano (CTRL-O, CTRL-X)

Install Compiz
apt-get install compiz

If you try to start Compiz at this point, it attempts to load a Metacity window decoration theme which isn't present by default on the eeePC so no window decorations will appear. This can be corrected by placing a suitable theme where Compiz expects to find it. To do this, go to http://www.gnome-look.org and download a Metacity theme from the Metacity link on the left side of the gnome-look.org page. Pick one you like the look of and download it. The theme will be in a tar.gz archive so once you have downloaded it to your eeePC, double-click it to view the contents of the archive. You should find a directory called metacity-1 within the archive and this needs to be dragged and dropped to a suitable location (I'm assuming it's in My Documents for the purpose of this guide). Do not rename the metacity-1 directory.

From your Console window (and assuming you're still a superuser):

Copy the metacity-1 directory to the location that Compiz expects to find it in:
cp -r /home/user/My\ Documents/metacity-1 /usr/share/themes/Clearlooks/

Create a configuration file to run at startup:
nano /home/user/.kde/Autostart/compiz.desktop

Type the following entries into the configuration file:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Exec=compiz --replace &
StartupNotify=false
Terminal=false
Type=Application
X-KDE-autostart-after=kdesktop

Save your changes and exit Nano (CTRL-O, CTRL-X). Remember that Linux is case sensitive - ensure the commands and config files used above are entered as shown!

Press CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to restart the X Window manager and switch back into KDE. Compiz should now be enabled. The whizzy effects will be active but you will notice some ugly thick black borders around your windows and menus. This can be fixed thanks to the following steps passed on to me by Berthold Barth - thanks Berthold!

Now, I'm not getting unsightly borders, I'm gettin no borders at all! I can maximise and so on from the taskbar, but am unsure which option will get me my window borders back. Compiz otherwise appears to work a treat. Now if I can only make the sakbar have a better look than that godawful bundled lanch button, I'm going to be quite cheerful.

Any compiz pointers re: the above?
source article: http://www.r3uk.co.uk/index.php/home/36 ... cks#compiz

/edit actually, I'm asking the question wrong, aren't I? Here we go properly, then:

sudo tell me how to get my window borders back

[Loada]

I recently upgraded my 701 (Linux) to WinXP using a Sandisk Cruzer 4GB USB stick.

I used these instructions:
http://www.eeeguides.com/2007/11/instal ... thumb.html

and I "nlite'd" my XP disc to create a cut-down install using these instructions:
http://www.i64x.com/eeexp.php

Worked a treat and being a Windows-user, XP is a MILLION miles better than the default Linux. I can now administrate it along with all my other household PCs and it upgrades itself happily as does all the installed software (AVG and the like). I freely admit that I don't have a clue what I'm doing with Linux and to be honest, I don't really want to. It's never been able to do anything (for me) that Windows couldn't.

The only "gotcha" in the whole process is the first instruction link I've posted (to setup the USB stick) is not Vista-UAC friendly. I did it under Vista and had UAC turned off and it worked fine but it won't work if you have it on. It's not a big deal if you have to turn it off briefly, I suppose but I'm no fan of UAC so it wasn't a problem for me. Haven't turned it back on since. Also, the EeePC "boot" section of the BIOS isn't the best (at least on the 701) and it took a bit of faffing with the settings before I got them into the right configuration so that it would attempt to boot from the USB stick.

Obv, you'll need a valid XP license (of course!).

[Governmentyard]

I've only got naughty XP and if I were to install that I'm fearful of the nagging that MS have planned for such versions.

I've turned off compiz in Xandros now, using

metacity --replace

Seems that metacity is the normal window manager and compiz supplants it when activated, which is what gets rid of the title bars. I've now got 4 desktops instead of the one I had with Compiz running. I got the following error message after returning to metacity:

Window manager warning: failed to load theme "clearlooks":line 427 character 84: no <draw_ops> with the name "close_button_icon_unfocused" has been defined

I wonder if this has anything to do with the titlebar and so on not being there?

/edit I've now tried compiz --replace tosee what errors that throws up - here's a cut-and-paste:

compiz --replace
/usr/bin/compiz.real: No stencil buffer. Clipping of transformed windows is not going to be correct when screen is transformed.
Window manager warning: Failed to load theme "Clearlooks": Line 427 character 84: No <draw_ops> with the name "close_button_icon_unfocused" has been defined
The program 'gtk-window-decorator' received an X Window System error.
This probably reflects a bug in the program.
The error was 'BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)'.
(Details: serial 2001 error_code 8 request_code 72 minor_code 0)
(Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously;
that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it.
To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line
option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful
backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)

/me scratches head.

[DutchLlama]

Is it possible to get my Asus EEE PC 900 with Xandros show up in "My Network Connections" in XP?

So I can pump data to it without using a flash drive?

[Governmentyard]

Are you using full mode? There's stuff in the file manager about windows networks, though on my network at any time there'll be a 360, a vista machine and a couple of windows machines, so I'm not sure whether anything is being 'seen' by xandros, which is hardly consistent, or whether it's just a standard icon.

Also something in the control panel equivalent, as I recall. I'm not turning the fucking thing on again until I get some leads on sorting this compiz out though, might have a look tomorrow. It's going out the window if I touch it again tonight!

[Governmentyard]

Anyone running xp from an external usb hd drive on an Eee? Crossed my mind this morning.

[Cloudane]

Yup. Took a lot of fiddling around to get it to work, but it's pretty fast on a Corsair Flash Voyager GT.

[Governmentyard]

I was gonna set it uo one one of these, on a partition, maybe...

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/product/seo/952733

Also, I've got firefox three in the following form:

firefox-3.0.1.tar.bz2

in My Documents. How do I run or install it without nuking ff2, and without having the repository with it in set up in synaptics manager?

[Cloudane]

I'm guessing just extract it to somewhere like /opt/firefox3 and run it from there. Not sure how the tarballs of FF work (check the readme)

[Viscount Charles]

Buy an Asus EEE PC 901 this week, or wait two months for the lenovo S10? Lenovo have delivered on some quality gear in the past, but it's likely to be more expensive than the EEE. Decisions, decisions.

[Sir_LANs-a-lot]

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