teee heee, my new eee PC

So today I walk into Harvey Normans and see the little eee PC sitting next to all the other standard laptops and I think “oh, how tiny”.
I went and had a play with it to find out how small the keys actually feel. They are tiny. Probably a little too tiny for fingers like mine.
On the way home I was thinking that if I was still working, I probably would buy a toy like that…
… after some more thinking, I thought that I really should support something like a quality build and doing a good job of providing linux.
So I stopped off at the Good Guys and bought one for $457

Issues:

• I don’t like laptops suspending when I close the lid. If I want the machine to stop functioning, I will let it know. So I edited /etc/acpi/lidbtn.sh and commented out the line that called suspend2ram.sh
• I don’t know how close the machine is too full charge. The icon in the tray only states the unit is plugged in. There is also a light on the unit that lets me know that it is charging. I have cat’d /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state and /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info but there is no obvious answer as yet. Once it is charged I may be able to deduce it is full based on some information.
• I’m used to NetworkManager configuring the wireless network for me. Need to get myself adjusted to the KDE way of doing things or…
• I’m tempted to find out how well ubuntu or fedora runs on the box just so I can get my gnome life back.

Still to fix:

• I need to turn off the display when the lid is closed. I know the script I need to edit but I don’t know what command to issue.

-= Comments
1. Lucien | April 4th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I am jealousy. I saw a guy at Swin with one the other day which he had installed WinXp on and was very happy with. Anotehr guys I heard about (also at Swin) is trying to install os X on it.

I’m just trying to figure out how to justify buying one for myself. I only just got my new MacBookPro a few months ago, yet…

2. pimaster | April 4th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
os X would be an interesting experiment.

How to justify. That is really a hard one. The only thing I had to justify was “Do I have the cash on me right now”. Supporting Linux and vendors who are going to support Linux (open drivers and community support) was what I wanted to achieve. What I do with laptop now that I have it. I don’t know.

3. Lucien | April 4th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
I’m right there with you. I can think of one thing to do with it: since it has the VGA plug, I can run a lecture from it. Now if it will just compile java, it could be my complete “java lecturer in a box” solution.

Printing from Windows to Linux (sharing a linux printer)

When I first setup my server in my room (Yes, I finally got there from this post on 30th June last year), printing was high on the list of todos.
After getting the printers to work locally (worked a lot smoother on fedora 8 compared to fedora 6), I got working on how to print from another linux box. After trying to manually edit some of the printers, I got frustrated and deleted them all to start with a fresh slate. Closed the printer dialogue and re-opened it to find that cups had automatically detected them for me. Fantastic.

The next step was to print from windows. I thought this was going to be easy since I had already enabled smb shares. But I couldn’t find settings that would work in the config file /etc/samba/smb.conf. So off to google I go.
http://www.petersblog.org/node/726 has simple working configuration.
I’ll copy the configuration setting just in case the original ever disappears.

# add to [General] section:
printcap name = cups
printing = cups
security = share

# make sure [printers] section looks like this
[printers]
browseable = yes
printable = yes
public = yes
create mode = 0700
guest only = yes
use client driver = yes
path = /tmp

And bam, Windows picked up the shares, I installed them and am happily printing test pages :D