Tuesday, January 29, 2008

my brand-new EEE-PC

A little late (but better later than never) I got myself an EEE-PC.
First and important thing to do was to tell it to talk to me in english, because I hate it, when computers talk to me in denglish (as this awful modern mixture of german and english is called, and yes, of course, I use it myself in spoken language and I hate it, but at least for written language I insist on avoiding it), so how to modify the default locale? And pls don't you just modifiy /etc/default/locale!

$ sudo update-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    

I found wiki.eeeuser.com and forum.eeeuser.com, most valuable!!! Really!!! Go to the wiki and make the best of it!!!

I added a few Xandros package repositories, that got listed there.

I found two package managers: synaptic (GUI!!!) and aptitude (ncurses based), obviously you will always have to call them through sudo.

Sometimes you will nevertheless want to install a package on the command line, this is how it looks:

$ sudo apt-get install YOUR_PACKAGE
    

These were a few of the packages I installed first this way: openssh-server, nxml-mode, rcs.

Actually the init script, that got installed with the openssh-server package is somehow flawed:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/ssh # it crashes and core dumps (almost)
    

So I have to run this instead for being able to access my EEE from my network:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/sshd
    

I certainly also installed GNU emacs, but I did so using one of the package managers.

I tried the descriptions for using bluetooth, and it looks like it works, but when I tried to connect to the Internet via bluetooth and one of my UMTS phones as modem, it didn't work. But I successfully connected to the Internet, when I USB-wired that UMTS phone to the EEE.

The EEE-PC seriously comes with an up-to-date and updatable Firefox, and I installed Adblock Plus (and its most important filter subscriptions, so all the obnoxious ads stay away from my screen), Sage (my RSS reader), and GMarks (so I can access Google bookmarks).

Initially the Music Manager refused to play my MP3-s, but I installed a few MP3-related packages through synaptic and everything was fine. Now I can play my MP3-s (that reside on a fat USB disk attached to my Linux NEO box) through my home WLAN, and I overly enjoy it.

Of course I switched to the Full Desktop aka Advanced Mode in the meantime.

I followed the Multiuser mode HOWTO, and now I have to login before X starts up, and user is not the only user any longer.

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