I’ve wrote up a script that might be useful for other people: a Boxee Box command line “remote control”. Right now you can use it to change the volume, skip tracks, play, pause and skip ahead in video/audio. It has two modes: regular and interactive. Regular takes in a command and exits upon completion. Interactive puts you in a shell where you can type commands.

Regular mode, set volume to 50%:

$ boxee vol 50

Interactive mode:

$ boxee

Get it on github.

Over the last week or so I’ve been working on getting Arch Linux installed on an Asus Eeepc I recently purchased.  A long time ago I mentioned picking up the 900HA but I took so long to get around to it that the 1005HA ended up being the model I picked up.  Installation from a USB stick was a breeze and their Beginner’s Guide is easy enough to follow (it helps if you’ve used a distro like Gentoo or Slackware in the past).  The specific instructions on tweaking it for the 1005ha can be found on their wiki here.

Here’s the packages I recommend so far:

• OpenBox – Great window manager.  I used to use Fluxbox but I feel that OpenBox gives more freedom to tweak various things.  It’s extremely fast, even on this limited hardware.
• Conky – This is pretty standard.  Lets you view your remaining battery, plus whatever else you want to monitor.
• tint2 – Great minimalist dock.
• wicd – Wireless connection manager that sits in your dock.  A better alternative to netcfg, plus supports wired connections as well.

Overall I was surprised at how fast this machine runs.  The only performance bottlenecks so far have been the monolithic Firefox browser and the Flash plugin.  Most of the hotkeys work out of the box.  Sound, video, wifi, etc are all supported.

Hardware-wise this machine is hit-or-miss.  The keyboard is acceptable but I find the arrow keys difficult to use (both the Up and Down keys are in the spot that is usually occupied by the Down key).

The trackpad is pretty bad all around.  The material they use for it is the same as the rest of the case, meaning that it’s just slightly sticky to the touch.  To allow users to glide their finger over it without too much friction, they added bumps all over the trackpad, which gives the effect of moving your finger over bits of sand.  The trackpad button is equally awful in that it’s very difficult to know if you’ve clicked it, or if you’ve left or right clicked.  Verdict: Just use the keyboard or buy an external mouse.

On the plus side the display is bright and the battery seems to last forever, and the machine feels pretty sturdy. Its sub-3lb weight, small form factor, and low price point let me carry this machine around with me in my backpack anywhere I want to go, worry-free.  I don’t recommend it as a main computing machine, but for computing on the go this really can’t be beat.

Recent Incoming Searches:

• archlinux 1005ha

Two blog posts in 1 month! Look at me go! I might even make this a Regular Thing.

So per my last post I recently got Linux up and running on my iBook G4.  For the most part it’s been a pretty good experience, but due to the age of the laptop I’m considering getting a new netbook and using that instead.  I love Apple as much as the next snooty web developer guy, but that particular generation of Apple laptops was not build to last.  The keyboard has always been cheap and prone to warping, the screen has had splotches of discoloration, and a component related to the battery has failed such that if I ever unplug the power supply, it immediately shuts down. This is a big problem when one has cats that consider any piece of dangly wire as a toy.

Right now the Asus Eee PC 900HA is looking pretty good.  My main concerns are making sure WiFi works and that I can swap the Netbook UI for the more familiar Fluxbox.  Ideally I’d like to be able to ditch the version of Linux it comes with it and use something like Arch Linux which from what I’ve read works pretty well (wireless included) and is a lot like Gentoo without needing to compile everything.  It’s no longer a new device so it can be found for about $250 on eBay or Craigslist, even less at auction.

Ubuntu has made installing Linux so trivial that I almost don’t need to write anything.  However, if you’re like me you may have tried getting Linux up on this particular hardware and had dismal results, especially with the wireless card.  But not anymore! Wireless, among other things, now has full support.

The very first thing I did was backup all my files off of the laptop.  I planned to do a complete wipe.  Even if you plan to try to repartition, I recommend this step.  You never know what can go wrong.

Second thing I had to do was grab the 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope iso from here.  Why not the 9.10?  Well, for some reason, the 9.10 disk is 705MB, and the biggest CD I had around could only be overburnt to 702MB.  Dang!  So 9.04 it is.  I burnt the ISO with Toast, popped it in the CD drive, and rebooted the laptop.  You may have to hold down the ‘c’ key when the laptop reboots to get it to boot from CD.  [Note: If you can get a CD that will hold 9.10, go ahead and try it!]

I would like to stop for a second and point out that the main resource I used for this can be found here.  It’s fairly out of date and some of the things it just don’t apply anymore, but if you find yourself having some difficulties the author links to some good resources for specific problems.

Moving on:  The CD will boot and you’ll come to a prompt asking you to either hit ‘enter’ or type a boot command and hit ‘enter’.  Some iBooks will get a black screen if you just hit ‘enter’, so to avoid that, type “live-nosplash-powerpc” at the prompt, no quotes.  I didn’t try it without using that command, but you don’t really need a splash screen anyway.  Once you do that, it may give an error about ROM.  Ignore it.  It may also hang for a very long (5 mins?) time, once again, just let it do it’s thing.  After quite a while, you’ll see the usual Ubuntu login screen, and you’ll be dumped to a live desktop.  Sweet!

Uh-oh! Remember how I said wireless works now?  Well… I only sort of lied.  Wireless doesn’t work in the live CD environment.  My theory is that they don’t put proprietary drivers on live CDs, but that’s speculation.  Either way, I hope you brought a network cable. This step is the same as any other install: You click the “Install” icon, pick your options, go through the whole wizard, and let it install.  For me there were zero hiccups, although it did take a while to install.  While you’re waiting, have a beer.

If all has gone well up to this point, Ubuntu should prompt you to remove the CD and reboot.  Do that and after it reboots log in.  Have a network cable?  Good, because you’re going to need it.  Plug it in, or ideally already have it plugged in when you rebooted.  After a short period of time, Ubuntu should alert you that there are new drivers available.  Click the dialog box that alerts you of this and you should be prompted with a Hardware Drivers window that allows you to add the Broadcom wireless driver. I don’t recall the exact things to click, but I do remember it being extremely obvious (I think you select the driver and click “activate). Yay wireless!

Now at this point you’re probably thinking “sweet, Ubuntu and wireless, but this isn’t 9.10!”  Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager and at the top you’ll be given the option to upgrade to 9.10.  Click it, sit back for 40 minutes and have a beer.  When it finishes, you’ll have 9.10.

That’s it!  Everything should work: Wireless, Touchpad (F11, F12 are middle, right -clicks), sound, video, etc.  From here you can do almost anything you want, my plans include ditching GNOME for Fluxbox and figuring out a better way to right-click.  Keep in mind though that GNOME works great even given the age of the hardware.

This process is almost not deserving of a How-To, but as a guy who’s not very old and can still remember when it took some effort just to get a PCI ethernet card to be recognized, this is a pretty big deal!  The Ubuntu folks really have their shit together, big thanks to them and the thousands of contributors to all the software for making this installation so painless.

Oh and if you have any problems, check out the PowerPC FAQ. Good luck!

Updates

Some issues I’ve come across so far:

- Fluxbox is significantly snappier than GNOME, but is difficult to use without an external mouse.

Some Boring Stuff

This section used to be at the top, but given how much traffic this post gets and I can only assume everyone is interested in the iBook G4 Ubuntu install, I’ve moved it down here:

The other day I decided I wanted to “get back into Linux” so to speak.  I’ve been an avid user since 2002 but the last year or so I haven’t used it much outside of work.

I remember my first distro: SuSE.  Back then it wasn’t openSUSE and if I recall correctly wasn’t entirely open source.  I didn’t care at the time: I bought it off the shelf because it came with a book. I fiddled around with various distros since then on everything I could I install it on, finally settling on Gentoo at my desktop OS.  I loved it.  Sure, it took 3 days to get a graphical display running (not including compile time), but I learned a ton.  Even though Linux had advanced pretty far by the time I got into using it, it was still a pretty Big Deal if you could get it installed on your box on the first try without having to modify anything or go out and buy new (or more commonly: old), Linux-compatible, hardware.  Gentoo was a totally different deal because you build it from scratch, but because of it, I now know more than I’ll ever need to about handrolling init scripts and compiling a kernel from scratch and all that things that I could only learn to do because I was 17 and had nothing but time.

As I started college I switched over to Apple laptops starting with OS 10.2.  OS X had so many of the development features I liked without any of the hassle, so it soon became my main OS.  I kept my Linux servers going for a while, but as their hard drive size and computing powers became more trivial and my computing needs became more mobile, I phased them out.   Still, I never stopped using it: most of my work as an Assistant IT guy starting in my sophomore year of college was working with Linux boxes and I was even given time to resurrect an old iMac G3 and throw Yellow Dog on it.  Every job since has been working on a site powered by Linux, so I’ve never been too far away.  Still, tonight seemed like it was time.