200 OK

So I have two netbooks one of the first ever ones the Asus eee 700 and a newer Samsung one. The Samsung one is running Windows 7 basic or whatever its called (the lowest of the low version) and the Asus did have some odd version of Linux called Xandros that stopped working but I never bothered with it because I got the newer Samsung since it was time to upgrade.

Anyway I never sell/chuck devices away because i’m weird like that and thought this little Asus might come in handy one day and sure enough a couple of days ago a opportunity for it to get some love after being turned off for a couple of years reared its head.

I am going away on holiday and I was uming and aring about taking the Samsung with me for fear of damage or it getting nicked etc, so i thought i’ll bang Linux on the old Asus that i’m not too fussed about and roll with that for dumping pics on and checking email etc. Should be pretty straight forward i told my self…. haha how naive.

So i knew the little Asus was not a power house so I decided to go for a distribution of Linux call Xubuntu, this is basically a version of Ubuntu for less powerful machines, even better I found one called eeeXubuntu which was created a few years back especially for the Asus netbook I have.

So first thing I had to do was download it and burn it onto a CD, then boot up a PC using the CD (basically runs the operating system without having to install it) and then use that machine to make a USB stick with the OS on to install on the Asus, confused yet? you aint seen nothing yet home boyyy.

I put the CD one of my PCs and:

Great start, what does all that mean? i’m sure someone knows. I put it down to a dodgy CD burn and I was right, I reburnt the CD booted again and then followed a process of  creating the USB installer, seconds in and in order to do this we need to load a Linux terminal window and physically punch in commands along the lines of:

...sudo mount eeeXubuntu.iso /cdrom/ -o loop
cd /cdrom/
sudo /cdrom/mkusbinstall.sh --autodetect...

blah blah blah. Long story short this process worked and I put the USB stick into the Asus and turned her on (unintentionally filthy).

Whey it works, we install eeeXubuntu and life is grand, I can now play Mahjonng and shit wheyy… what about YouTube? Movie player to watch some films? not installed or supported, I need to update? ok cool.

So I run the updater so I dont have software etc from 2007 and it ticks away downloading 800 and something files to update to the latest version gusty fire badger 8.09 or some such. Reboot and low and behold the wireless no longer works… but it did the first time. It appears the eeeXubuntu has been shot dead and normal Xubuntu has taken over. This is cool at least I am up to date, i’ll just install the driver for the wireless card, cant be that hard…. ha.

So I Google like I have never Googled before and eventually hit a site that tells me this might work:

...
sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget 'http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz'
tar zxvf madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz
cd madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-*
make clean
make
sudo ma..

blah blah blah more typing commands into a console. The above did not work first time because the link mentioned to the file was broken so I had to google again to find the newer one and type that in instead, the newer file name was the same as the old one but of course they added in a few more numbers to make it more of a pain somin like madwiif66456-82374234.78..333/hahafuck you/.beta5.6667.3 3. I realise there is no doubt a way to cut’n'paste into the terminal window but I dont know how and was not gonna waste more time googling.

So that process finished and after a restart the wireless was back up. EXCELSIOR!  well not quite.

Now the Internet connection is so slow I might as well train a fleet of carrier pigeons to carry data too an from my location. I grin and bare it for a while and decide to do some other tasks like install VLC to watch videos, chrome web browser and flash to watch YouTube etc…. hah all failed chrome error message of no sense and the other two, even using the GUI program installer… coudlent find either of these after ages of head scratching.

Abandoned that and went back to sorting the speed of the Wifi using google… what ensued was a series of forum posts on par with stuff from computer science lectures from my uni days, mixed in with the green code stream from the matrix. At this point I gave up turned the Asus off, put it back on the shelf where its been sat for two years and decided to take my Samsung with me and be extra careful.

The thing is i’m a geek! I know i could sit down for a couple of months maybe more an become a bearded sweaty Linux guru, i have that ability. What i do not have is the time to do that and lead a (somewhat) normal life! I’m sure once you understand what you are doing with something like Linux its great, for most people though…  not worth the hassle.