MMMeeja

Today, I took delivery of my new Asus EEE 901 netbook and I’m quite excited. I bought it to take along to BarCamp Leeds 2008 as my old G4 iBook is feeling a bit out of date for such a geeky gathering.

I want to get Ubuntu 8.04 installed on there with a working Apache server, PHP, Perl and MySql. This post will record my attempts to go from an unopened box to complete set up in just three hours - can it be done? Read on...

Preparation

I’ve read through these excellent articles which cover installing Ubuntu on an EEE and decided that EEE-Ubuntu is the way forward.

Start the clock - 18.15

First to download the Ubuntu ISO onto my desktop machine. I’ll leave that downloading whilst I open the box.

Unboxing

Wow, looks nice. Box contains the netbook itself, power supply and manuals but also a cleaning cloth and carry wallet (nice touch) and curiously recovery CDs, despite that the EEE 901 does not have a CD drive.

I’ll quickly boot it up and check that it all works OK in the standard configuration...

Xandros Linux

Setup is a breeze as a wizard takes you through choosing a username, password, timezone etc. Next, setting up the wifi connection by following the quick start guide. This was not so easy because my network uses a whitelist of MAC addresses, so how to find the EEE 901’s MAC address in Xandros Linux?

Without an obvious command line terminal, I hunted round the icons on offer (a good way of getting to know Xandros). It turns out that I just needed to click the "Properties" button on the network settings dialog and choose the hardware tab.

Once I’d added the netbook’s MAC to the router and entered my shared key to the 901, a DHCP lease was obtained and all was good! Hello Google.

Time check: 19:12

Wifi working? Camera working? Disks OK?

The EEE 901 comes with a diagnostic tool that checks sound recording and playback, display, networking etc so I ran through this before overwriting Xandros. Happily everything worked.

The camera gave an impressive picture and sound output was acceptable. Sound recording was pretty crackly but the microphone was definitely working.

Ubuntu Onto USB

The Ubuntu ISO has downloaded, so now I need to transfer it to my USB stick because I don’t have a USB CDROM (there’s no CD drive built into the EEE).

Using the UNetBootIn application from EEE-Ubuntu is a piece of cake, but it takes a loooooong time. Now to try and boot the EEE from USB and follow these instructions.

Installing Hardy Heron Onto The Asus EEE 901

I choose to use an Ext2 partition on the 4Gb drive as the root partition. The 16Gb drive was split into a 4Gb Ext2 partition for /var and 10Gb for /home. The separate /var is where the MySql databases will reside and Ext2 was chosen because (I read somewhere) that it uses fewer disk write operations. That leaves about 2Gb for swap.

Installing files from USB stick is quite slow and... but wait... FAIL!

A quick google suggested that I might be running out of space, which seemed odd but I shaved a few megabytes off the root partition for a bit of free space and tried again. Same failure. After trying various partition configurations and rewriting my USB stick the time has got to 21:15 - I had failed in my challenge.

The next morning I figured out the problem. The Ubuntu installer was trying to write the boot partition to a non-existent hard disk (/dev/hda) when it should have been writing to /dev/sda. The option to change this is hidden behind the “Advanced” menu on the very last page before installation begins. Change the combo and installation progresses smoothly. So now to check what is and isn’t working...

Some Problems

The first problem I came across was that my USB drive would not mount, giving the error “Invalid mount option”. This was an easy fix, edit /etc/fstab and comment out the last line which attempts to mount /dev/sda3 as a CDROM.

With that fixed, setting up the LAN connection was easy - just follow these instructions. I left the update manager to upgrade installed files and went to the cinema.

Aaargh! I Hate Linux Wifi!

Took me ages to sort the wireless LAN out, I tried re-compiling the kernel, adding about three different native drivers but in the end I had to go with the Windows drivers via NDISwrapper - annoying. Why do I need an Windows XP machine to extract drivers for my Linux netbook? Come on, hardware manufacturers - sort yourselves out.

Installing Apache, PHP, Perl & MySql

I love apt-get, it just makes everything so easy.

Seriously, this part of the installation was better than Windows, better than Apple, better than good! If you’ve ever been through this process before, you know what I mean - no rebooting, no messing.

First Impressions

The little EEE 901 was perfect for Barcamp, connecting to the free wifi at Old Broadcasting House first time. I used it to take notes, surf the net and even hack a few lines of code whilst there. It’s tiny form-factor, solid state disk and light weight made it perfect for the very dynamic environment. There were quite a few other Barcamp attendees with 901s too and we got a few jealous glances from those carrying hefty 19" MacBooks.

The Asus’s strengths could also be its weaknesses - the keyboard and trackpad are difficult to use because of their small size. I need to get a wireless mouse for it as a priority.

In all, the Asus EEE 901 does exactly what I bought it for - it’s an ultra-portable, full featured machine on the cheap. I love it!

I spend most of my time sat at my ancient Apple ibook. It's old and slow, but set up just how I like it, however sometimes I need to get at my Ubuntu server's desktop - to check a design renders OK in Konquerer or tweak some setting that's easier to do with a mouse than the command line.

Happily it's really easy to use any OS X machine as an X-Windows client. Just a couple of steps will get you on your way...

Allow Remote Logins On Ubuntu

If you have a screen, keyboard and mouse attached to your Ubuntu machine, this is a piece of cake. Login and go to the "System" menu, then "Administration" and "Login Screen".

Use the combo-box to allow remote logins, like this:

Using a remote terminal to enable remote logins is a bit trickier - but not much. Use SSH to connect to your Ubuntu machine and change directory to /etc/gdm.

Look for a file called gdm.conf-custom. If it does not exist, you need to create it.

Edit the file and add the following lines:

[xdmcp]
Enabled=true

Save the file and restart your X server:

sudo gdm-safe-restart

Connecting From OS X

To connect to your Ubuntu box from your mac, you'll need to have X-Windows installed. It's one of the optional packages on your installation CD/DVD. Just put the media in your drive and scroll down to find it.

Once X11 is available, open a terminal and type:

/usr/X11R6/bin/X -query <your_ubuntu_host>

After a few seconds, you should see a login screen.

Caveats

Don't use this technique over an unsecured network. It's possible to set up SSH port forwarding (port 177, TCP fans) for this, but unless you have a very fast connection I wouldn't recommend it.

 

MMMeeja offer intranet design services and as I've been busy setting up our own over the past couple of days, I thought I'd post an item on the technologies we chose for our office server.

As we're a development company our needs are quite technical (and therefore well served by free software) but there should be some items here that apply to most businesses.

Document Management

We use Subversion for all our document management. Not just source code, we have all of our accounting spreadsheets, contracts, memos - EVERYTHING is under Subversion control.

The Subversion server is complemented by a web interface (WebSvn) that allows easy browsing of each document's history so we can very quickly spot exactly when an expense occured or a contract was agreed.

Issue Tracking

It's important to keep your customers' concerns, bug reports and enhancement requests easy to find, and that's why we use Trac for issue tracking.

Trac integrates beautifully with Subversion, in a relatively unstructured way. This means that simple tasks (such as changing a font) are managed in a similar manner to whole projects and the file changes involved are found easily.

Trac uses a Wiki just like Wikipedia, which means that anyone can update any issue with a minimum of fuss and zero beaureaucracy.

Wiki

Trac's Wiki editing features can be used for much more than issue tracking - and we certainly use them. The ease of posting fact filled pages means that our intranet is the first port of call for information on:

• Travelling to client sites
• New projects
• Marketing drives
• Technologies we use

Nobody asks permission to add anything to the Wiki, they just do it and the information is available to all.

RSS

Both WebSvn and Trac provide RSS feeds of any changes (new issues, pages edited, files updated etc.) and everybody subscribes to the feeds they are interested in to keep on top of the latest developments in their areas of responsibility.

This engenders face-to-face communication, partly because we're a small team and partly because we're all nosey and want to know what's going on.

Not On Our Intranet

It's also interesting to note what isn't needed on our intranet. We don't bother with a calendar - Google Calendar does a better job.

We also don't require logins - the intranet is not available outside the office and we're a small enough team to still trust everyone. That's not to say that edits aren't tracked.

We certainly don't have our corporate identity all over our intranet. Whilst Trac and WebSvn can be customised to suit our design, it's just unnecessary for us.

An intranet that serves the business and it's stakeholders is an incredibly useful tool and one that's easy to mold to your requirements, giving you a great competitive edge.

What tools do you think we've missed off our intranet? Leave a comment below.