Activating Full Mode on the Asus Eee PC

Merry Christmas! Today I received an addition to my geek arsenal: an Asus Eee PC.

The Eee’s default interface: Easy Mode.

They really are telling the truth in their slogan; it is indeed “Easy to Learn, Work, and Play.” But if you’re like me and require that default-looking desktop environment to satisfy your needs, probably want to activate the Eee’s Full Mode.

Patching Files in Linux / Unix

This post applies to any Linux, Unix, or Mac-terminal users.

A patch file is one of the best methods to do what you think it would do—patch things. This short guide will teach you how to create patch files, and apply them to your files.

Unix Tip – Shortening The Abbreviations

Even for us fast typists, our hands start to complain after a few hours or more of banging on our keyboards. Sometimes the best thing to do is what is really the only apparent chance of survival—shorten all these abbreviations even more.Please note, this guide is intended to be used by Linux and Unix users. Yes, Mac users… if you can believe it, Mac is all Unix on the inside.

gEdit Template Plugin :: Basic Templates

Eckhard Jäger released a plugin for gEdit last Monday which allowed you to create your own templates, and then create files from those templates. I really liked the idea of this plugin, so I’m going to help it out a bit. Here is a quick archive of a few useful templates for web developers.

Installing A Wireless Driver With NDISWrapper

This short tutorial will guide you through the installation of NDISWrapper, and how to set it up to work with your specific wireless adapter.

Firefox 3 Beta Release (Candidate)

Firefox 3 Beta 1 has now been officially released. You can download the beta here, in a lot of different languages. You can still view some screenshots below if you would like.

A new article has just sprung up on Digg, giving a few links to an early release of Firefox 3 Beta. It’s really actually a release candidate, so that Digg article isn’t completely valid. But anyway, I’ll give a rundown of the new Firefox, and the main new features I can see after 2 or 3 minutes of playing with it…

Linux Virtualization Project: OpenSUSE

Yay! Part 1 of the Linux Virtualization Project. By the way, I’ve switched from Microsoft Virtual PC to VMWare. Because I said so.

My Linux Virtualization Project

Very soon I will be starting to install a few different Linux distros here and there, probably through Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. I’ll let you know how it all goes.

I would probably be using VMWare Player for this project except, well, I just wanted to try something new.

So, yeah. I’m installing Fedora right now, I’ll post details later on.

Ubuntu Gutsy 7.10 + Wireless Adapter = PROBLEMS!

Note that this may also apply for Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. Let’s hope this get’s indexed so people can be helped out.

I recently burned a CD of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, Tribe 3, and then installed it onto a secondary hard drive I added to my computer earlier on. I was all excited to get Ubuntu running, but it was a little more than a few clicks for me.

I have a Linksys Wireless WUSB54G network adapter, the ‘USB’ in the name meaning that it is connected to my computer by USB cable. On my first boot from the hard drive, Ubuntu was not able to recognize that I had the adapter; I needed a driver. I googled a bit and everything I found suggested ‘to use ndiswrapper with the driver.’ Now, I was able to get that far, and those who haven’t gotten that far should view my new post about this. Now here was my big problem: ndiswrapper wasn’t showing up in the running modules, but by typing ‘lusb’ I could see that my adapter was there, and ‘ndiswrapper -l’ showed that the driver was installed and the device for that driver was present. I tried using ‘sudo modprobe ndiswrapper’, but kept getting an error of ‘FATAL ERROR: Module ndiswrapper not found’.

The solution: You need to update your kernel headers and recompile ndiswrapper. Use this to update the headers:

• From a Terminal, run:

    sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

  and run the following for the dependencies:

    sudo apt-get install dh-make fakeroot gcc-3.4 build-essential

The above was taken from the Ubuntu Wiki, just to note. Now this presents a bit of a paradox. On a page where most people are accessing from separate computers merely because the computer they are trying to fix doesn’t have internet interface yet, they tell you to get something that you can only get through an Ubuntu machine. For me, this was a problem, as it was the only Linux computer in the house (Windows and Macs are dominant here) I either had to get debians and use a removable drive to transfer, or temporarily set up an interface that would allow good access. I chose the latter. I moved my computer, my screen, everything, into a room with my router in it, so I could plug in the ethernet cable to get the packages. Both methods should work, one was probably easier than the other, though. Now download the latest version of ndiswrapper, untar to a folder on the desktop, and CD to that folder. Run ‘make distclean clean’, then ‘make’, and finally ‘sudo make install’. There should be no errors in the compile this time. Check that the driver is still installed for the adapter. If not, just reinstall it using ‘ndiswrapper -i rt2700usb.inf’ like you did before, with whatever your driver’s inf file is. Reboot and it should now work!

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