CentOS on Asus EEE pc

An unofficial team of CentOS developers and Asus EEE pc owners (KB and MH) managed to get CentOS 5 installed over the network onto an EEE pc today.

Wireless and some speed related tweaking are still required.

HOWTO documentation to follow...

pictures here

Want security updates for ASUS eee pc - install another operating system

I've loaded Ubuntu 7.10 on my Asus EEE pc, I did not wait for Asus to put security updates on their repository.

At FOSDEM a chap who had Debian Etch on his knew what vulnerabilities there were in the stock Asus install - even though his machine had Debian on it within 1 hour of being out of the box.

Also at FOSDEM the CentOS guys discovered that a standard CentOS network install does not have a driver for the built in network card.

Ubuntu it is for now...

Wireless woes

I have a old, really old, iBook Dual USB. It has never given me any problems and with a replacement battery is still a quite useful machine - if you are not in a real hurry.

The machine did not come with wireless, I went wireless after the AirPort card stopped being made so used a USB stick from Belkin with the Ralink drivers for MacOS X 10.3.

However knowing that Apple would eventually stop supporting that version and given the age of the machine I would have to chose an alternative OS at some point I chose to use Debian Etch on it.

Problem was the USB stick has never worked with Etch, I purchased an EdiMax stick that was sold as Linux compatible but this required drivers to be compiled for it - these drivers did not like the PowerPC architecture at all so rather than remain isolated I investigated alternatives.

Luckily I came across the ASUS WL-330gE, this attaches to the Ethernet port and once configured can act as a Ethernet to wireless gateway.

The unit attaches connects to the Ethernet port and is powered from either the USB connector or a separate power pack. Conveniently I have a USB connector adjacent to the Ethernet port so I plugged it in set my IP address to one within the adapter's default range and configured it to match my wireless network.

Once I reconfigured my Ethernet settings to use DHCP my machine connected via the adapter to the wireless network.

If you are a complete Linux novice I would strongly suggest that a machine with Linux pre-installed with drivers for wireless would be a better match for you.

People who know a bit about Linux and know how to reconfigure network adapter settings and just want their machine to connect via wireless may want to investigate the ASUS unit.

You can get past Frozen Bubble level 70

After two days of effort by two of us we managed to get past frozen bubble level 70. Perhaps if we were teenagers it would not have taken that long.

I have not personally done it but I'll get around to it at some point.