My Eee Desktop – November 2009

I’ve been experimenting with creating my own Fluxbox “styles” (desktop themes) lately, and this provides me with an excuse to launch a new regular feature here at E7P: My Eee Desktop. Every month around this time, I’ll try and post a screenshot of how the desktop on my 701 looks—I do tend to ‘tinker’ around with how it looks, so hopefully there will be the odd change or two to show off!

I actually have two Fluxbox themes I’ve been working on, but will save one for next month (for reasons which should become clearer then). In the meantime, then, here is My Eee Desktop for November 2009:

Eee 701 desktop, showing 'IT Crowd' Fluxbox theme

This is showing my own “IT Crowd” theme, for which I used a deliberately chunky system font (note the menu, toolbar and window title bar), in keeping with the “IT geek ” theme of the show.

The system stats in the top-left of the desktop, are displayed via conky. The version of the app in the Xandros/Eee repositories is positively prehistoric (1.4.4, dating from November 2006!), so I may end up compiling my own executable of the latest version, if I find myself with nothing else to do sometime…

The top-right “stack” is a collection of “dockapps”, displaying in the Fluxbox “slit”. From the top down, they are:

• wmbubble – monitors CPU activity and memory usage levels
• wmnd – network activity monitor
• wmwave – wireless network stats display
• wmifinfo – shows various stats regarding current network connection(s)
• wmweather+ – weather applet, including satellite photo (not shown)
• wmfishtime – animated analogue clock and calendar

I’ll post another screenshot of my desktop next month. In the meantime, if you’d like further information on how this was set up, configured, etc., please let me know via the comments box below.

Bits and pieces

Just thought I’d post back here quickly to let you know I haven’t given up on this blog, though it’s been incredibly busy lately so I haven’t had many chances to put anything up here. I’m preparing a few new items for E7P, but in the meantime, here’s a taster of what’s (hopefully) in the pipeline:

• I’ve noticed that Flickr seems to have quite a few photos along the lines of “What’s in your (netbook/gadget) bag?”, so there’ll probably be a post along those lines in the next couple of weeks or so.
• On that subject, I recently bought a Belkin 7″ padded netbook bag, and I hope to post a review of this coming up soon.
• One of my main birthday presents this year was a 500Gb Freecom portable USB hard drive, and I’m already putting together a post about how I’ve prepared it for use with my 701 (this may well come first in the queue ).
• I’ve been tinkering around with the Fluxbox desktop I installed on my 701 a few weeks back, including creating a couple of new “styles” (desktop themes), so look out for a feature on this in the not-so-distant future.
• Finally: I am hoping to find the time to make some more videos for this blog, and depending on how these go, I am thinking of starting a videoblog here devoted to the Eee 701. This would be a lot of work, so I think I would “start small”, and go from there.

Sorry: must dash, but thanks for watching, and there will be more here soon…

Gaming on the Eee 701: a first look

It seems to be a question that gets asked about most portable computing devices at some stage: can you play games on it?

Considering that the Eee 701, at first glance, could be said to look a bit like an overgrown Nintendo DS (OK, that’s stretching the point a little ), one might well ask how well-suited “the original netbook” is to the odd game or two.

I’ve been experimenting with running various types of gaming software on my Linux-powered 701, and the qualified answer is “well, it depends on what game(s) you have in mind”! However, speaking for myself, I’ve found the machine well-capable of delivering the kind of gaming performance I want, although as you’ll see below, my tastes tend towards the ‘retro-gaming’ side of the spectrum.

So, let’s start scratching the surface with a few examples…

Doom and Doom II

If you still have a registered or commercial copy of one of these mid-1990s classics gathering dust somewhere, why not give them a second lease of life on your Eee? No, you don’t have to find a way of running the original DOS programs (you can if you really want to, but it means compiling the DOSBox emulator from source!). Just install one of the open-source Doom engines (PrBoom is my choice—it’s in the Xandros repositories), and load up the WAD (levels) file(s) from your full version(s) of the game.

PrBoom runs perfectly on my 701, at a very respectable framerate. For some reason, I’ve only been able to get it to run Doom II so far (it doesn’t seem to recognise my Ultimate Doom WAD), but I’m sure I’ll get that worked out in time).

Quake

I’ve had less success to date with the follow-up to Doom—there doesn’t seem to be a Quake engine in the Xandros repos (and please be clear here: I mean the original Quake, not II or III), and so far the only advice I’ve found is to install manually a Debian package of GLQuake, which might work if there’s an ‘e’ in the day

Please leave a comment here if you know how to get Quake running on the Linux Eee—I’m all ears!

Armagetron Advanced

A favourite with Linux gamers for some years, Armagetron Advanced is a 3D-rendered recreation of the “light-cycles” game from TRON (I said I was a keen “retro gamer”, didn’t I?). This too is in the Xandros repositories, and I’m pleased to report that it runs like a dream on the Eee—full-screen at the native 800×480 (WVGA) resolution, with a framerate usually hovering around 55-60fps.

XMahjongg

XMahjongg on the 701

An old favourite on X11/UNIX systems going back to the late 1980s, XMahjongg (a rendition of the classic Mahjongg Solitaire game) runs nicely on the Eee, except for the minor niggle that the window is just a little too tall for the screen (see screenshot), and the playing area doesn’t resize when you shrink the window. It doesn’t spoil the game, however, which if you’re not bothered by its somewhat 1990s appearance (I’m not!), makes for a good way to pass some time if you feel the need to.

So, gaming on the Eee is a very broad ‘field’—there’s a reason why “Linux Gaming” is a dedicated section on the EeeUser forum!—but I hope this gives you an idea of how the Eee 701 can be put to use as a games machine, as long as you don’t insist on XBox 360-type titles.

(I’m planning to return to this topic in future—it’s my intention to write one or more follow-up posts, and I’m thinking of making a video to demonstrate some games running on the Eee. If you have any 701 gaming-related questions or topics you’d like me to cover, please feel free to leave a comment below, and if appropriate I’ll try and include them in future “outputs”.)

My first Eee screencast

Following up my earlier post about recording a VNC session to a screencast, I’m pleased to have a first attempt to show you:

This is a basic ‘tour’ of my 701’s desktop, which is now running the Fluxbox window manager. The movie is mostly a test to see if the ’setup’ would work—in future, I’ll ’script’ the thing before I make it!—but I reckon I can use this method for other ‘proper’ screencasts.

To capture the Eee desktop, I ran the “krfb” desktop-sharing app on the 701, which uses the VNC protocol to allow remote access to the Eee’s display. The actual capturing was done using ScreenToaster, a fine example of how advanced Web-based applications have become at the end of the 2000s.

ScreenToaster allows you to record a commentary using any microphone on your computer, and apparently it can even use your webcam if you have one, though I have yet to test that. As long as you have a computer with Java and a reasonable amount of CPU power, I think ScreenToaster does the job as well as (and possibly better than) your typical lower-range shareware screen-capture program, and is worth a look if you need to capture a screencast.

Ironically, one advertised ScreenToaster feature which I was hoping to use—the ability to record the output of a VNC session—didn’t work for me at all (it tried to overlay the 800×480 VNC display over our iMac’s 1600×1250 (?) screen, and capture that). Therefore, to make this screencast, I had to bring up the Eee’s VNC display on the Mac, and tell ScreenToaster to capture the part of the Mac’s desktop which was showing the VNC display. A bit of a “hack” (and this may have been why there are two mouse pointers sometimes!), but at least it worked!

Finally, I exported the movie from ScreenToaster as a QuickTime (MOV) file, and did some editing in iMovie 08, as well as adding captions, the “Digital Ramyun” opening and closing titles, credits, etc.

So, perhaps this isn’t the most thrilling viewing (OK, it isn’t ), but as a “proof of concept” I think it does the job…

Having fun with Fluxbox

I’ve been trying out an old Linux favourite of mine from a few years back on my 701: the Fluxbox window manager. I gained some experience with Fluxbox from experimenting with the DSL “lightweight” live Linux CD, and there’s a lot about the window manager that I like—in fact, I’ve never really forgiven DSL for dumping Fluxbox for a rival which somehow manages to make even fvwm95 look classy (but I’ll stop there in case I get flamed ).

Fluxbox is a fast, lightweight window manager for X11, with a “minimalist” look which I think lends itself well to small displays and lower-powered PCs—both of which may give you an idea why I’m trying it on my 701 It’s not difficult to add to the “stock” Xandros OS; these instructions for installing Fluxbox on the Eee were enough for me, though my experience with DSL a few years ago did help dispel any “culture-shock”.

Fluxbox on Eee 701 - basic view

The screenshot on this page gives you an idea of how Fluxbox looks “out of the box” (as it were). In this picture, the desktop is very “minimalist”, if not plain; however, if you like your “eye candy”, Fluxbox can cater for it with some setting-up, which I’ve yet to do.

Hopefully, you can see that Fluxbox doesn’t follow the all-conquering “MS Windows-like” look as so many window managers for Linux seem to. Instead, Fluxbox appears more like GUIs such as NeXTSTEP and AfterStep, with features including a “right-click” command menu, virtual workspaces and a “dock” (known in Fluxbox lingo as the “slit”, into which small graphical applications can be inserted.

This screenshot shows the following:

• The “right-click menu” in its “default” (i.e. just activated) state. From here, you can launch applications, customise Fluxbox’s views and settings, shut down the system, and more.
• A system toolbar at the bottom of the screen. This one is set up to switch workspaces, show apps running in the workspace, display various “tray” utilities, and show the time. However, you can customise the contents, and create another bar at the top or side, as you wish.
• A uxterm (terminal app). I have set up one of Fluxbox’s features—”grouping” of application windows—so that all uxterm windows will be “tabbed” in the same window frame (though this is not visible here).
• GKrellM (graphical system monitor)—this is loaded into the “slit” in the top-right, and displays various items of system information, including CPU load, disk and network usage, and uptime. (In case you wondered, the “water-and-rubber-duck” image is a GKrellM “plugin”, based on the “dockapp” WMBubble—it displays CPU load, free memory and network traffic.)

I have only just started to explore third-party themes for Fluxbox—the one in the screenshot is from the set which comes with the program—but so far I think this window manager really suits the 701. It’s lean, fast, intuitive (well, it makes sense to me, anyway ), it gives the machine a new look, and so far, it “just works”.

I’ll post some more screenshots here if I get any good ones, but in the meantime, if you’re looking for something different to “hot-rod” your Linux Eee, you could do worse than take a look at Fluxbox.

Adobe AIR won’t fly

The “factory reset” of my 701 yesterday seems to have achieved the desired effect, and I’ve managed to reinstall many of the apps I wanted (thanks to apt-get, it took less than half an hour). Better to get it over with now, I thought, rather than soldier on a while longer and have to do it anyway with more hassle. Ho-hum.

However, to save me getting too carried away with success, I’ve encountered a boulder in the road to mobile computing perfection…

…which is, in a nutshell: the Adobe AIR runtime won’t install on the Eee 701.

Yes, I know, not the end of the world, but rather annoying all the same. This is a problem to me, almost entirely because it means I can’t then install TweetDeck, my favourite app for working with Twitter and Facebook.

I won’t touch on the Twitter/Eee 701 issue here, mainly because I want to return to it in a future E7P post. However, I was puzzling over why the AIR runtime wouldn’t install: despite my every effort, I just couldn’t get past a generic “failed/something went wrong/er, try contacting your administrator, yeah?” message.

Finally, I gave in and called for help at the EeeUser forum, where a kind passer-by patiently suggested that I might check the system requirements for AIR (and helpfully posted them to save me the trouble of hunting them down ).

Here’s the ‘nub’ of the matter: “officially”, the Eee 701 is too under-powered to install Adobe AIR, let alone run it.

Yes, I know the 701 is underclocked to 630MHz, and can be sped up to its “native” 900, but that’s not a step I’m willing to take quite yet (I mean, asbestos trousers aren’t as easy to come by as they once were). It means that I’m not going to be able to run TweetDeck, or most other multi-column Twitter clients, which inexplicably seem to be AIR-based these days.

So, for the time being, my search for a decent Twitter program continues. If you were thinking of getting AIR running on your 701, I just hope that this post saves you the trouble…

…unless, of course, you’ve found a way round it?

Back to square one

Well, congratulate me. I’ve only owned my Eee 701 for about one week, and already it looks like I’m going to have to perform my first “factory reset“.

It’s my own silly fault, of course. Whilst I’m quite familiar with the Linux concept of software package repositories—and that one should be careful not to mix the wrong ones together—it appears that this is more or less what I’ve just done on my 701. This basically means that I now have a bit of a jumble of software on the machine, meaning that some applications won’t now install because of “unmet dependencies”.

After some to-ing and fro-ing at the EeeUser forum, the best (least worst?) course of action sounds like reinstalling the system to its “factory default” and starting again. Obviously it’s a bit of a pain to have to do this, but the alternatives (basically, soldiering on with a mixed system) are no better, and at least I haven’t had much time to make many changes, so I figure I’m better off “biting the bullet” now while things are relatively new.

Thanks to all at the forum for their help (especially “BL00″), and next time I’ll make sure to follow the instructions more carefully…

Using a calendar with the Eee

One omission from the Eee 701’s otherwise pretty wide roster of applications, is a PIM (or if you prefer, calendar) program. (Update (2009/10/29): Actually, I discovered after I published this post, that this last (first?) statement is incorrect—the Eee’s Linux OS includes KDE’s suite of PIM apps, including KOrganizer and Kontact. Apologies for this, and to do penance I’ll try and take a look at these programs in a future post. But back to my original post…)

Whilst this is not entirely surprising given the machine’s original target audience (e.g. schoolchildren—don’t they need to be organised too? ), I’ve been looking into how best to use my 701 to help keep myself organised, and have a couple of ideas to share at this point.

There are two sides to this from my perspective:

• an Internet-hosted calendar, via a service such as Google or Ovi (both of which I use); and
• an “offline” calendar on the Eee itself, for when I’m away from an Internet connection.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: it is quite possible to access online calendars on the Eee via Firefox. Google Calendar works quite well this way, with the usual provisos of how much you can fit on an 800×480 screen.

I’d heard of Mozilla’s Sunbird project (basically, a standalone calendaring application), and this can be installed quite easily via apt-get. However, there is an easier option, in the shape of another Mozilla project: Lightning. This is an add-on for the Thunderbird e-mail application, and as Thunderbird comes pre-installed on the Linux Eee 701, there is no need to install a separate program via apt-get.

Thunderbird with reduced font size and Lightning

Moreover, Lightning gives you the features of Sunbird within Thunderbird, with the added benefit of integration between the e-mail and calendar facilities, so unless you have specific reasons to keep them separate, I’d be inclined at least to give Lightning a try if you want a PIM facility on your Eee.

As well as giving you a “local” calendar on your Eee, Lightning (and Sunbird) also offer CalDAV functionality, which means you can subscribe to calendar services on the Internet that have a CalDAV facility. You will need to check the service you use to find out whether it offers CalDAV; Google Calendar certainly does, so I will use them as the example here.

As Google has gone to the trouble of providing instructions for setting up Sunbird/Lightning with Google Calendar via CalDAV, I’ll just refer you to them if you need them Once you get this set up, you can then add, edit and delete calendar items on your Google Calendar from Thunderbird, as easily as if you were using GC via the Web (with the odd caveat, but I haven’t found those yet).

As with quite a few apps on the Eee 701, the small screen means that space is at a premium, and that affects Thunderbird and Lightning. The ever-handy Eee User Wiki has a page on how to “shrink” Thunderbird, and I thoroughly recommend it (just change the point size in the chrome CSS file to 8pt!); however, you may find that certain views look a bit less ’squashed’ than others. If I have any useful tips in that direction, I’ll be sure to let you know here.

In the meantime, if you want to use your Eee to help keep on top of your schedule, I hope this has given you a pointer or two to get you started.

Recording a VNC ’screencast’

Amongst the features I’m hoping to add to this blog, are ’screencasts’ (“desktop movies”, or “animated screenshots”) made with my Eee 701, to demonstrate how to perform certain actions, show off applications, and so on.

I’m looking at various ways to achieve this, and the method I’d prefer is to run a VNC server on the Eee (probably using the “krfb” screen-sharing app, which I understand is based on VNC), then connect to this from our Mac and record the output, if possible adding an audio commentary as I go along.

However, I’m writing this post mainly to ask: does anyone know of a Mac application which can record screencast movies from a remote VNC session, and do so with a nice easy-to-use GUI?

I’ve searched quite extensively for such an app, and to date have only found two which come even close. The first is vnc2flv, a cross-platform program which can capture a VNC session to an FLV (Flash movie) file. This program is available for Linux and Mac, and comes with a script which can combine the movie-recording with a simultaneous audio track.

Whilst vnc2flv would certainly do the job (and may have to), it’s console- instead of GUI-based, and looks as if it could become quite fiddly, particularly if using the script to record an audio commentary simultaneously. As a result, I wondered if there was a more “polished” Mac application with the same features (and hopefully more).

The only other candidate I’ve found so far is ScreenToaster, a screencasting app which can capture output from a VNC session. I’ve yet to try it, but apparently it runs on Macs, it can record the output of a VNC session, and it’s free.

What’s not to like? I don’t know yet, but on the face of things: it’s Java-based; the movies are Web-hosted, so I don’t yet know if/how easily I can export them; and I have to see if it can work within a home LAN.

I’ll come back here and post further details when I have them, but ScreenToaster could turn out the most “polished” screencasting/VNC solution I’ve encountered… or perhaps the only one!

(Updated 27/10/2009, to reflect the fact that I found ScreenToaster as I was writing the article, but didn’t update the earlier section of vnc2flv to reflect this. Oops.)

Using an S60 phone as a modem with a Linux Eee 701

One of the first features I wanted to set up on my Eee, was the ability to use my mobile phone (a Nokia N95) as a modem, as a backup in case there’s no WiFi or Ethernet connection available.

I’ve found a couple of guides on the Web for how to set up a Linux-running Eee for this, but have found that they didn’t quite work “out of the box”. The closest I found was these instructions on the EeeUser forum; what follows is heavily based on these tips, but with a couple of changes and clarifications based on what worked (or not) for me.

This guide assumes the following:

• Your Eee is the Linux version, running the “stock” Eee/Xandros OS. It doesn’t matter if you’re using “Easy” or “Advanced” (KDE) mode, though I’m still running mostly in “Easy Mode” with the big icons (I plan to ditch these soon and just run the IceWM window manager, but that’s for later.)
• You have an S60-based phone (mine is a Nokia N95, but other S60 3rd Edition phones, and possibly S60 5th Edition ones like the Nokia 5800 and N97, should work the same).
• You have a data package with your mobile network provider, and the SIM card in your phone is set up accordingly. If you already use the Internet on your phone, you should be fine. (Some network providers don’t like you using your phone as a modem unless you upgrade to a higher-level—and usually higher-priced—data package, so check your contract’s terms and conditions to see if this is the case.)
• This method involves a USB (cable) connection between your Eee and your phone. Apparently, it’s possible to do this over Bluetooth if you have a USB Bluetooth dongle plugged in and configured, but I haven’t got round to this yet—if/when I do, I’ll post back here with how it goes (or not).

The steps to take are as follows:

1. Connect your Eee to your phone using the USB cable. Assuming that the phone then displays the “what connection mode” list, choose “PC Suite”. Keep the phone connected and powered up throughout the following steps.
2. Bring up the “Network Connections” utility:
   • In Easy Mode, choose the “Internet” tab, then the “Network” icon (not “Wireless Networks”).
   • In Advanced Mode, there’s a Network icon in the “tasktray” at the bottom of the screen, where you bring up the menu and select “Configure Network Connections”.
   • Alternatively, if there’s no icon in sight, fire up a Terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T) and enter “sudo kcontrol &” to bring up the KDE Control Center (sic), and select “Network/Network Connections”.
3. Select the “Create” button.
4. Choose “Dial-up” as the connection type.
5. On the “Select Hardware” screen, you should see your phone listed as “/dev/ttyACM0″. If it’s not there, check the cable connection and the phone (is it switched on (!), in “PC Suite” mode, etc.). Select the phone from the list, and then the “Next” button.
6. Enter “#99*” as the dialup number (this is standard for GPRS/3G “modem” dialup connections), and a single space as the username/password.
7. Complete the wizard process, and don’t opt to auto-connect on boot, or connect straight away (we’re not ready yet).
8. You now need to edit two files as per the EEEUser forum post, so go on over there and follow steps 5 and 6 (Note particularly the part about your phone’s data access point, as this depends on the network you’re using. If you can’t find this on your phone, you’ll need to do a Web search for your network “APN”; it shouldn’t take you long to find, but please don’t ask me!)
9. Once you’ve saved and closed these two files, return to the “Network Connections” utility, highlight the new connection you’ve just set up, and select “Connection/Connect…”.
10. If all goes well, you’ll see a dialogue box appear, reading “Initializing modem…”. (In my experience, this stage can take some time (20-30 seconds or so), so please be patient.)
11. When connection is completed, the dialogue box will disappear and the connections utility will show that you are connected to the Internet via your phone.

(I must make it very clear once again that 95% of the hard work here was done by “Buxton” at the EeeUser Forum, and I have only added to his efforts above where I found my experience differed from the post, and where I felt some points needed making more clearly.)

A point or two to make from my testing so far:

• Be aware that unless your phone can access a 3G or 3.5G data network where you are, you’re going to find that Web pages, etc. load rather more slowly than they would via a home LAN/WLAN connection. If you only have GPRS or (worse) GSM data to call on, you’re about to get a history lesson in what the Web was like to access in the mid-1990s (i.e. at 56K modem speeds), except that the Web has become a whole lot more “bloated” in that time…
• Watch your data consumption, especially if you’re on a tight data limit with your network provider, and definitely if you’re roaming abroad. In fact, to be careful, I’d recommend you just don’t do the latter at all, unless you are very careful and know exactly what you’re doing, or else you could be hit with a heart attack-inducing bill when you come home!
• If you can access WiFi where you are, I’d do that instead…

However, this is a handy backup option to have if you and your Eee find yourselves out of reach of an access point. Hope this is useful, and if I get this working over Bluetooth in future, I’ll let you know.