Pete Baker’s Blog

I have a new toy. Yes, after wandering into tax-free Dixons at Gatwick Airport, I had a mess around with the demo version of one of these things, and decided to buy one on the spot. It’s the 4G version – the one with the 4GB solid state drive. (specs) Yes, impulse buy. Yes, I was weak. But hey, it was my birthday, and it came at a tax-free price of 210 quid!! An ultra-quiet, ultra light sub-notebook for 210 quid! That’s not really an impulse buy now, is it? It’s just common sense!

What amazes me about this thing is how easy it has been to configure it up to pretty much a Linux development system – C compilers, GTK, the works! OK, it already comes installed with a pretty comprehensive flavour of Xandros Linux, but with some tweaking you can add pretty much anything to it. The 4GB drive is a little restrictive (especially as the existing Xandros Distro takes up almost 3 of those 4 Gigs), but I set myself a goal of getting the following bits of software on it:

1. The GNU C compiler (for hacking whilst on the move)
2. sqlite (Simple, portable, fast development database)
3. Truecrypt (Cross platform file and whole-device based encryption)
4. The Gimp Image editor (For editing holiday snaps)
5. ssh server (Remote access)
6. Some pen testing tools – nmap & Metasploit to start off with. (Nice to have this in such a small device)

Unfortunately, the extra software available through the Asus apt sources is a bit limited…. I wanted to point the thing to a fully fledged distro, and get all my compilers, libraries, games and other crap! After a bit of searching, I can across this very useful little wiki called eeeuser, which has a lot of useful howtos and faqs:

Eee User Wiki

So, pointing your Eee at some ‘proper’ apt sources…

Adding additional software repositories.

To make space for all this new software, however, you have to remove the unionfs filesystem, otherwise any updated libraries will not overwrite the old ones., causing your disk to fill up with newer copies of the existing base system. Removing UnionFS has the side effect of removing the ability to recover your system from a bad update… but that’s not really much of a problem if you are careful what you install. Details here:

Removing unionfs

From that point on, installing all of the software listed above was a breeze, just select it all with aptitude package manager, and away you go. Installing Truecrypt involved downloading the source code and compiling everything – but again that was completely painless.

All in all it’s a wicked bit of kit, a nice balance of power, portability, cost and flexibility. It functions perfectly well as a web browser, development machine, email reader, document editor, PDA, MP3 player, video player, image editor and even games machine (if your sensible in your choice of games, that is ).

One more thing… make sure you patch your samba daemon! Unless you fancy taking your chances of not being rooted the next time you connect it to a public WiFi access point, that is….

RISE Security versus Eee PC

ASUS Eee PC rooted out of the box

The virus like spread of social networking sites has led to an all too familiar real world situation for me – I’m registered with multiple sites, but have completely different groups of friends on each. It’s all getting a bit cliqeuy! You end up in the same conversation every day ‘are you on Facebook? Nah mate I use Livejournal, can’t be bothered to register with anything else.’ … ‘how about Flickr? What’s the point, I’m on Myspace!’ How am I supposed to look popular when my friends are distributed across hundreds of different sites? As my mate Ed has just said to me ‘at the rate it is growing there will be one social network site per person’.

To be completely honest, I really just can’t be arsed.

However, I do think it would be nice if I could use my main blog to post once, and cross post to both my Livejournal and Facebook accounts. I’m not going to bother with Myspace, because synesthasically speaking, it looks like tramps wee on a train smells.

Facebook already allows you to import posts via an RSS feed, which is nice. However, Livejournal does not, so I have had to use the LiveJournal Crossposter from Evan Broder, which pushes Wordpress posts up onto your Livejournal account. Finally, I have also installed Adam Hill’s rather funky Facebook Comments plugin, which periodically imports comments from your Facebook back into your Wordpress blog. I’ll bet I get loads of spam.

Crossposting to Flickr is a bit pointless – unless someone knows of some amazing Wordpress plugin that can convert your blog posting to a photographic representation. For this post, I’m guessing it would just be a picture of me breaking down and crying.

I’ll bet none of this works. Social networking sucks! Go down the pub and meet people for real!
Anyway… here goes… pressing the publish button.

Finally got round to starting a blog. Hopefully I can be more motivated to post stuff here than I could with my Joomla site!