Running Ubuntu
I now have my Asus Eee running Ubuntu, there are loads of “how to” pages on how to install it, but this was the best one I found.
Setting up the wireless was a little fiddlier than I’d hoped, the instructions to get it running include a ‘wget’ call , so you need to be connected to the internet to download the packages. I plugged into my wired network, but couldn’t get any connection and it took me quite a while to realise that I needed to have the ethernet cable plugged in to my machine when it starts up, in order to have a network connection. All worked fine after that! I assume there must be a way to get it to recognise a network cable being plugged in after it’s already booted, but I’ve not found out how to do it yet.
Getting Skype and the webcam working was easy enough too, though to get the webcam working (rather than just a black image!) an extra step was needed to the instructions above – that was to set the BIOS option OS installation from started to finished.
Google Gears is now installed fine too, though again I needed a little tweak… by installing libstdc++ 5 before trying to install Google Gears.
My final task was to get Apache, MySQL and PHP running. I thought this would be the most tricky part, especially after my experiences getting them all running together on Windows, where it all just seemed very fiddly. But in fact, it turned out to be one of the easiest parts of getting my system set up. I used these instructions, and installed each of the components (apache2, php5-mysql, libapache2-mod-php5, mysql-server) separately. On Gutsy Gibbon Ubuntu, I couldn’t get it to install LAMP using tasksel, hence why I needed to install them separately.
