alex August 19th, 2008
A few days ago I ordered myself this external USB powered CD/DVD for taking away with me so at least I’ll be able to watch films (and backup my data!) on my Asus Eee.
It arrived earlier today and I’ve just been having a play (if you can play with a DVD drive!), all appears to be working fine so far- I was unsure that the USB ports would have enough power for the drive, but fortunately they do 
The only slight problem I’ve found is that when playing a film I can’t get to the main menu screen for the DVD, so I can’t change the language/subtitles or get to the ‘extras’. Though I suspect this may be more to do with the Totem Movie Player than the drive itself - if anyone knows any different, or has a way around this, then please let me know!
Until then I’ll only be able to watch ‘The Bunker’ in directors commentary mode and ‘Shaun of the Dead’ dubbed in Russian.
alex June 22nd, 2008
I’ve just spent a frustrating couple of hours unsuccessfully attempting to get my Asus Eee (running Ubuntu Hardy Heron) to allow me to record short videos using the built in webcam and mic.
I started off by applying these fixes and have checked that it all works fine using skype. I first tried recording using ‘Cheese’ - this resulted in the video working fine - but no sound ( I also tried with plugged in mic/headphones). So I installed ucview and gave that a go instead, but his was quite erratic too, most of the time it would appear to record, but then on playback, only the first frame would be visible, and no sound (using either built in mic or a plugged in mic). I also found that sometimes ucview wouldn’t stop recording even after I’d clicked the button and I had a to kill the process to get it to stop.
I then went back to looking at cheese only to find that it now won’t start, the top window bar appears, but with big grey square underneath - no menus or webcam preview. Restarting, removing and reinstalling all made no difference 
Really not sure what is causing these problems, from googling & reading wikis and blogs most other people seem to have got ucview and cheese working fine - so just me then If anyone has an idiots guide as to what to check then feel free to send on to me
I’ve been trying to get this working in the hope that when I go away to Ethiopia I’ll be able to record short video blogs to post up - but I may have to fall back to just using my digital camera and the video/sound recorder on that, but would’ve been nice to be able to use the webcam and mic.
On a different note, I hope that Ubuntu updates will soon include FireFox3…
alex May 6th, 2008
A few days ago I mentioned that I was having problems with playing BBC iPlayer programs on my Asus Eee. I was also having problems with _some_ other Flash content - though not all.
Turns out that I’d installed the wrong version of the Flash plugin - actually I’d installed more than one and the conflicts were creating the same problems as if the plugins hadn’t been installed at all. Howver the instructions in the forum posting fixed me up.
alex April 27th, 2008
I’ve updated my Asus Eee from Ubuntu 7.10 to the latest release (8.04), though I didn’t strictly speaking upgrade, it was more of a reinstall. I’d intended to upgrade using Ubuntu’s update manager, but when I tried this I got a message to say that I didn’t have enough disk space, needed 1.3Gb, but I’d only got about 1Gb free. In the process of freeing up some space by removing packages, I think I removed too much, as I couldn’t even get the login screen to appear. So anyway, I ended up just doing a reinstall. All went fine, though I needed to look up a couple of bits to get the wireless working.
My only little niggle with Ubuntu 8.04 is that it’s got Firefox 3 Beta 5, rather than the current stable version of Firefox, this causes a bit of an issue for me because it means I can’t install Google Gears or the del.icio.us plugin, neither of which work with Firefox 3 yet - I assume they’ll soon get them working when v3 is fully released (don’t know when this is due - maybe summer, but hopefully soon). Having been playing with Firefox addons the other day, I think I may be able to hack the del.icio.us plugin to make it work, but don’t think I’ll be able to do the same for Google Gears.
Another unresolved issue I have is that I can’t seem to view any BBC iPlayer programmes. Flash appears to be installed fine and works for other sites, but when I try to play any programmes I just get the message “Something went wrong. There seems to be a problem playing this video. Please try again. undefined” But I haven’t yet figured out where this problem is. [Update, I now have this resolved]
alex April 17th, 2008
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.
alex April 15th, 2008
The Asus Eee I ordered a few weeks ago has finally arrived. I’m beginning to have a bit of a play with it, though the first thing I really want to do to night is to update to Ubuntu. I’m not too experienced in Linux, but there seems to be plenty of help and forums to help me out.