Tag: 10.04

Setting up the EEE 1005PE

This post has been far too long in coming – mainly because some miscrent broke into my car and stole a bunch of my gear – including the charger for my 6 hour old ASUS EEE 1005PE. The replacment charger took over 40 days to source (that’s what you get for living in New Zealand).

Anyway, this georgous wee netbook replaced my vintage EEE 701 4G and came pre loaded with Windows 7 Starter – and a bunch of trialware which took an absolute age to purge from the drive. It’s now dual-booting Win7 and Ubuntu 10.04 (which is my primary OS of choice).

As a side note – under Ubuntu 10.04, the Atheros AR2427 wireless card fails to be detected due a different hardware device ID of 002c which the ath9k wifi driver in the current (~ June 2010) kernel does not understand. However, all is not lost – simply follow the HOWTO written by James Little to add the patched driver to your current kernal and, 5 minutes later, you’ll have a wireless Ubuntu netbook once again (Thanks James!!)

A PC for the Kids: Introduction

With my wife adopting a new notebook we’ve found ourselves with an additional, usable machine which we’ve earmarked for our boys use.

The unit in question is a rather dated IBM Thinkpad R51 which ran fine with Windows XP, but given that our boys are now of an age where they are being more inquisitive, I’ve decided that something a little more robust would better fit the bill than the aging Windows OS.

As a keen open source OS user myself, I’m planning to drop Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) onto the notebook and then lock down the configuration to allow the boys to experiment, but not break the environment.

So, looking at the task list ahead of me, I’ll be looking to run through the following:

  1. Install the OS (release date is 29/04/2010)
  2. Install and configure parental control on the boys user accounts
  3. Lock down the rest of the system on the boys accounts
  4. Let the boys at the notebook and observe what usability issues crop up
  5. Tweak

The next few articles getting posted to the blog will be following through this list so I’ll be making extensive use of search engines, forums and any other resources I can leverage to get the best info to make this happen as painlessly as possible. Suggestions in the comments please 🙂