A couple weeks ago, prices on Asus Eee PC's dropped $50 to $100 at MSRP.  Yesterday, Asus dropped their prices AGAIN!

Below is a spreadsheet showing pricing for 901 and 1000 as of Monday:

Also, Asus will be releasing their 160GB 1000's on October 7th:

But that's ok.  I've learned from my mistakes, recovered using the recovery partition and now my 900 is better than ever.

It turns out that if you change your sources.list to retrieve packages from the 701 repository, you can't properly do updates that actually pertain to the 900.  My Eee was still running, but some how the file that stored my password got corrupted and I couldn't back in to remove or replace my login password.  So I've learned to change the repository listings back and forth accordingly by editing "/etc/apt/sources.list".  Since, I've added a start button to Easy Mode and have gotten a little more daring at editing configuration files.

Just a word of warning before you run out and buy a Linux based Eee PC:  You need to be willing to hack to get the PC just the way you want it.  And you also have to be willing to fail and learn from your mistakes.  If you don't think you'll have fun working with it, you should consider a regular notebook with Windows Vista. 

A friend of mine liked my Eee PC netbook so much, he bought one of his own.   Only he bought a 901 instead of a 900, which means he has an Atom processor as opposed to a Celeron and a high-gloss finish that attracts fingerprints.  He also went with 12GB of storage, comprised of a 4GB and 8GB SSD's, and Windows XP.

Well, Asus had this crazy idea to install XP on the 4GB SSD leaving the 8GB wide open.  I'm sure they have their reasons for this, but the fact of the matter is no matter how much registry hacking you do to move Program Files, move the swap file, move My Documents and try to remember to always save programs to D:, the C: drive still fills up pretty fast.  So he gave the netbook to me for the weekend to see if I could get XP installed on the 8GB.

First and foremost, you MUST have a PC already running Windows in order to do ANY kind of recovery on an Asus Eee PC.  If the Eee PC is the only PC in your possession.... how are you reading this Blog?

So what tools do we have available to us....  An Asus recovery DVD?

Well, I don't have a USB DVD drive.  I can take apart a hard drive enclosure and just use the IDE and power adapters from the insides and hook them up to a regular ol' DVD drive.  Optical drive or hard drive, an enclosure simply doesn't care.  It works either way.  Let's just say I don't have anything that converts IDE to USB, or anything I really want to take apart to get the job done.  Let's say all I have is a thumb drive.

How do I make a thumb drive bootable?  Here's what I did because I wanted to partition and format the drives from scratch (if you're not going to re-partition, scroll down):

The software of choice is actually Hewlett Packard's USB Disk Storage Format Tool.  Once you download and install this program on your one working PC that's not an Eee PC (ahem), run it and you'll get a small window that asks what device you want to make bootable (pick the USB thumb drive), what file system you want to use and what label you want to use on the volume.  Check the box for "Create a DOS startup disk", install a Windows boot floppy and point the application to the A: drive for the system files.

Wait... You don't have a Windows boot floppy?

That's ok.  Images of 9X OS rescue floppies are everywhere on the web.  I personally use a Windows 98SE image without the RAMDRIVE option.  Yes, a Windows ME floppy is "newer" than 98, but they got rid of the ability to format a drive and then transfer system files over to it with ME and you're going to need to be able to do that.

When the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool is done, you'll find that there are still no files on the USB drive.  That's because the HP software only copies over the boot sector, so you're going to want to drag and drop all of the stuff from the floppy to the USB drive.  Don't forget to have Windows show system and hidden files and feel free to edit the CDROM stuff out of the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT so it boots up faster.

Now we want our Windows setup files on the thumb drive.  Copy them over from the Asus recovery DVD?  Umm... no.  There's no way to run the install without booting off the DVD, so I used "any old" XP Home OEM (as opposed to retail) CD.  Besides, the Asus recovery DVD just puts everything back the way it was from the factory.  We don't want that.  We want XP on the 8GB SSD!  If you have a Dell, HP or eMachine or something that uses XP Home, you can use that same CD.  If you don't have an XP Home CD, Torrent one.  Is that breaking the law?  Come on.... I'm not asking you to use someone else's COA or anything.  You just need the media. 

Back on track... we want our Windows setup files on the thumb drive.  Just right click on the "I386" and "Send to REMOVABLE DISK (?:)" where "?" is the drive letter of your thumb drive. 

Since we're using an off the shelf XP Home, let's take this time to talk about enabling some of the features of Windows Professional.  I didn't have an extra (legal) XP Pro COA, did have an XP Home COA, but needed to join the PC to a domain.  I found this hack invaluable.  It worked like a charm.

Once that's done, you can plug the thumb drive into the Eee PC and fire it up.

Once you boot up in Windows 98SE via your thumb drive, you can run FDISK to remove old partitions from the two SSD's and make new ones. Make the 4GB drive active (you can't make the 8GB active because it's a slave.  If the SSD's in the Eee PC were SATA, you could do that, but they're not.  They're EIDE), reboot and the USB drive should change it's drive letter from C: to E:. Now you can do a "FORMAT C: /S", then "FORMAT D:" and your SSD's are now blank and bootable (well... at least the 4GB is bootable).

But wait!  You just partitioned these drives as FAT32 and XP works best on NTFS!

No big deal.  It's faster and easier to dig up a Win 9X boot disk and use the CONVERT command built into XP to convert the drives into NTFS then it would take for you to find a drive utility that could partition a drive as NTFS right off the bat. 

Copy HIMEM.SYS and SMARTDRV.EXE over to the C: drive and run EDIT from the thumb drive.  Type in "DEVICE="C:\HIMEM.SYS", hit "ALT+F" and the FILE menu should drop down.  Go down to "SAVE AS" and save this as "C:\CONFIG.SYS".  Now "ALT+F" and then "NEW" and type in the edit window, "C:\SMARTDRV.EXE".  "ALT+F", "SAVE AS" and save this one as "C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT".

Now we want to copy the "I386" folder over from the thumb drive to one of the SSD's (doesn't matter which one).  You can do this with XCOPY from your 98SE thumb drive, but I've found that working in a 32-bit environment is a lot faster. 

Here's how you run a 32-bit OS off a thumb drive and where you should start reading if you didn't want to re-partition the drives:

There's a great little program on the web called BartPE.  It's like Microsoft's WinPE except the Bart's is a GUI as opposed to Microsoft's text based program.  You'll need the Windows XP installation files from an original XP CD to create a BartPE boot image, but everything else you need is on the web (well.. I guess the XP CD is on the web too, but I digress) and linked in this forum post from the Bart Man himself.  Once you make your BartPE bootable thumb drive, copy the I386 folder from an XP CD over to the thumb drive.  Make sure it's a Windows XP CD with a "WINNT.EXE" in the "I386" folder.

Once in Bart's environment, you can use the file management tool to format the two SSD's and copy all of the "I386" files over from the thumb drive to one of the SSD's.  Pop out the thumb drive, boot off the SSD and change directories to the "I386" directory.  Run "WINNT.EXE" and off you go.

If you used the Windows 98SE floppy image to FDISK and format the SSD's, you're going to want to convert the drives over from FAT to NTFS.  During the first part of the XP installation, you'll be asked if you want to convert the partition you're installing on over to NTFS.  Answer yes and on the next reboot it'll do the conversion which takes about a minute.  Once you have XP up and running, you can do the other drive using the CONVERT.EXE program that comes with XP.  Just go to a command prompt and type "CONVERT ?: FS:NTFS" (Where "?" is your drive letter).  Keep an eye on the screen because it's going to tell you what the volume label is and then ask you to type it in to confirm you want to do the conversion.  If you're trying to convert the boot sector, CONVERT is going to tell you the drive is locked and has to reboot before it can do a conversion.  This is totally normal.

Since we're talking about Windows CD's and I386 and all, I figured I throw in a plug for Magic ISO.  This program lets you take ISO images and edit them before burning them to CD or, create a whole new ISO with your changes.  How is this relevant?  Well, when I hacked my XP Home to have XP Professional features using the aforementioned hack, I created a bootable ISO of that version of Windows for future re-installs.  I simply made an ISO image of my XP CD, opened it up in Magic ISO, grabbed the "I386" folder, edited the necessary files, saved, copied the files back over into the ISO and burned a new CD.  Keep in mind that the free version of Magic ISO only works up to 300MB of data, so if you have to burn a full CD or ISO image of a full CD, you'll need to pay for the software.  I'm telling you that IT'S WORTH IT.

MASSIVE EDIT!

In an effort to help people tweak their Eee PC netbook I was telling people how to define their own DL sources and pin dependencies and all of this shit based on experiences from my previous life as a Linux user when there wasn't a lot of cool apps and shit to get things working.... SCREW THAT!  I did all my shit manually, but then I found there's a shell script called pipmyeee that does everything I did but it's a HELL of a lot easier.

Go here and download pimpmyeee. 

Rename whatever the file is called (which is usually pimpmyeee.sh + whatever version) into something simple like "pimpmyeee.sh" (remove the version number).

Go to the folder you downloaded it into (/home/usr/, right?) and open a terminal window with CTRL+ALT+T.  Type "sh pimpmyeee.sh".

Choose the option to enable extra repositories.  This will give your EeePC more servers to download packages from.  Next, select "Enable Fill Desktop (KDE)".

Once that's all done, go to "shut down" using the icon on the task bar.  You'll notice now when you do this, there is a "Full Desktop" option: 

Click on this and you'll reboot into a standard KDE desktop:

I proceeded to remove the Mr. Potato Head and the Planetarium applications to free up some space.  I did this by going to "Launch", "Applications", "System" and then the "Synaptic Package Manager".  For those familiar with Redhat, this is just like RPM.  I also installed Armagetron while I was in the process.  When you're done with this KDE desktop, you can select "Easy Mode" from the Launch menu and get back to the Asus Launcher desktop.  Once there, if you installed any packages, you may not find icons for your newly installed packages.  You will need to know the shell command to execute the particular application.  For example:  I installed Armagetron and have to do a CTRL+ALT+T to open a terminal and then type "armagetron" to execute it.  That is.. until I figure out how to do custom icons and manipulate the Asus Launcher desktop.

One thing I did notice about "pimpmyeee" is that there's options to install "cool" themes.  I think the themes suck and there's no easy way to uninstall them.  So unless you already know how to uninstall the themes or edit them to your liking, I don't suggest "trying" these options.

Ok... Since I didn't know how well this whole "changing desktop images" think was going to work (and for anyone that's ever changed their startup and shutdown screens in Windows or edited a BIOS boot-up image in the past, you know how it can take a good deal of tweaking to get the image just right) I decided to just grab an image off the web, do some quick and dirty editing of it and copy it over to my USB flash drive.  For this, I decided to just do the login page for now and if it works I'll get to working on all of the different tabs for the different themes.

I started by going on the web and grabbing a desktop background image I liked.  I grabbed a 1024x768 even though my EeePC netbook screen is only 800x480 so I have plenty of pallet to work with:

Now, the login on the Asus EeePC is on the right, so I'm going to have to flip this image horizontally.  If I do this, "Linux" is going to be backwards.  I could just flip where Tux is at, but the gradient in the background makes that easier said than done, so I'm just going to crop the document and flip it and then save it to my USB flash.  The finished product looks like this:

The first thing you need to do to get this image copied over is go to the terminal with CTRL+ALT+T and give yourself Super User access.  You have to be Super User or you're not going to be able to copy files into the "AsusLauncher" directory.  You give yourself this Super User power by typing in "sudo su".  Now be careful when logged in as Super User.  You can completely destroy your install if you decide to get adventurous.

"/home/user/" is your default directory, so all you have to do now is "cd D:" and you're in your USB drive.  Do an "ls" and you should see your modified artwork or the directory that you saved it in.  Now just do that "cp" command to copy the files back over.  Since I've only done the login page so far, I'm just going to do "cp login_page.jpg /opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher".  For those die hard Unix/Linux/SCO/whatever fans:  Yes, I know I can put the full path in and copy whatever files over regardless of what directory I'm in, but I like being IN the directory I'm grabbing files from so I can do an "ls" and make sure I get the file name spelling right, file extension (JPG vs. JPEG), etc.

Type "exit" to exit Super User and "exit" again to close your terminal window and logout or reboot to see if the image took it's place.....

Ok.  I found shell by doing a "CTRL+ALT+T" (T for Terminal).  Once I was there I decided to look around for the desktop images because it seemed like all of my efforts for trying to change the background image were made in vein.  Even a simple "set as background image" did nothing more than store the file into "/home/user/".

I located a number of JPG files in "/opt/xandros/share/AsusLauncher": 

The first image here is the desktop background for the "Internet" tab when you have the "Blue" theme, which is also called "accessibility".  The second is for the "learn" tab while using the "Silver" or "business" theme.  The third is for the "play" tab while using the "Sunset" or "home" theme. 

The first image in this row is the desktop background for the "settings" tab while using the "Green" or "student" theme.  The second is for the "work" tab while, again, using the "Blue" theme.  The final image is the login screen.

So it looks like each theme relies on these particular files to be in this directory, with these particular names, to load up as desktop background images.  So it may be that the only way I can change the background right now is to change the images and re-save them with the same name.  I've begun the process by doing a "cp *.jpg /home/user/D:" which copies all of the JPEG's to the mounted USB drive.  Don't worry about mounting the USB drive.  The Asus EeePC mounts it and gives it a drive letter automatically. 

I would try editing the images in Tux Paint, but don't feel to comfortable with that right now. I'm going to stick with good ol' Fireworks for now until I get some more hours with the EeePC under my belt.  Speaking of hours under my belt, maybe I'll figure out how to hack the themes without having to reinstall Linux.

I know a lot of folks like to post the "unboxing" of their new gadgets.  But I was so anxious to bust into this new Asus EeePC netbook, I didn't even want to stop to find my camera.

The netbook I got is the "older" (launched a few months ago) 900 model.  There's now a 901 and 1000, both of which feature the new Intel Atom processor which is slower than my Celeron when it comes to raw CPU number crunching, but is smaller and more efficient, and an upgraded battery that lasts twice as long as mine.  Of course, these models cost more too.  The 1000 series also has a 10.1" LCD as opposed to my 8.9" screen.

There's a lot of netbooks on the market now from a lot of different companies.  I went with the Asus because I trust them as a brand and there's a lot of community hacking and modding already on the net.  To help with the selection process, I got the following matrix from a friend:

To give you an idea how small the Eee PC 900 is, I've set it on top of my regular Gateway laptop in the picture below:

Now, I know that's an unfair comparison because my Gateway is a full size productivity laptop with 17" wide-screen LCD.  It even has a separate number pad for God's sake (but that's cool because I can do ALT characters like the Ü in Über!)  But I think it does give you a pretty good idea of HOW SMALL this guy is.

So I'll be doing some mini-"reviews" here on the blog this weekend as I get to play with my new toy.  So far, my biggest complaint is the keyboard.  Now, I knew what I was getting into and fully expected the keys to be small and take some getting used to.  I'm actually not complaining about the SIZE of the keyboard as much as the layout.  Instead of hitting SHIFT, I keep hitting the UP arrow with my pinky.  And the number keys are all shifted over to the left one key due to the lack of tilde in the upper left.  Hopefully I will overcome this.

Just so you know, I opted for the version with Linux installed and the larger SSD(20GB)  as opposed to XP and the smaller SSD (16GB).  I must say I'm not disappointed.  The laptop came pre-installed with Skype, Pidgin (an IM client that works with MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM all at the same time),  Open Office 2.0 which allows me to view and create Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Powerpoint presentations, etc., a PDF reader, Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird... let's just say A WHOLE LOT of apps.  I won't need to be installing much more.  I just need to figure out how to get rid of the bulky Asus branded KDE theme they're using for a desktop.  It's fun for about five minutes and then it leaves die hard Linux fans screaming for a shell in about an hour's time.

Just an FYI, I'm going to post the first thing I figured out about using this thing... I think what I did wrong may be fairly common because when I asked someone at work to help me with network settings, he pretty much ended up doing the same thing I did.

When you see the desktop for the first time, you see the "Internet" tab and then the icon for "Wireless Networks".  So naturally, if you want to find a wireless network, you'll want to click on that icon. 

What I've found is if you type in the WEP key incorrectly or select WEP instead of WPA or some other mistake, you can't ever make another attempt to connect by clicking on this icon again without restarting the system.  It goes through the initial motions, but it seems to hang.  I also found that once you DO connect, when you reboot you'll have to enter your WEP or WPA key again to re-connect to the same network.

It turns out what you really want to do is click on "Network".  This give you A LOT more power and doesn't seem to "hang" if you fat finger your WEP (something that's easy to do on the EeePC).  You can also select for the connection to start "On Boot" and it remembers the WEP or WPA key.  That all said, now I have NO IDEA why there's even a "Wireless Networks" icon on the desktop.  It seems a bit redundant considering clicking on the "Network" icon gives you all the same information and a hell of a lot more power.