Asus Eee 1005 HA

Well, a few days ago when I bought a netbook from Asus, the eee105HA. In fact, it all started with a mixture of the death of my notebook combined with the desire to have something portable, allowing me to use in unscheduled hours of work, school, home visits from friends and so on. Finally, after reading several reviews on, I bought one!

Well, what? The screen features LED illumination of 10.1 inches, which means a good image quality and low consumption. The disk with 160 GB, 1 GB of RAM and the rest of that "basic kit" that all laptops have. Ah yes, a detail to be taken into consideration, that even been mentioned in all the reviews I read and it's worth to note, is the keyboard (very comfortable with a good space between the keys) and touchpad, also excellent. Ok ok, a failure is to have no LED to indicate that the caps lock is enabled, but ....

This version I bought came with Windows 7 Starter edition. The first impression I got was "ugh", but after searching on the limitations, I discovered that the only significant thing that could harm me is the fact of not being able to change the wallpaper, which is no big thing, but as I need a copy of Windows for some programs without corresponding Windows, I opted to leave it in a separate partition. Before you ask me, this limitation of classical Starter Editions to only allow three opening windows has been removed from Win7SE. Oh yeah, nice detail, the asus already makes the HD partitioned so that you can install another operating system without having to delete the partition (although among the resources of seven of them is to allow you to make thumbnailing of system partitions).

I then downloaded the Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 Karmic Koala . Burn the DVD, I generated the stick and then did the installation. After about 20 minutes the installation was complete. It was then just use the system and install the missing drivers, only ... oops! There was no missing driver! Yes, Ubuntu 9.10 installed and recognized ALL the devices in 1005 , including webcam, wireless, keyboard functions. Even my mini 3G modem he recognized immediately.

Well, that's it. If you are thinking of a good alternative to an effectively portable notebook, the 1005 is a great choice. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the battery it lasts more than 5 hours! That's right! Perfect for college, where there is not always an outlet nearby

A little more security on your Ubuntu

It is known that the Linux operating systems are the safest. No virus epidemics, as in Windows, nor are there large security when browsing the Internet. So the only danger in a computer with Ubuntu, is leave it alone and unlocked.

So, I advise to use the program BlueProximity that detects via a Bluetooth-enabled device, usually a mobile phone, if you're away from your computer or not. So whenever you are absent, Ubuntu automatically locks.
And even more: When the user approaches the computer to unlock it back automatically, without writing a password. Note that both the computer and the phone must have bluetooth.

The basic operation is: Ubuntu connects to the device and with the signal, detects the distance that this device is, according to the settings chosen by the user or not it blocks at that distance.
In addition it can block other processes, among which there is the possibility of sending signals to other programs. This is quite important, since this functionality is possible through, for example, change the status on Messenger, or even the music player. This matter will be dealt with later.
This program is not in the official Ubuntu repositories, so installation requires you to visit this site and download the file. deb, then just take two clicks on the file to install and is ready to use.

Tools for the Terminal

1. cmus
cmus music player music player is a very powerful and equipped with nice amenities. It 'made with ncurses and this provides a text interface. cmus is richly endowed with many visual mode and the ability to report on Last.fm. Supports the commands you type and auto with the Tab key on how to use cmus A Guide is available here (in English). Homepage

2. Finch
Finch is available with Pidgin, the popular IM client. Finch offers the same features as Pidgin, offers just that through the terminal using ncurses. Supports IM protocols such as Yahoo, Google Talk, XMPP (Facebook), WLM (Windows Live Messenger) and others. Homepage

3. htop
htop is an interactive process viewer that uses ncurses. It allows scrolling to view the processes in place and can use color and graphics. A real gem for a Linux user. Homepage

4. irssi
A client IRC (Internet Relay Chat) with a very powerful ncurses based interface, implements the multi-server, can be expanded with Perl scripts, supports themes, DCC chat and all other amenities of the IRC server. Homepage

5. mc
Midnight Commander is the famous double-pane file manager for the Linux terminal, also based on ncurses and equipped with many amenities. Homepage

6. lynx
Lynx is a popular web browser for the terminal. Supports protocols such as HTTP, FTP or Gopher.  Homepage

7. gzip
gzip is a command line tool to compress and decompress files. All files ending with a. Tar.gz is archived with tar and compressed with gzip.  Homepage

8. bzip2
Similar to gzip, bzip2 is a data compressor that requires a lot of time to compress and decompress files, but provides a more efficient compression algorithm that produces smaller files.  Homepage

9. aaxine
aaxine is a video player for console based multimedia player xine-lib , which uses ASCII characters for aoutput video. Ubuntu comes with the package xine-console . Homepage Big Buck Bunny

10. aview
The tool supports the display of images as ASCII art. Supports the following formats, which can be in the form of binary code or ASCII text: PNM, PGM, PBM, PPM . It also supports video formats like FLI and FLC.  Homepage

11. mencoder
mencoder is a powerful encoder / decoder Video included in MPlayer and can convert between various video files. Homepage

12. ffmpeg
Using libavcodec, ffmpeg is another powerful tool for encoding / decoding, recording and stream video files.  Homepage

13. convert
Included in the ImageMagick convert is a tool that can convert between image formats and can apply various effects to images or change some aspects, such as resizing, cropping, blurring, and more. convert is also used on web servers for image processing.  Homepage

14. moc
moc (music on console) is another music player based on ncurses, to the terminal which plays formats such as Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV or WMA. It also supports themes and research files.  Homepage

Bond, High Availability Network Server on Ubuntu 7.10

High network availability is vital for any self-respecting corporate server. Some time ago it came as sometimes seen as a taboo, due to some complexities regarding its installation and configuration on Linux, but today it is seen as just another item to be seen.

Although Ubuntu does not bring any assistant or other graphical tool to allow such service, the setup is extremely simple.

In the example, I'm working on common DELL PowerEdge 2950 server with two plates Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet, seen as eth0 and eth1. The distribution is Ubuntu Server 7.10.

The first step is to insert the Ubuntu 7.10 CD in the CD and run the following command:

# Aptitude install ifenslave-2.6

Once that's done you need to edit the file / etc/modprobe.d/arch/i386 by inserting the following lines:

alias bond0 bonding 
options bond0 mode = 6 = 100 miimon

Where miimon will be the time in milliseconds, mode will be the way it is done the bond, which can be:

Mode 0: balance-rr
mode 1: Failover
Mode 2: balance-xor
Mode 3: Link Aggregation
Mode 4: Transmit Load Balance
Mode 5: Load Balance

Also in options you can enter the option primary = eth0 or eth1 = primary , so choose which interface will be the primary, of course depending on the chosen mode.

Then you must edit the file / etc / network / interfaces , commenting on all lines except the lines of:

it auto eth0 eth1 
inet loopback iface it

For then the same file, include:

self bon0 
iface bond0 inet static 
address 10.1.162.6 
netmask 
255.255.240.0 
gateway 10.1.160.1 up / sbin / ifenslave bond0 eth0 eth1 down / sbin / ifenslave-d bond0 eth0 eth1

Once that's done you should reboot your system to verify everything as planned.