Asus eeePc
19 01 2008
Everyone I show my Asus to is really impressed. Teachers can see that it will fit into their daily flow, students all want one (not just to play Tux games). In a Year 9 sessions today we talked about how useful it would be to have one in lessons and how they could grab information from the web to support their learning. Again, this use raises the issue of “information literacy” in that they would need to be able to differentiate between good and bad information, and where they should be looking for information and how to acknowledge it. All of the class members thought that the outlay was justified.
After a night of no-sleep on Weds (working on a project for somebody) I was in no shape to try to get the Asus to talk to the WPA-TKIP network. Apparently it won’t do it with the native ndiswrapper package and it needs madwifi. I think I fell asleep trying to install it all, but anyway my patience wore thin (helped with the nagging conscience that I should be doing reports) and I left it for another day. But I’d scrambled the wireless settings for home… Not to worry, there’s an easy rollback to default settings on the Asus and I was home and dry again.
Getting software - once the Synaptic repository manager is set up, installing packages is a doddle as with any Linux distro these days. I installed Audacity for good measure (just to prove it could be done - Harvey had asked me recently if I could do it, and it was easy once I’d found how to install synaptic). My favourite so far is the advanced desktop tweak, which changes the look and feel to be a standard KDE desktop. I was intending to install Ubuntu on the machine instead of the factory default Xandros Linux, but I don’t think I’ll do it yet awhile considering that Ubuntu isn’t so hot on wifi at the best of times (so I understand - please tell me if I’m wrong, but it took a bit of fiddling to get ndiswrapper installed on the kids’ EdUbuntu machine at home so that I could move it out of the study.) The Xubuntu people are getting things solved daily though, so it’s only a matter of waiting.
As I said in a previous post - this little machine is really going to change things around here.
Thanks for bringing this innovative device to my attention Dale. It works great and is very easy to use. One snag I have found is that the wireless networking has been a bit tricky to set up. It’s on our school network now, but can’t connect to the internet - some error message about the ISP?? I’ll continue to have a play…
Great device though and a low cost way of achieving a 1:1 pupil to PC ratio.
Wireless is OK on WEP and WPA protocols, but on the WPA-TKIP it has problems. There are tweaks involving ndsiwrapper and possibly some othernetworking daemons - no doubt Asus will sort things out.
I got a new protective bag for mine. What a dilemma - do I go for a distinctive colour so that I won’t lose the Asus or a more businesslike black? Either way, the Tesco Value sandwich bag fits perfectly and I bought the pink one rather than the black. Cost me £2.00 rather than £1.30 though.
I’ve been experimenting with the full desktop mode, and with adding extra icons to easy mode - both work great. Will do a post one day soon about this.
Wyvern Business Systems are doing a great deal on these machines - they can personalise them too in an awesome kind of way. See them at the Shropshire ICT Conference on the 14th April.