Alternative browsers on the EEEPC 900

After the release of Linux version of Google Chrome browser I've, at last, decided to give a try to a couple of browsers alternative to Mozilla Firefox: Google Chrome and Opera, in order to see how they work on the EEEPC 900.

Download and installation

Both browsers are available for download as “.deb” files so installation process has been quite smooth and easy. I downloaded both installation files from the respective sites and installed them using the dpkg command (of course they can also be installed by double-clicking on the install files if you don't like using the command line interface).

I so installed Opera with the following command:

sudo dpkg --install opera_10.11.4791.gcc4.qt3_i386.deb

The installation program notified a missing dependency on libqt3-mt, I installed it using apt-get command:

sudo apt-get install libqt3-mt

And Opera installation process completed successfully.

In similar way I installed Google Chrome with the following command:

sudo dpkg --install google-chrome-stable_current_i386.deb

This time the installation process completed without errors.

Xubuntu 10.4 on Sempron 2400 (full install)

The third and last act of the upgrade season is the desktop computer (Sempron 2400) upgrade. Unfortunately, because my recent switch from Ubuntu to Xubuntu I suppose, I cannot proceed with a regular upgrade. The upgrade process stops after the sources gathering phase with this message.

I so decided to go for a plain install in order to, eventually, have a much cleaner system.

Before installing

Before installation I only had to back-up my home folder since all data I have are kept in the home folder or in NTFS partitions that will remain untouched by the installation process.

I then downloaded Xubuntu install disk image from its download page and prepared a boot disk on a 1GB USB disk using Ubuntu's boot disk creator.

Upgraded the EEEPC 900 to Ubuntu 10.4 (NBR)

The big upgrade season has, at last, arrived. The first computer I decided to upgrade to the freshly arrived Ubuntu distribution is the EEEPC 900.

Night-time upgrade process

Tuesday night, the 29^th, I noticed the “New release available” button displayed in Ubuntu update manager. I so decided to start the upgrade process and to go to sleep also because the download process was promising to be quite long (it did take about two hours at last).

Upgraded the PIII550 to Ubuntu Server 10.4

The upgrade season continues: after upgrading the EEEPC 900 I decided to upgrade the little headless server (PIII at 550MHz) I keep mainly as Torrentflux server and for server-side experimenting.

Upgrade process (a little troublesome)

I started the upgrade process, as suggested in this Ubuntu page:

sudo do-release-upgrade --devel-release

The upgrade program informed me that I was upgrading from a SSH session and, once I confirmed, it started with the download of new files (quite a smaller download than standard Ubuntu). Unfortunately I had the bad idea of continue working on my desktop computer (Sempron 2400) and I managed, at last, to have my desktop system locked and the SSH connection, with the upgrading process, lost. (Definitively memory intensive processes like panorama stitching aren't a good Idea while waiting for some important task to complete). As second error I did not use the GNU Screen utility to start upgrade process so I had no mean to recover the lost session. At last I did let the upgrade process to continue until I realized, checking it with the “ps” command, that it was clearly waiting for an user input. At this point I had no option but to restart the computer.

After the computer restarted I launched again the “do-release-upgrade” command (I used the screen command before this time) and the upgrade process resumed exactly from point it was arrived before. I cannot guarantee that you can stop and restart the upgrade process from any point but fortunately it worked from me. The upgrade process continued, with e lot of replace-or-keep-old-file user input requests until it arrived to the final restart and I had, eventually, my little server fully upgraded and working.

Conclusions

The second upgrade has been successful even if with some problems (my fault not Ubuntu's) just one thing: if you are running some important task over an SSH connection never ever forget using the screen utility before.

Sharing hardware projects with Fritzing

As I started with my first experiments with the, recently bought, Arduino board (I'm mainly reproducing examples provided with development software) I've also started looking for a good program for sharing circuit schematics. There are many Linux programs to draw circuit schematics, I played a little with KiCad for example, but usually these programs aren't suited for producing images to be shared on the net. This is not surprising if you think that usually a circuit CAD program is required to produce high quality output for printing (or plotting) of very complex hardware projects while my requirements were quite the opposite. What I was looking for was a program to easily produce low quality images of very simple circuits.

Fritzing

Fritzing is a open source tool specifically aimed to the documentation, sharing and teaching of electronic projects. I downloaded the Linux 32 Bit version from the download page and extracted it in "/opt/" folder:

sudo mv fritzing.2010.04.16.linux.i386.tar.bz2 /opt/

sudo tar xvjf fritzing.2010.04.16.linux.i386.tar.bz2

then I started it by executing the "Fritzing.sh" script