This Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC) has the potential to make a big impact for learners. It costs about £200 for the 2GB version and £230 for the 4GB, so is pretty affordable. It’s light at about 1kg and has a nicely readable 7″ screen and a usable mini-keyboard; with a touchpad mouse that has a useful scroll facility down the right. It comes with 3 USB and one Ethernet port and an SDHC (high capacity) slot, has a discrete webcam top-centre, two speakers, and mic/headphone jacks. This is a ‘big’ bundle for the price.
The eeePC is shipped with a flavour of Linux called Xandros, which keeps the price down, though you can install Windows XP (instructions are provided in the supplied user manual) or other versions of Linux like Ubantu. However, there could be problems with using Windows XP because of the number of writes it make to the hard disk – solid state disks are succeptable to greater wear.
But with only 4GB, which translate to 1.4GB free with the OS installed there isn’t much room for installing software. However, this is the beauty of this device from my perspective. It’s aimed squarely at utilizing the potential of Web 2.0 with useful software like Skype (though you might want to upgrade the version to the available beta with video capability), icons to Google Docs, and more.
You can change settings in XP to reduce writes, but I decided to stay with Xandros.
At home on my wireless network with WPA security, the eeePC connected straight away and worked without any problem. At uni with WPA2 on Eduroam this wasn’t the case. The OS on the eeePC doesn’t have the required code to handle WPA2 so I had to find out how to install the code myself.
That’s when I found the forums on EeeUser.com the ‘Unofficial ASUS Eee PC EeePC 701 Blog Forum Wiki Community’
After a few searches I found http://wiki.eeeuser.com/wpa_default_xandros
This told me how to setup the required wpa_supplicant file, but first I needed to know how to ‘Add Additional Software Repositories‘.
Finally, I needed to write a wpa_supplicant.conf file that worked with Eduroam. Eventually I worked out that what I needed was:
ctrl_interface=var/tmp/wpa_supplicant
network={
ssid=”eduroam”
key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
proto=WPA
pairwise=TKIP
eap=PEAP
phase2=”auth=MSCHAPV2″
identity=”username”
password=”password”
}
This file was then saved as /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf_MINE
If you copy and paste these lines to create you wpa_supplicant.conf file, you need to edit the speech marks (ie delete and then put them in again) or it won’t work.
These instructions works for the 900 (tested by a colleague) as well as the 701.
The 901 onwards has a change in hardware. I’ve tried the following and it works.
You need to change the line in your /etc/network/interfaces file
from:
up cp /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf_MINE /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf.ath0
to:
up cp /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf_MINE /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf.ra0
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