Updated: Might I suggest trying TweakEEE, a program written by myself, to do almost everything these ‘how to’ guides incorporate. Latest Version (0.4)

Before you start please realize this guide is sort of a continuation of my first guide you can find here ‘HOWTO: Ultimate EEEPC Setup‘. Some of the steps in this guide require the additional repositories that I used in my first guide.

Anyways, it hasn’t been too long since I released my first eeepc howto tutorial and I received a lot of positive feedback. However some people mentioned it wasn’t 100% complete and I agree. I had to leave some stuff out or didn’t include it because of incompleteness. However I have been browsing around and collecting a list of excellent additions to my first eeepc howto tutorial. **DISCLAIMER** I would just like to state that I’m not responsible for anything that happens to your eeepc from steps within this tutorial**, however if you follow this guide well I can almost guarantee that it will work perfectly fine, in the worst case scenario you would just have to restore to factory defaults.
Again I would also like to thank everybody over at Eeeuser.com. A great community with excellent documentation on the wiki and forums. If you don’t have an account there I highly recommend that you make a forum account and introduce yourself. A lot of my steps originated from forum/wiki posts there and I try to reference them all below. If I missed anything please toss me an e-mail marf@[thiswebsitedomain].org and let me know where credit is due.

Table of Contents

• Computer Name
• Easy Mode Editor
• Change Default Dictionary Language
• Installing a new Dictionary/Thesaurus and more
• Google Earth
• X-session File Error
• Easy Mode Cursor
• AsusLauncher Theme (Zinni Designs)
• Watching Commercial DVDs
• Downgrade MPlayer to play alot more files!
• Wireless Start on Boot

Computer name

Such a simple change, I’m surprised I missed it in the first howto. It’s not super important however unless your planning on sharing file on your eeepc, and accessing them from a windows machine. None the less it’s nice and easy to add. The wiki post here inspired this and they have alternate methods to change the computer name.

1. Open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + t)
2. sudo kwrite /etc/hostname
3. now change the first line to whatever you want, I changed mine to eee-marf
4. Close and save changes.

You will have to restart your eee-pc for the changes to be noticed.

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Easy Mode Editor

In my previous guide I showed users how to install Launch Tools by SublimePorte. Well since then AsusLauncher Advanced Editor (or Easy Mode Editor) has evolved quite a bit by a user named Coyote. I’ve chatted a bit with SublimePorte and he has decided to let Launch Tools RIP. He has some other great eee projects: 3egprs (forum topic), xp3esd(forum topic), and 3gmonitor (forum topic) (plus a surprise one in development ;)) and he said he will focus on them and let Coyote develop the Easy Mode Editor (Official Site). So to install this program run these commands.

1. Open a terminal
2. Enter this command wget http://www.infinitedesigns.org/eeepc/emeditor_0.5.5-0.i386.deb This downloads the Debian package file to your eeepc.
3. Now install the package with this command sudo dpkg -i emeditor_0.5.5-0.i386.deb And you can execute the package at any time with the command emeditor.

You can even add an icon for Emeditor once you execute it, just go to ‘Advanced > Import Icon > Easy Mode Editor’ and choose ok. Then ‘ File > Save ‘ and now when you reload the AsusLauncher you will see it in the Settings tab.

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Change Default Dictionary Language

I like the ability to have apps available offline. Lets face it we always don’t have internet and so dictionary.com isn’t always available. So the first time I fired up the ditionary that comes with eeepc I notice there is mandarin Chinese . So to changes this:

1. Go to the Work Tab and click on dictionary
2. Now click the wrench in the bottom right and in the first drop down click the first entry, similar to the picture below.

Once you click OK the changes are made immediately. Now the dictionary should be a bit more useful.

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Installing a new dictionary

The dictionary that comes with the eeepc is good but not great. This post at the eeeuser had some of the initial information for this section. Plus I often find when I’m writing I would like to use a thesaurus just as much if not more than a dictionary. So after a little searching around I came across the program called stardict. It is easily installed onto the eeepc and corresponding dictionary and thesaurus databases. You of course could link it to online dictionaries but I prefer to not rely 100% on the internet.

1. Open a terminal
2. Enter the command sudo apt-get install stardict-gtk and press yes to the prompt.
3. Now that stardict is installed you can execute it with the command ’stardict’ in console but there isn’t anything in the list. We have to add a dictionary and thesaurus. Go to the stardict dictionaries and get whatever dictionaries you want. I got ‘The Collaborative International Dictionary of English’ and ‘Moby Thesaurus II’. Download the tarball Versions.
4. So the Download should have taken a bit of time but once done we want to open a terminal.
5. Enter the command cd .stardict/dic/ If those directories don’t exist let me know in a comment and I’ll update this part
6. **UPDATE** Only perform if the previous step returned an error saying “directory doesn’t exist”** Enter this command mkdir -vp /home/user/.stardict/dic Now you must perform the previous step (cd .stardict/dic/)
7. Now enter the command tar -jxvf /home/user/stardict-dictd_www.dict.org_gcide-2.4.2.tar.bz2 and this comand tar -jxvf /home/user/stardict-dictd-moby-thesaurus-2.4.2.tar.bz2 Please remember if you downloaded yours to a different directory you might have to change the path for extraction.

Now fire up Stardict in the console by typing stardict… of course, and add an icon using the Launch Tools or the Easy Mode Editor I explained above.

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Google Earth

Not necessary to install, but cool to have. If your tight for space I’d leave this section out but if your feeling venturesome then read away! I’m using this eeeuser wiki post as a guide for this section.

1. Firstly visit the Google Earth download page and download the bin file. My downloads by default go to the ‘My Documents’ folder.
2. Now open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + t)
3. Then we need to make the bin executable, type in the command chmod +x My\ Documents/GoogleEarthLinux.binNow we’ve made the install file executable.
4. The next step is to execute the install file with the command sudo ./My\ Documents/GoogleEarthLinux.binA window will eventually popup that looks like so

   I chose the defaults and Clicked install. Once the install is done it asks you to Start Google Earth or Quit. We note that the install directory was /opt/google-earth, we will need this for a later step.

5. Enter this command wget http://www.infinitedesigns.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/googleea
rthspeedfix.zip I received this file from this wiki post at eeeuser and decided to host it here just to not use up any bandwidth from eeeuser. If you want more information about what is in this speed fix you can refer to the wiki post and it dissects the code somewhat if you are curious.
6. Now that your file is downloaded open a terminal if you don’t already have one opened from before, and enter the command cd /opt/google-earth and the enter the command sudo mv googleearth googleearth.bak We make a backup because the file we will be unzipping is overwriting the executable.
7. Next enter the command sudo unzip /home/user/My\ Documents/googleearthspeedfix.zipA prompt comes up asking if you want to replace googleearth and choose y for yes, because we already backed up the file.

Now we have this great program you can execute with googleearth. The first time it executes theres a warning dialog box, but that’s okay, don’t worry about it. There’s another box that pops up but I forget so I’ll let you figure that out. Now we want to adjust a few settings in google earth.

1. Navigate to ‘Tools > Options’. I made my settings as per the picture below for the 3D view.
   
2. Now navigate to the Cache tab. Make this relatively small. I was quite generous when I took the screen picture at 64MB, but now I Realize I should have made it smaller liek 32 or 16MB. It’s your choice
   

Now enjoy google earth. Always remember if the window ever falls off the screen and you can’t move it back with click and drag, hold down the Alt key and drag the window from clicking anywhere in it.

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Xsession-error File

It was brought to my attention in a comment from my previous howto that the X11 errors file in the default /home/user directory can get unusually large. Mine was nearing the 3mb mark and I’ve had this install of xandros for no more than a month. There is a discussion about this problem on the eeeuser forum. A user says that at minimum the fix is to change >> to > in the /etc/X11/Xsession file. You might be asking yourself what is this exactly doing? Well we are changing the bash file redirection settings. I’m not a linux expert but I like to get my hands dirty and from what I understand double >> will redirect the erroneous output to the error file specified, and if it already exists it will append to the file. I’m not really sure the file is so large and continuing to grow, so we can lessen this by changing the double >> into a single >. From what I understand this will direct the output to the file, and if the file exists, it overwrites it. If you want to know more about bash I/O redirection read this guide here. Now we want to change the appropriate line in our file.

1. Open a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+t)
2. Enter the command rm /home/user/.xsession-errors
3. Now edit the file that has the error output options by entering the command sudo kwrite /etc/X11/Xsession Then look for the following line, which is approximately line 94 in my file
   exec >>"$ERRFILE" 2>&1
   I changed my line to look like this exec >"$ERRFILE" 2>&1 I close kwrite and then save the changes.

Done, a small change but can save you some SSD space in the future. **Mini Update: After nearly finishing this tutorial I notice how large this file can get. It was nearly 500KB when my eeepc was only on for about 8 hours. Mind you I was probably doing alot more activity than average but it makes me realize how much space this can save in the longterm. **

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Easy mode Cursor

Lets be honest, the default on the eeepc does it no justice with aesthetics. There are a flurry of cursor themes over at www.kde-look.org. Thanks to the eeeuser community and this wiki post which gave me inspiration for this section. You can install the new cursor by following these instructions:

1. First head over to kde-look and grab a cursor theme. I chose the same one as the wiki had chosen. I downloaded mine into ‘My Documents’ directory.
2. Now open a terminal and enter the command mkdir .iconsand then navigate to that directory with the command cd .icons
3. Now we want to extract the tar file we just downloaded into the directory we are currently in with this command tar zxvf /home/user/My\ Documents/31480-lil-polar.tar.gz --exclude=lil-polar/Source/* The reason I put the exclude is because the source is included in the tar file and I don’t plan on changing anything so theres no need to waste space with those extra files (which turns out to be quite alot). After that we want to move the cursor directory to the default with this command mv lil-polar default now all you have to do is restart X (Ctrl + Alt + backspace)

Now you should have the nice looking little cursor. However I notice that if I click an icon, lets say Mplayer from the AsusLauncher, the icon changes back to the old loading icon temporarily while the program loads. I’m not sure if this is just the lil-polar theme being incomplete, but I’m willing to look beyond the small problem.

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AsusLauncher Theme (Zinni Designs)

I came across this a while back but never installed it until recently, and honestly, it’s actually very pleasing on the eyes. Assuming you didn’t choose to opt for my ThinBlack theme in the previous guide then you will benefit even more from this. Firstly I’d like to thank Zinni Designs for making these themes. The themes originated fro his old blog however he has stopped using the blogspot system and moved to wordpress, which he now hosts here. Unfortunately it looks like this project has died to him, and in which case it will forever be on beta 2. The actual theme page is here, however don’t download the themes from there, I don’t want to be a mooch to his bandwidth, I’ll host the file on my website and you can grab it with a command further below.

1. Enter the command wget http://www.infinitedesigns.org/eeepc/ZinniEeeSkinBeta02.zip
2. Now we will backup the original pictures incase you ever want to bring them back. First entermkdir .AsusLauncher.Backupthen entersudo cp /opt/xandros/share/Asuslauncher/* .AsusLauncher.Backup/
3. Now we will backup the AsusShutdownDialog mkdir .AsusShutdownDialog.Backup and then sudo cp /opt/xandros/share/AsusShutdownDialog/* .AsusShutdownDialog.Backup/
4. Now we navigate to the Asuslauncher directory. cd /opt/xandros/share/
5. Finally extract the zip file sudo unzip -o /home/user/ZinniEeeSkinBeta02.zip The -o flag overwrites any existing file that may be there.

Now you’re done. A simple restart of X (Ctrl + Alt + Backspace) and you can enjoy your new themes.

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Watching Commercial DVDs

If you find yourself wanting to watch DVD’s from an external DVD drive, you will need to install a library to allow mplayer to play them properly. This section was inspired from this wiki post from eeeuser. Now to enable this ability follow these instructions.

1. Open a terminal
2. Enter the command sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 Simply installing this library allows mplayer to play commercial DVD’s
3. Now one last thing can be done to improve playback performance. Go to the play tab, and open the Media Player. Then go to Options > Preferences. In the General section there will be a Video Output dropdown box, select xv and click OK.
   

Now if your ever travelling and want to play some DVDs from your collection on your eeepc… play away!

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Downgrade MPlayer to play alot more files!

Don’t ask me why the version of MPlayer that comes with the default Xandros install hardly has any codecs… it just does. But thankfully a previous version does, and downgrading is very simple. Thank the eeeuser community and this wiki post for providing all the goodies to unleash the media capabilities of the eeepc. This is contingent on you adding the extra Repositories which I walk through in my first guide. Now lets get started.

1. Open a terminal
2. Enter the command sudo apt-get install mplayer=1.0~rc1-12etch1 It will prompt you to install package, choose yes. **Ignore these next few lines if yours downloaded fine** Now if for some reason it couldn’t fine the package that means you didn’t add the repositories from my previous guide. No problem, head on over to here, which is an eeepc repos put together by some eeeuser community members with some useful packages, and luckily this mplayer package as well. You can add the repos quickly and easily with the commands they have listed on the homepage. Once it is added, you ‘wget’ the key and add it, then enter that command at the beginning of this step and voila!.
3. Now your MPlayer has been downgraded but it still doesn’t have 100% of the codecs. luckily there’s a shell script that connects to some online location and grabs some codecs. To activate this script (a one time thing) enter this comand sudo /usr/share/mplayer/scripts/binary_codecs.sh install It should download and install some file that is about 6 MB.
4. Now with the teriminal still open we are going to help improve mplayer playback a bit. Type in smplayer Now the program should be open. Choose Preferences by ‘Options > Preferences’ or ‘Ctrl - P’. Now go to the Performance option in the list and set the cache to enable and enter 9999. This way when streaming files over the network or a card, or even locally on the pc, if there are ever little hiccups with the streaming we have a suitable buffer so you should never get any choppyness (assuming your not playing 720p or 1080p files, that’s another whole issue).
   

Enjoy an “upgraded” media player.

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Wireless Start on Boot

If you use your eeepc at one location quite a bit and are tired of connecting to the network every time you boot it up, there is an easy way to enable connection on boot.

1. Go to the Internet tab in AsusLauncher. Click on the ‘Network’ button.
2. Now it should bring up a list of your network connection profiles, as well as your LAN. Select the profile you want it to auto boot and click the ‘Properties’ button.
3. Now a new window appears and at the bottom you notice a drop down list box labeled ‘Start mode:’ that currently has ‘Manual’ selected. Change this to ‘On Boot’ and click OK. OK the window after that and your done.

Now you can connect to your wireless like normal, or if you want to see it in action you can reboot your laptop and it should connect upon startup.

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There you have it, more great tools to help you unleash the power in your eeepc. I don’t want to say too much but I’m also working on an “easier” method than these two guides.
Enjoy!