Meanwhile, in the Hackintosh area, the 1201N has finally gotten it's own official thread over at Insanely Mac- 209533. There is now a bit more information up front about the state of OSX on the 1201N. Not much changes, no networking at all unless you swap out the WiFi PCie card.

1. Dual monitors (using the VGA out)
Issue: Connecting a monitor or projector to the VGA is a PITA. The Nvidia Control panel detects it, but cannot enable it without re-writing a new Xorg.conf file, which is owned by root, and so the new file must be written to /tmp and moved over, then X needs to be restart-ed. Even then, moving an open window into the 2nd screen won't always work, even though the screen is there and I can move the mouse into the window.

Aso, the GPU acceleration seems off when a 2nd screen is connected via VGA. I haven't tried the HDMI out yet.

[01/24/10] SOLVED: See my page on the wiki where I'm also tracking these issues and solutions.

2. Microphone not working
Issue: I installed Skype and it worked great w/ the video camera, however the microphone does not work, even though Skype detected it and claims that it is there.

3. Trackpad
Issues: Multiple issues
- trying to get multitouch to work - Fixed, logged and source.
- trying to turn it off when a mouse is present
- getting middle mouse button when emulating 3 buttons (the mouse button is a rocker, so clicking both is impossible)

Pros
- 4GB of RAM
- Plenty of disk space
- Smaller size

Cons
- No wifi after sleep, or sometimes after disconnecting from network
- Short Battery life
- Can run Omnigraffle
- Funky trackpad

The biggest issue with the Air is the the measly 80GB hard drive, it just isn't enough space. Upgrading it in this 1st gen Air is not financially feasible, as the HD costs as much as the 1201N itself. Not having Omnigraffle is forcing me to go back to the Mac for that one app. So far OpenOffice has been great at editing the various file I'm forced to deal with at work.

There is a spot for a 3G connector on the MB, but nothing is soldered onto the MB to accept a SIM chip.

1201N Motherboard top:

This is what you see after you remove the keyboard, unscrew the screws for the shield underneath the keyboard, unscrew the 4 screws at the bottom holding in the top of the case, and gently pry apart the top of the case all the way around the edge as it has little tiny legs on the top of the case that lock in with friction to the bottom of the case.

And a close up:

]]> http://dillernet.com/apple/2010/01/18/eee-pc-1201n-motherboard-photos/feed/ 0 http://dillernet.com/apple/2010/01/18/flash-10-1-beta2-plugin-for-chrome-browser-in-karmic/ http://dillernet.com/apple/2010/01/18/flash-10-1-beta2-plugin-for-chrome-browser-in-karmic/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 06:39:19 +0000 dillera http://dillernet.com/apple/2010/01/18/flash-10-1-beta2-plugin-for-chrome-browser-in-karmic/ So if you have the 1201N you really should have the Flash 10.1 Beta2 plugin, which supports the ION chip in your Netbook and plays back flash video content near flawlessly and with minimal CPU overhead.

After you download the flash beta, you extract it and run a simple installer from a shell that wants to know the lib dir of your browser. It won't recognize Chrome's installation dir (in /opt/google) and so it' won't install directly to Chrome, but you can install for Firefox first and just copy the player over to Chrome.

Running the Flash Player installer, it will ask:


Please enter the installation path of the Mozilla, Netscape,
or Opera browser (i.e., /usr/lib/mozilla):


For the Karmic Firefox 3.5.x you would use:

/usr/lib/firefox-3.5.7

and the installer will install the player into
/usr/lib/firefox-3.5.7/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Chrome

To get this to work in Google Chrome, you need to do a few manual steps.

First, copy the flashplayer from the FF installation into /opt/google/chrome/plugins (you may need to create the dir):


# mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins
# cp /usr/lib/firefox-3.5.7/plugins/libflashplayer.so /opt/google/chrome/plugins


Then you have to make sure the Nautilus Launcher launches Chrome while telling it to check for plugins:

[RIGHT-CLICK]Applications/Edit Menus
Select Internet/Chrome, click on the Properties button

add the text --enable-plugins between the chrome and the %U.

Now close eveything and then launch Chrome from the Applications/Internet/Chrome menu.

Here is Hulu:

And there you go, Flash with accelerated ION video in Chrome.

Source: HowtoForge

1. The Nvidia Control Panel in Karmic couldn't parse the xorg.conf file that was built by the Karmic installation process (and was working fine as best I could tell).

To resolve this, I had to run (as root) the nvidia-xconfig app which wrote out a more complete and parseable conf file for me. I had to logout and back in to restart xwindows (and now I see the Nvidia splash-screen)

Next, since I was running the Nvidia Control Panel as my user it wasn't able to write out the new xorg.conf file that it wanted to write (which had my 2nd monitor enabled and postitioned where I wanted it). Simply writing this file to /tmp and then moving it over via the shell worked. I had to logout and back in. But now my 2nd monitor worked! And I enabled Xinerama on this monitor.

Xinerama is an nice extention to have, it makes the extra monitors act like you'd expect them to coming from XP or a Macintosh- that is, you can freely drag and drop apps across monitors, and the multiple desktops spann the multiple monitors.

About Xinerama & Twinview

From Nvidia.com:

The NVIDIA Linux Driver supports GLX when Xinerama is enabled on similar GPUs. The Xinerama extension takes multiple physical X screens (possibly spanning multiple GPUs), and binds them into one logical X screen. This allows windows to be dragged between GPUs and to span across multiple GPUs. The NVIDIA driver supports hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering across all NVIDIA GPUs when Xinerama is enabled.

There is more info about Xinerama and Twinview at Phoronix.

The PAE kernel is working fine with the Nvidia ION drivers, suspend and hibernate.

I found more information about a wifi driver, and this post at the Asus forum has links to an actual Linux driver. Using this driver doen't require the NDISwrapper, but I have noticed that the wiki will not re-connect after suspend, which the NDISwrapped, Win2K driver did. However, I've been hibernating (due to the bad batter life on the 1201N) and the wifi works fine after a hibernate wake-up (which is decently fast, especially with BootBlaster for the BIOS).

The opening of the 1201N to replace the hard-drive is a bit more than just opening a panel in the bottom, but it's fairly easy, given you take your time in cracking all the little pressure-tabs which hold the top and bottom of the case together. The new HD and the extra ram are making Ubuntu much more responsive and snappy.

A nice GTK application for blogging is BloGTK. It's written in python and it's fast and a decent replacement for MarsEdit when not on my Mac (not that there are many choices for GTK blogging apps). The 2.0 release is available on LaunchPad, but it requires a few extra python packages to run on a fresh Karmic installation. I've outlined what you need to do below.

The BloGTK 2.0 tarball (itself a python package that needs to be installed as root) will install alright, but it won't run, instead you'll may this:


dillera@granite1201:~/Downloads/blogtk-2.0$ blogtk2
Xlib:  extension "RANDR" missing on display ":0.0".
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/blogtk2", line 6, in <module>
    from blogtk2 import main
  File "/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/__init__.py", line 35, in <module>
    from blogtk2.main import main
  File "/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/main.py", line 22, in <module>
    from gdata import service
ImportError: No module named gdata


• Grab BloGTK 2.o
• Grab Python GDATA
• Grab Python feedparser

In your shell, expand them, then as root run the installer....
unzip -d feedparser2 feedparser-4.1.zip
tar xvf gdata-2.0.6.tar.gz

then as root:
# python ./setup.py install
in both of the expanded directories

Finally you'll also need to have the python gtk-spell package installed. This is available in the repo.

# apt-get install python-gtkspell

Now you can run BloGTK.


dillera@granite1201:~$ blogtk2
Xlib:  extension "RANDR" missing on display ":0.0".
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/gdata/tlslite/utils/cryptomath.py:9:
DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead
  import sha
/usr/bin/../share/blogtk2/lib/blogtk2/main.py:63: Warning: g_set_prgname() called multiple times
  program = gnome.init('blogtk', '2.0')


Pros:

• It is very fast

Cons:

• There is no way to specify new formatting types, what is available is just Paragraphs, Blockquotes, unordered lists (and this cannot detect multiple lines of list items)
• There is no image uploading

Alternatives:

• ScribeFire - a nice blogging app that is Firefox Plugin (it does image uploading)

1. Setup Nvidia ION Drivers
2. Enable Multi-touch on Synaptics trackpad
3. Get Wifi Working
4. Add Terminal into Nautilus right-click menu
5. Desktop switching
6. Stop Update Manger
7. Tracking 1201N BIOS releases

So the link on the Launchpad discussion is here. Down load this, it contains the driver for the wifi and the commands to execute as root to install the NDISwrapper packages from the repos. I ran it, added ndiswrapper to /etc/modules so that it loaded on reboot and after the reboot the wifi worked right away and connected to my local WPA2 AP. It also works after resume.

The good news is that Ubuntu allowed me to install the Nvidia 185.18 driver right after boot (it detected the ION automatically) and this version is working with suspending. The better news is that wired ethernet worked out of the box!

I've since then found some easy directions to get wifi working (using the win2k drivers and NDISwrapper- I'll post this up soon).

I'm much happier with Ubuntu Karmic, and I'll be following up soon with some more detailed posts about what I've done with the 1201N.

Below is exactly what I did to my system to get this working. Do this as root.


# wget http://www.avenard.org/files/ubuntu-repos/ubuntu-repos.key && apt-key add ubuntu-repos.key && rm ubuntu-repos.key
# echo "deb http://www.avenard.org/files/ubuntu-repos jaunty release" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/avenard.list
# apt-get update
# apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.28-11-generic
# apt-get install nvidia-glx-195 nvidia-195-libvdpau
# nvidia-xconfig
# apt-get install vim
# vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf
-- [Change Mouse to /dev/input/mice]
# /etc/init.d/gdm stop
# rmmod nvidia
# modprobe nvidia
# echo nvidia >>/etc/modules
# /etc/init.d/gdm start


Reference Pages:

http://ptspts.blogspot.com/2009/08/asrock-ion-330-nettop-with-jaunty.html
http://www.avenard.com/media/Ubuntu_Repository/Ubuntu_Repository.html

Update: I also updated the BIOS of the 1201N to the latest version; downloaded from Asus website - you can grab it right here- 0318
- unzip the new bios
- stick it on a USB stick
- rename it from 1201N-ASUS-0318.ROM to 1201N.ROM on the USB stick
- put the USB stick in the 1201, remove all other USB devices

To update the bios- power off and hold ALT+F2 as you power on. The 1201N has 'bootblaster' which makes it difficult to do this (it will often just go right into grub), if you can't get the BIOS update utility to come up I suggest you get into the BIOS itself (F2) and then choose to disable Bootblaster then try the ALT+F2. The flash utility will load and read the usb stick and update the BIOS automatically, then restart the netbook.

With blastwave (CSW) you install pre-built binaries for your system as regular solaris packages. Removing them using pkgrm is a pain if you want to clear blastwave off completely and start fresh. However, there is a solution.

I found the command over at glaasse's blog:


# yes | pkgrm `pkginfo | grep CSW | awk '{print $2}'`


Does the trick, and you can sit back and watch it happen. Be careful using the yes command and pkrm however.