Monday saw the release of Easy Peasy 1.0, a version of Ubuntu 8.10 adapted for netbooks like the Asus EEE PC. I've just installed it onto my EEE, and am looking forward to using it. It is essentially similar to Ubuntu, but has some important differences: firstly all of the drivers needed for the EEE are included by default, meaning, amoungst other things, that the WiFi will work straight out of the box. The included software lineup is also slightly different too, Java, Flash and the media codecs are already included, but more significantly, it includes OpenOffice 3.0 (whereas Ubuntu 8.10 only includes OpenOffice 2.4 by default). This is really handy if you need to open documents sent by colleagues using the lastest version of Microsoft Office. It also includes Skype so you can ring up your friends for free and tell them how good it is, the new cutting edge Songbird music player from Mozilla and the Picassa photo editor from Google (a list of features can be found on the Ubuntu EEE Wiki. All of this is fronted by the Ubuntu Netboox Remix interface which does an excellent job at getting the most out of the limited screen space on netbooks.

If you own an Asus EEE PC or another machine running Ubuntu and a camera which is only supported under Video4Linux 2 (V4L2) you will have noticed that it not possible to get your camera to work under Flash. This will hopefully change soon, with V4L2 support in Flash 10. However, as Flash 10 is still a release candidate you might find that you still have problems when using a V4L2 camera. I've seen this on websites that switch the camera off and on again during one Flash session, this seems to not work very well. There is another way to get the camera working under Flash though, the Flashcam project which gets around the lack of support for V4L2 webcams by forwarding the output of the camera to a simulation of device that uses Video4Linux 1, which is supported under Flash 9.

A few days ago Lifehacker Australia carried a blog post where they said that they felt my method to get the Huawei E169G modem working on an EEE PC was a "tad fiddly". Well, they are probably right, so taking this as a challenge I've had a go at creating a package that will apply these steps automatically and make getting this modem up and running as simple as possible. This is one of my first attempts at packaging, so there might be some problems, however I've successfully tested that it works on both a Xandros and an Ubuntu powered EEE PC. The package is quite basic in what it does, so it may well work on some other Debian-based distributions too.

Having Flash 10 on your EEE PC opens up some interesting possibilities. One of these is the use of Seesmic, a website currently in beta that is designed to allow people to have conversations via video. The idea of this is that people can just use the built in webcam of their computer to record a short dialogue, this can be much quicker for somebody to do than composing a written comment and possibly could speed up the flow of a web-based discussion. The problem for EEE users is that this site just isn't designed for this type of machine. Hopefully the rise of netbooks means that we will see less and less sites being developed that do not work on them (that would be sensible after all) and let's hope that Seesmic will be able to correct this problem once they are out of beta. The way that the site is currently set up means that it is not possible to use it with an EEE. However, this is not the end of the story, open source has a habit of providing amazing flexibility, and we can put this to good use to make this site work for us. You mileage may vary with what is written here, but I have had seesmic working on an Ubuntu-powered EEE. If you get this to work with a standard EEE let me know.

It's been a long journey to get full Adobe Flash player functionality on Linux machines, but now it looks like that journey is drawing to a close. I've just been playing with a release candidate of Flash Player 10 on my Asus EEE PC and am very happy with the results. It looks like the built in camera will now work under Flash Player, thanks to the addition of support for the Video4Linux Version 2 camera API, which is great news if you use applications that make use of this functionality. The other very noticable change is that full screen video now appears to be working at the correct frame rate making it possible to enjoy full screen videos from such YouTube or BBC iPlayer without the choppiness caused by a slow frame rate. This turns the EEE into a great portable net media player (although be very careful using iPlayer and video sites with a mobile internet dongle or you may end up with a hefty bill!).

Back in December 2007 I installed SecondLife on a factory-standard Asus EEE PC to see if it would work or not, it did, even with just 512MB memory installed, but it was a little slow. So since adding a bit of extra power to my EEE by upgrading it to 2GB RAM and installing Ubuntu on it, I was curious to see how this might improve the experience. The SecondLife client has also been updated recently, the version I tested with is version 1.20.15.92456 which I downloaded directly from the SecondLife web site. The results were pleasing, the client was usable, the graphics more vibrant and details than before, as you can see from the picture, even with low graphic detail selected the detail was quite impressive.