*WARNING* Modifing your Eee will invalidate your warranty and can be destructive if not performed correctly, it is also addictive!

Now my shiny Eee is running Ubuntu nice and smoothly, it was time to invalidate the warranty and add some funky goodies in the shape of extra storage and bluetooth.

The 701 conveniently has some space next to the memory slot, and this is a great place to hide the newly added gadgets.
A quick trip to tesco's procured the necessary hardware

• 8gb usb pen drive
• bluetooth adapter
• 4 port usb hub

Asus EEEPC Networking problem

We seem to have a steady stream of Asus eeePC lately most with Linux Xandros as a base operating system, the problem this time revolved around the failure of the eeePC to communicate via an encrypted network. In the main most wireless network routers are capable of between two or three levels of network encryption across the wireless access point.

These range from :

• None (No network encryption)
• WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy)
• WAP (Wireless Application Protocol)

Howto install Firefox3 with the Asus EeePC

Brian came to (SoSLUG one of our regulars), us last week with two possible methods for the installation of Firefox3, we thought we would try them out for the benefit of the many of our members that have one. You might be wondering why you should want to upgrade from firefox2 to firefox3, both look identical however firefox3 is a little faster than it's older cousin however it's most interesting feature is it's ability to page zoom, simply by using the "Ctrl +" and "Ctrl -" this allows you view any given page to your screen.

Sound for Linux using ASUS P5W DW

After trying many tutorials scattered around the web with no luck, the problem was discussed at one of our regular SOSLUG meetings, and found that the Dell Inspirion 1521 shares a similar audio chipset that requires the Intel HD driver to function. The following is taken from the Dell 1521 page.

You need to blacklist the "snd-hda-intel" kernel module from being loaded automatically by appending it to /etc/hotplug/blacklist
Reboot.

Dell 1521

(Recently updated bottom of page)

If you want to install Ubuntu for this machine type we recommend you install the Hardy Heron, the 64Bit version is still a bit basic and lacks advanced features offered in the 32Bit version, however we still recommend you install the suggested packages where possible as suggested below just remember to change 64bit for 32bit packages as necessary.

Dell Inspiron 1521 laptop Specification

• 15.4" LCD Wide Screen
• AMD 64bit x2
• 80 Gig Hard Disk
• 2048 Mb Ram