mattw.fn_blog()

One of the things that I always fail to do before going to a conference and finding myself without Internet access is setting up a tether to my phone. Google is hosting djangocon, so lack of tubes hasn’t been a problem, but last night I remembered to go dig for a way to get Xandros eeepc talking to my T-Mobile blackberry curve over USB. It seems there are a few options out there for bluetooth, but I don’t have bluetooth built in, and when I’m mobile, I’d rather not use my battery even faster.

Strangely enough, for such a popular phone and computer pair, the options are pretty slim for USB tethering on linux. There is nothing out there that is pre-packaged, but if you don’t mind compiling a little code, you have 2 options. The first, who’s instructions I found on eeeuser forums actually required installing OpenMotif, which just seemed like a horrible idea to me, so I kept digging. After a bit more digging around, I stumbled upon Barry Backup, a tool that provides syncing, charging (you can’t charge off of USB without telling your ports it’s OK to push more power) and tethering / ppp for *most* blackberries.

To get it running on Xandros, you will need to have build tools installed, you can install quite a few of the dependencies with packages from the etch repos, but you’ll need to compile Barry itself. It is probably also worth noting that I couldn’t get the tarball to compile. Grab the Barry source, and you should be good to go.

Now that I’ve got an eeepc, I’ve been able to cut down the weight I carry every day without losing much functionality.  One thing that I have been missing however, is the ability to configure my Eye-Fi card for random networks that I come across.     I’m running the stock Linux, Xandros, and Eye-Fi doesn’t officially support anything other than Windows and OSX.   Fortunately,  Dave Hansen has released Eye-Fi Config on his EyeFi Linux Hacking blog.   It’s a simple command line tool that doesn’t help you with online service configs or local copy, but allows you to search for, add and delete WiFi networks from your linux machine.   It’s exactly what I needed.  Thanks Dave!

I’ve had my hands on an Eee PC 4G Surf for the past 24 hours or so (when I’ve been able to get it away from my son) and I have to say, I’m impressed. The eeeuser.com wiki has step-by-step instructions for pretty much anything you’d want to do, including Xandros tweaks, alternate OS installations and hardware hacks. So far, I’ve concentrated on getting the most screen real estate out of Xandros, and getting all my familiar tools installed. I’ve actually found typing pretty easy on it’s small keyboard, and the 7″ screen is really nice. Moving back and forth to my 15.4″ laptop is really weird now, and it feels like my Gateway is even bigger than I thought it was before (seriously. the thing is huge). My back already approves of the Asus.

I also got the Backtrack 3 Beta USB image booting off of a 1GB SD Card. I left my USB DVD drive at work, and following the instructions got me nowhere. Here’s what I did.

On my XP box:

Downloaded the HP Drive Key Boot Utility and formatted / made my 1G bootable.  For detailed instructions see this page.
Downloaded the BackTrack USB Image (946MB) and copied the rar file to the flash.

Removed the SD card and put it into the Eee PC

On the Eee PC:

Opened a terminal, and copied the rar file to a temporary directory on the SSD
Used unrar (included in xandros!) to unpack the rar onto the SD

The instructions failed me at this point by telling me to run bootinst.sh. lilo barfed, and finding out what was causing the problem seemed like it was going to take longer than I wanted. luckily I noticed the dos directory with loadlin.

Create an autoexec.bat with the following lines:

cd c:\boot\dos

BT3.bat

That’s it. reboot the box, hit esc when you get the bios screen, and choose the SD. Blam, you’re ready to inject packets and be a wireless pain in the butt. One cool thing about BackTrack (beyond it just being a good tool) is that Muts (one of the developers on BT) has an Eee PC, so you know any super irritating problems will get worked out by release.