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Two things I've noticed that bug me in my Eee running Ubuntu 8.10:

1) I know that "problems with hibernate and suspend" are long-time bugaboos, but for the most part suspend has seemed to work very well for me, surprisingly enough. However, I find that the machine "gets stuck" with the wireless networks that were last in play when it was closed; to get wireless working again (so that it seeks out the actually available networks), I find I must reboot the machine. This defeats much of the point of suspending rather than shutting down in the first place. (Not under all circumstances, I guess, but most of the time.)

2) This one's easier to deal with, and mostly just weird -- when I plug the AC adapter in to the running machine (on battery, that is), Evolution starts. Errr? I'm sure that Evolution is a fine product -- I used it occasionally, long ago, but right now I, personally, don't have any real use for it. It's easy enough to just close / quit, but this is a truly oddball behavior.

SKYPE:

I want my new Eee, portable as it is and with excellent wireless capabilities, to be my own Great Communicator, so if I'm traveling with it and need to contact someone, it should lots of options installed and ready to go. So, after x-many years of *not* using it, I decided to finally install Skype. The process was neither terrible nor perfect; here's how it went:

I installed the Skype app using directions found at Ubuntu:

1. Add the Skype repository*: deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free
2. Reload or update the package information
3. Install the skype package

Easy enough; that process worked well.

Signing up, though was a bit of a hassle; after a few unsuccessful attempts to claim a name (other people have evidently already thought all my clever thoughts), the app just seemed to hang; I could quit it, but I couldn't try any more names (the only working options: close the window, or clear all the fields). Even restarting the app led me to the same problem, so I couldn't even sign up for one of the ultra-generic, give-up-on-life names of the form I hate, like "timothylord38fjld8."

So, I downloaded Skype to my MacBook instead, and installed it there as well (in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess), and was able to successfully get a skype ID. It's boring, but at least not as bad as any of the provided suggestions. After this, I reopened it under Ubuntu on the Eee, and found all was as hoped -- I was able to sign it just fine.

However, when I tried to make a test call (Skype provides a special contact which is used just to verify a working connection), an error message system showed that I had a problem with my audio configuration. Fixing it took far fewer guesses than do most computer errors do for me, though.

Here's what I had to do:

• From Options (on Skype's main menu), select "Sound Devices" from the column on the left.
• For both "Sound In" and "Sound Out" of the list of options that "Sound Devices" brings up, select "HDA Intel (hw:intel,0)" rather than the default value, which was shown as "Default device (default)."

At this point, I was able to make a sucessful test call. The sound is a bit hollow -- not lost-in-a-Utah-canyon hollow, but certainly not the sort of sound that would make me think it was from a conventional landline in a country with indoor plumbing. Still, the important thing to me right now is that it works.

And it definitely works -- a few minutes ago, I reached my friend Brian, currently traveling in Korea on business, and was able to hear him very well.

Skype's business practices etc. I think are a minor annoyance, including that the software isn't open source. So I hope not to grow too attached. But I had an impressive experience with Skype last summer (I ought to describe it in better detail; had hoped I already had a journal entry about it to link to, but No), and I can imagine wishing I had the same thing available again.

PIDGIN:

Setting up pidgin to work with the company Jabber server is a bit of a pain. I went through a lot of googling and guessing to get it set up on my OLPC XO. Thinking I'd remember at least most of the right guesses, I was too lazy to go retrieve the XO today, and just started trying to configure it.

Generally, I use a MacBook Pro for working; the OS is not my favorite, and neither is it awful -- as an appliance for internet access (incl. email), word processing, and the occasional bit of shell manipulation, it's fine. And it's running (only) Mac OS X, version 10.5.2 as of now, and iChat for IM / Jabber communications. But the way iChat's preferences are set up, it's by no means obvious how to translate settings for entry into Pidgin's preferences.

• Username -- should be be long-form, or short form? (Turns out, short-form -- domain not required)
• Domain -- does that mean the Jabber server, or the rest of my "identity" as defined by my corporate email? The latter.
• Force old (port 5223) SSL? Errr ...
• "Resource"? I know to leave it as "Home" now -- but there's nothing intuitive about this, in case you were wondering.

I have it going now -- but annoying, and only slightly less annoying for remembering a few of the correct but non-obvious answers.

EKIGA:

I want to play more with Ekiga soon, but haven't yet except to use it as a way to make sure the camera was working :)

COMPIZ-FUSION:

Cool party trick (for certain people's idea of cool) -- last night, I hoped to check my email and post a few stories to Slashdot from a board-game party I visited, but found that there was no wireless network over which to do so. But people were interested in the tiny computer, and the spinning cube / wobbly windows got their attention.

(However, to be fair, the mind-mapping program View Your Mind was the thing that a few of the attendees were most interested in. Inkscape, too.)

Nutty dream, went like this:

I was friends with a girl on whom I had a slight and acknowledged crush, but on which neither of us had acted. She introduced me to a friend of hers, who was wildly attractive to me. (Both were slim, dark-haired, clever.) We met this friend at her house; my attempts to talk to her were interrupted each time by her father, who would (seemingly with no rancor or malice, just a poorly developed sense of social behavior) answer on her behalf any questions or comments I made to her. I really wanted to talk with her one-on-one, but the bumbling father, however smart and pleasant he seemed essentially to be, was making this pretty awkward.

Later, the four of us (tag-along dad, cute friend, and new cute acquaintance) decided to go see a local landmark. "Local" in this case means the usual dream-style creative geography; the landmark was a white, castle-like building built on a white-sand ocean beach nearby. So I guess this wasn't Utah, and it was too cool to be Texas. Whatever it was built for, the building was now abandoned, except for beach-goers and sightseers like us. I knew of this building, but in the scope of the dream I never got to see it in person.

Instead, the dream faded shortly before we reached the beach, but not before the car with all four of us passed a bus (going the same direction) carrying kids in what looked like a school musical group. The group specialized in playing the glockenspiel, and most of the kids had their instruments on their laps on the bus, but they were just riding, looking rather glum. (I saw the instruments and their expressions only because the perspective of the dream changed, so I had a view that panned along from inside the bus, as if from a camera panning slowly along the bus's aisle from front to rear.)

I was excited to see that they had glockenspiels (and I was glad to realize on waking that I had successfully identified them), so I started yelling through the car's open window (I was in the lefthand rear seat, while Annoying Dad drove) "Play! Play!" and pantoming the act of hitting the keys. A few of the kids saw me, and smiled, and did start playing while the car we were driving in slowly passed the bus. I kept yelling, and gesturing, and the message spread, until the whole band was actually playing together, making a beautiful sound.

(Then I was woken by a phone call, which helped solidify the details.)

On days that I start work early in the morning (esp. Tuesdays, in that most Mondays I enjoy some late-night bowling), I'll often take a nap in the late morning or early afternoon. Today's went longer than usual, and in the course of it, I dreamed that I was at a gathering that was populated mostly by physicists, for no reason that waking life makes sensible, but as usual in dreams, it made sense at the time.

I was wandering through the small convention center (or it could have been part of a college campus, or business park) where this gathering took place. I stepped into one room, where I saw a fairly famous female physicist, attractive and dressed in a blue skirt-suit, aiming a small compound bow -- not more than 2 feet tip-to-tip -- at a target perhaps 35 feet away; she loosed one arrow, then proceeded to nail the target with several impossibly fast followup shots, all of which were in the black (center) of the target, though none were dead-center bullseye hits.

There were 10 or more other people in the room standing near her when I entered, and I thought at first that she was demonstrating her shooting as part of a talk, or to settle a bet, but it turned out that that room was just a general archery range, because archery was one of the most commonly shared hobbies among the assembled. (She just happened to be especially good, and so people had stopped to admire her form.) After she emptied her quiver, a general policy of "don't hit anyone else" prevailed, and the air was full of arrows whizzing by much closer than would have made me happy, but it was impressive and fun at the same time.

The lines of fire were *generally* in one direction, but only generally, and besides some actual round and padded targets, a huge stretch of wall seemed to be in play; trying to keep completely out of the danger zone, I moved around the periphery, tried to stay behind most of the shooters, but it was like trying to avoid smoke at a campfire.

EDIT: I think I've got it working now!

I followed (with the exception of step 7, since I wasn't using ndiswrapper to start with) the directions outlined in a post here:

http://madwifi.org/ticket/1192#comment:306
(search for the post labeled 08/22/08 22:14:30 changed by anonymous)

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(Followup to https://slashdot.org/~timothy/journal/215391)

My Eee 1000HA arrived, sooner than I thought it would.

I'll try not to sound as frustrated as I actually am, when I get to the bits about wireless, because except for wireless, I think this is a very nice machine. Need to figure out how to make the volume a bit louder, though.

It arrived with Windows XP; after the usual annoying Windows setup routine full of non sequiturs, everything looked pretty nice, including wireless networking, to the network in the house (WPA) specifically. I started IE exactly one time, in order to download Firefox, and then was cruising happily around. Yay!

I'd already downloaded Ubuntu EEE (http://www.ubuntu-eee.com/), and transferred it to a USB drive, using the very helpful (but not perfectly intuitive) unetbootin utility.

I started it up, found that my wired connection worked, and optimistically went ahead and installed it, wiping out Windows XP. (Nice thing: the machine comes with a backup DVD that will at least restore the factory load, which is more than can be said for many full-sized laptops these days.)

Wireless was broken for me using Ubuntu Eee. Yes, it's supposed to work "out the box." It doesn't, for me, on this machine. And though it's apparently easy, I had no luck figuring out how to get rid (temporarily) of the Netbook remix interface -- even though it's a neat thing, I prefer a standardish Gnome desktop. So, since I wanted to try the new Ubuntu 8.10 RC anyhow, I downloaded that, and, again using unetbootin created another USB drive.

For this, too, most reports seem to be that Atheros wireless cards should Just Work with Intrepid on Eee, but not for me. (Wired connection, though, works great.) I've been following a trail of breadcrumbs after googling for things like "Eee 1000-HA intrepid wireless," and spent too much of today alternately doing useful tweaks to the UI (rearranging panels to my liking, etc) and completely useless attempts at making the wireless work, following various forum posters' advice to ...

- see what the restricted drivers configurator says (it says that there are no restricted drivers in place, and that the Atheros driver is activated but not in use. (How do I get it *in* use?!) Computer interfaces, always infuriating.

- use Wicd instead of the default network-manager (which it actually knocks off when installed, a bit frightening). Wicd looks quite nice! But it didn't pick up on my card.So, no dice.

- Use wifi-radar; wifi-radar says "no card detected."

- install madwifi drivers and reboot (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC/Fixes)

- install intrepid backports and reboot (ditto)

I have not yet tried to mess with ndiswrapper. I would prefer not to re-install an OS at this point; I have Ubuntu 8.10 looking a lot like I'd like it to, and I've tweaked Firefox a bit with my favorite extensions, and installed some of my usual favorite apps. (Inkscape, note, does not degrade well to 1024x600.)

[fuming]

I seem to be in the usual tail-chasing mode when it comes to computer difficulties -- what's "obvious" or "trivial" to someone who *already knows* the source of a given problem is neither obvious nor trivial to someone who doesn't. If I could remotely smack every maker of smug, pat, condescending retorts to other people's computer problems, my remote hands would get really, really sore.

("Well, did you at least re-install the previous version of X, then reboot, then change an obscure config file, then remove an app you have no idea exists and replace it with a patched version from a site you've never heard of, then remove the battery, then restart in safe mode? If not, how can you even begin to complain?" And Yes, some of the presented "solutions" to some other -- wired -- network problems with the Eee have involved disconnecting and reattaching the battery in addition to software changes.)