timothy's Journal: A trickle of bits on the Eee 1000HA

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.)