So I’ve dedicated myself to the Acre Aspire One and it’s doing a great job.  One complaint was the horribly slow 16GB SSD drive that it came with.  It’s pitifully slow and loading a full blown Linux distro on it started showing its shortcomings.  Well this was solved by replacing the drive with a better performing RunCore based SSD drive.  Now the machine is quick and responsive.

I’ve loaded up Fedora 12 on the machine with “Desktop Effects” enabled, SELinux enforcing, and an encrypted hard drive via dm-crypt.  In truth, I notice no performance loss, it’s quick responsive and no stuttering.  Works great for Web Browsing, SSH sessions, and email.  That’s all I really need from a Netbook.  Oh and 5 hour battery life is no problem for this little 2.5lb machine.

Now there were some tricks and hoops involved (fixing the wireless card source, moving the updated kernel over with a USBkey, messing with a couple config files), but it wasn’t too bad.  Almost everything works, only thing not working yet is external displays, and that’s only because I haven’t gotten around to it.

Much happier now with a real firewall via IPTables, SELinux, and working English spell check!  Oh, and I went ahead and encrypted the file systems as well, why not.

Til I write my how-to, here are some useful links:

This thread contains most of the info you need:

http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=195429

The wireless driver:

http://www.ralinktech.com/ralink/Home/Support/Linux.html

The Fedora EeePC wiki:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EeePc

1. There is NO English spellchecking installed for StarOffice.  The install of StarOffice includes spellchecking for Polish but apparently not English.  I’ve checked all over and that’s it, no English spell checking and no easy way to add it yet.  This is a major problem for me, I’m a terrible speller.
2. The right shift key is too far to the right.  I’m a touch typist and key placement is important.  I’m used to having the right shift key and instead I hit the up arrow while typing.  I’ll probably solve this by remapping the shift key and the arrow key, but it’s a bad design.  Luckily it’s something I can work around, just annoying.

I really do need to find a solution to the spell check, or bite the bullet and do the Fedora install.

1. Shutdown Samba and Portmap – These services are on by default and there are known security issues with the version of Samba that comes with the EeePC.  Here is how to make sure they are stopped and don’t come back on.  Be warned, if you do this you will not be able to share files with others from your computer, though you can access files on other computers:
   • First start up a terminal window by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T
   • Next issue the following commands:
   • sudo invoke-rc.d samba stop
   • sudo update-rc.d -f samba remove
   • sudo update-rc.d samba stop 20 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 .
   • sudo invoke-rc.d portmap stop
   • sudo update-rc.d -f portmap remove
   • sudo update-rc.d portmap stop 20 0 1 2 3 4 5 6.
   • Next edit the services file using the following commands:
   • sudo vim /usr/sbin/services.sh
   • Press the “i” key to begin edit mode
   • find the line:
     start-stop-daemon –start –quiet –oknodo –exec /sbin/portmap
     and comment it out like:
     #start-stop-daemon –start –quiet –oknodo –exec /sbin/portmap
   • find the line:
     /usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d samba start
     and comment it out like:
     #/usr/sbin/invoke-rc.d samba start
   • Press the “ESC” key, then press the “:” key, then type “wq” followed by pressing the enter key
2. There is a webserver that runs on the EeePC any time you launch the anti-virus icon under settings.  It by default hides the content from the internet, but the webserver is still listening on the internet port.  To force the webserver to ONLY listen to your local machine (and not advertise to the rest of the world) do the following.
   • You need to edit the following file using the commands:
   • sudo vim /usr/lib/esets/webi/nginx/conf/nginx.conf
   • find the http {} section,  then the server {} section and
   • Press the “i” key to begin edit mode
   • change “listen 20032;” to “listen localhost:20032;”
   • Press the “ESC” key, then press the “:” key, then type “wq” followed by pressing the enter key
   • Reboot the computer as there is no clean way to stop the service.

Ok, so now the why part.

The EeePC (including my brand new one) ships with a old version of samba enabled to start on boot by default that has a known remote attack that can grant root priveleges.  That is VERY bad:

http://risesecurity.org/blog/entry/6/

Also the webserver that runs when you start up the anti-virus program on the EeePC is the legacy stable branch (one entire version behind current stable) and several revisions of that behind the current legacy stable revision:

http://nginx.net/CHANGES-0.5

The EeePc runs version 0.5.33 from November of 2007.  You’ll notice in the change log several fixed segfaults and other bugs, some of which could lead to security issues.  It’s best not to take chances and make sure it doesn’t report to non-localhost requests.

Go here to get the details.

I’ve finished getting all my travel arrangements together and looking forward to San Francisco (nothing against Vegas, but I love the local food in San Francisco!).

If you haven’t done it yet, and are still interested in joing the fun out in San Francisco here is a code to get 20% off registration for LinuxWorld packages: PRC20 It’s a “Friend’s of the Program Committee” Special.  Here’s the link to the show:

Last year I actually missed out on attending LinuxWorld as I was on baby watch (the little one was due any day around that time), but looking forward to making it this year!

You can find it here.

Here are the specs of my MythTV Box:

• Fedora Core 6 (may migrate to CentOS 5)
• AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800 CPU
• 2 GB DDR Ram (512MB x 4)
• 2x Seagate 400GB SATA 300 HD in Raid 1 (will migrate to Raid 0 soon)
• nVidia 6150 Chipset motherboard with built in HD scaling component video out
• MCE USB IR sensor
• Hauppauge PVR-500 Dual Analog Tuner (NTSC)
  
• Silicondust HDHomeRun Dual High Definition Tuner (ATSC/QAM)
• NMediaPC HTPC 200 Case
• Logitech Harmony 880 Remote (makes it all easy to run).

LiveTV and programmed listing recording works perfectly. I have about 360GB of space dedicated to Media storage. I’ve found that even Analog TV takes a lot of storage space (about 1GB per 30 minutes) to get good quality video that scales well to the 1920×1080i resolution I’m running on my HD TV. I’ll probably play with the analog recording settings more to try and find the optimal quality to still create nice images, but right now the picture of analog TV looks better through MythTV than it does with the TV’s built in Analog tuners. My only complaint is fast action shots show a little tearing/pixeling, but that’s more an artifact of 1080i than the MythTV. Wish the TV accepted 1080p or even 720p, but it’s an older Toshiba CRT HDTV that only does 1080i, 480p, and 480i. Still, the picture is beautiful!

LinuxWorld Expo San Francisco 2007