Tag Archives: eeeBuntu

EEEBuntu wireless gotcha & connecting an Android by USB

A few misc. Ubuntu and Android notes today:

1) I said a couple days back that I’d write up some EEEbuntu gotchas that I had a whole barrel of laughs with over the weekend. This one had me reformatting my EEEPC, so I think it qualifies. In the USB stick install, there is a nice convenient wifi notification on the top/right portion of the screen. When you actually install the OS, however, this isn’t present. I’m not good enough at linux (apparently) to figure out how to launch that wifi app, so this left me without a way to connect wirelessly. I did some googling and it turns out that you need to Right-click the menu bar at the top, and navigate to ‘add a notification’ (I can’t recall the exact path and I couldn’t google up any guides). NOTE: At this point you MUST restart EEEbuntu. You won’t get any confirmation that you added your notification successfully, and it will not show up until you restart. This is all you have to do to fix the wifi. (I won’t tell the whole story, but the basic jist of my reformat is that I sat there and added about 8 notification areas without rebooting, and when I tried to delete them I blew up the whole top menu bar and couldn’t get it back…)

2) Preparing your Android development environment to include real-phone testing! (This one is pretty cool once you get it working)

Essentially, just follow this guide, however there are a few little tricks. First of all, if you’re doing it on Ubuntu, all of those steps may not make it ‘just work’. As for which of the two strings to put in your rules file, Dapper and Gusty/Hardy are older version of Ubuntu, but string that worked for me was: SUBSYSTEM==”usb_device”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0bb4″, MODE=”0666″

Secondly, keep in mind you’re going to need to use the sudo command before just about every command related to this setup. (For those of you who, like me, aren’t well versed in linux, this gives you ‘root’ priveleges to do administrative stuff. If you don’t include it, the terminal will complain that you don’t have the rights to do things like save your rules file). My third tip is to restart your udev, which I found on the anddev.org forums. Use: sudo /etc/init.d/udev reload. Finally, use adb kill-server before you adb-devices if your device still doesn’t show up (but is connected). This was the magic trick that made it finally work for me (also from the same anddev.org forum post-that place is great).

Weekend update!

I spent some time this weekend working on GenomeSearch and doing things to my EEEPC, so I could round out my hours for the week (stupid jury duty…).

GenomeSearch update: I tweaked some methods a little bit, and coded the actual search behavior of the app. It isn’t working just right quite yet, but I’ve narrowed down where the problem is. It seems like after I build my hash of the results, I’m not pulling the data out of it correctly. This is likely what I’ll work on tomorrow.

As for the EEEPC, I like the look of the EEEbuntu that Nick gave me. I’m hoping it’ll run my development environment better, because the WinXP was really sluggish on the Android emulator. I managed to delete my taskbar on my last install, so I’m setting up a fresh install now. I’ll write another post sometime with some EEEPC/EEEbuntu gotchas, incase anybody else wants to do this install!