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Easy Peasy: the Linux that isn’t easy

I recently tried out Easy Peasy on my Asus Eee PC 901. It promises to be an easy to use system that is well adapted to computers like the Eee PC. Unfortunately, it comes up short of that promise.

I had problems with it right away. I downloaded Easy Peasy 1.5 and used Unetbootin 372 to put it on an SD card. The Easy Peasy site recommends Unetbootin, but the result wasn’t bootin’ anything. All I got was a blinking cursor on an otherwise black screen. Based on what I found in their forums, I used dd to write the Easy Peasy disk image to the card. This makes the card look a lot like a CD to a computer, albeit an 826MB one. That got the Eee PC booting Easy Peasy. It seemed to work well enough, although the touch pad mouse doesn’t move as easily for some reason.

Since it was just a minor issue getting the Easy Peasy image to boot, I decided it was working well enough to install to another SD card. I selected the install option, and after maybe a half hour it was done. The Eee PC rebooted, I told it to use the card, and I got a black screen with a blinking cursor.

That wasn’t enough to stop me because I don’t much care for the Xandros Linux distribution the Eee PC shipped with. I put the SD card into my Gentoo running deskunder computer and proceeded to re-install Grub on the card. That took some trickery. I also had to modify Grub’s menu.lst file and the /etc/fstab file because they referenced the SD card device incorrectly. I had used two cards during the installation. The one with the disk image was /dev/sdc, and the install target was /dev/sdd. Now that the install was over, there would be no disk image, and the root filesystem would be found on /dev/sdc.

I fixed all that up and put the card back in the Eee PC. This time it booted Easy Peasy from the card. After a while, it came up with a text menu like what can be found on Redhat installs a decade old. The age of the interface doesn’t bother me; that it worked a decade ago but not on the much newer Easy Peasy does bother me. It noticed that I had changed menu.lst and presented me with options. Pressing any keys in an attempt to select an option resulted in garbage text being put on the screen, just like from programs that are busy ignoring stdin.

After a while, I decided to use my Eee PC again with the old Xandros. Even with the Easy Peasy SD card removed, I get Grub error 21. Easy Peasy wrecked the Grub configuration on filesystems that I never asked it to mess with. This is a major problem. If you do give Easy Peasy a try and decide to  install it, be prepared for nothing to boot.

Since I still wanted to use the Eee PC, I booted Easy Peasy. I hit a few more keys when the menu came up and got lucky. I really don’t know what I pressed to get past the menu. After the X server came up, I logged in and tried to get the wireless connection to work. It didn’t. It did earlier when I used the Easy Peasy disk image, but it is broken after an install. It seems that it needs to open /etc/Wireless/RT2860STA/RT2860STA.dat, but there is no /etc/Wireless.

In the process, I decided to switch to a virtual terminal for some reason. I didn’t really need to, I just did. I was able to login and get a prompt from bash. But when I tried to return to the X server, all I got was a black screen. I could switch back to the terminal, but X wasn’t being useful. I tried the common keystroke to kill the X server without success. After about a half hour of sitting around on terminal, I found the computer brought up a graphical login on its own. I was logged out of my X session, and X was being useful again. Weird and obnoxious.

Overall, I would have to say that Gentoo is a little easier to install on a regular deskunder than Easy Peasy is on an Eee PC. Gentoo’s directions are clear, well written, and work. Easy Peasy has few directions, they often fail, and you’ve got to figure out how to fix it on your own. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Oh, the included Firefox doesn’t go to the previous page when backspace is pressed. I hate that about the Xandros install.

Update:

The wireless problem wasn’t fixed by restoring the missing /etc/Wireless files. After that attempt, I shutdown the system through the graphical interface for the first time. When I later started the system with the intention of seeing if any updates might help, the filesystem was not clean and was mounted read-only preventing the X server from starting. Using the shutdown command from a shell worked fine, but not the pretty GUI.

Don’t touch Easy Peasy unless you are ready to spend time fixing it.

The Morikami Visit

I visited The Morikami last Friday for their Sushi and Stroll event with a few friends. They have a small exhibition hall for art work that was showing items depicting the human form. They also have a rather large and well kept set of gardens with beautiful landscaping. Then, I attended an evening performance of Ronin Taiko. They played music using a traditional Japanese drums in the traditional wadaiko method. It is just as visual with the performers’ motion as it is aural.

Ronin Taiko

I took lots of pictures, but found that I need to improve my technique. Many of the outside pictures I took earlier in the day turned out well. Later, I was dealing with little light and had trouble. I have found that flash photography is more difficult with my new DSLR camera than with simple point & shoot cameras. I also depended too much on the camera for exposure settings during the Ronin Taiko concert. I’ve got an idea how to take better pictures next time.

I’ve uploaded the pictures of Ronin Taiko to Flickr and will be uploading the rest of the pictures over the next week or so.

Holst knew about Pluto

Holst knew by 1916 that Pluto wasn’t a planet. Not only was he not an astronomer, his interest in the planets came from astrology. Take that fuddy duddy astronomers! Don’t continue to deny that Pluto is just a little rock rather than a planet.
I came to this conclusion when I realized that in his composition The Planets there is no piece for Pluto. Or for Earth, for that matter, but I’ll give it an exception since we’re on that planet.

Blow your nose

Blow your nose. Its the right thing to do for the environment. It helps keep your nostrils free of pollution.

Only in Europe can you throw away rechargeable batteries

Canon's LP-E5 battery label

Only in Europe can you throw away rechargeable batteries. Only in Europe. At least that’s what I gather from the marked out trash can icon labeled “Europe only”. Maybe I’m wrong and its only the rest of the world where this thing can be trashed.

Polished my plate away

Over this past weekend, I polished my car. It took two days thanks to rain. I also put on four coats of a paint sealant so I shouldn’t need to polish the car again before January. I removed my license plate to give the paint behind it the same care and attention. Come Monday, I completely forgot about putting my license plate back on until I was almost at work. I almost forgot to put it on before heading home.

If anyone saw a silver Honda Civic without a plate driving around Monday morning in Jupiter, that was me.

Holy Leaping Lizards, Batman!

Before I went to work this morning I needed to put out some trash, so I went around to my backyard. Just as I opened the fence, something landed on my back. I was startled and tried to get as good of a view of my back as I can without a mirror. A good sized lizard was there. It was maybe a little longer than a foot, larger than the most common lizards around here, and has different coloring.

I managed to get a few pictures of it using my cell phone after it moved down to my right leg. Those pictures were crappy, but now I can’t say that I’ve never used a cell phone to take pictures. I got my other camera and came back for some more pictures. By then, it had started to climb on my house. Enjoy!

Gasteracantha Cancriformis leaves after five weeks

I had a new resident in my backyard: a gasteracantha cancriformis. It made a rather large web that I had to duck beneath while moving my lawn mower to and from the front lawn. I let it be because there are enough bugs in my backyard. Especially mosquitoes. After a strong downpour early this Tuesday morning, it disappeared.

I first noticed it about a week before I took the first pictures. It lasted five weeks in the same spot. I don’t think I’ve noticed a spider stay in the same place for that long before, but I can’t say I was paying close attention.

Another gasteracantha cancriformis showed up just outside my bathroom windows a few days before the downpour. That spider was also displaced.

The backside of a gasteracantha cancriformis in my backyard.

Whack-a-Skeeter

I’ve been playing Whack-a-Skeeter, a variant of Whack-a-Mole, at home. Starting last Wednesday and continuing through Friday, I had new windows installed on my house. During and since, my place has been in disarray. I suspect it will continue to be into next weekend because I’m not likely to get anything inspected before this upcoming Wednesday and I need to install blinds. My desk has been striped of its monitors, and I’m wondering if I’ll start up my main computer without them to do some software maintenance.

I also moved my PS3 to my living room and connected it to my old CRT TV so that I could watch a DVD I wrote before all this began. My old DVD player didn’t like the disk part way through. I even played Wipeout HD in SD. It lacks some of the graphical wow factor, but it is perfectly playable. Maybe tomorrow I’ll hook up my big monitor in the living room and watch a movie in HD, or just watch it on on my TV in SD because I can. Either way, it’ll be nicer on a couch than the office-style chair in front of my desk, and it’ll benefit from the fine speakers I have in the living room.

Anyway, while the windows were being installed, my house was very open to the outside. Plenty of sawdust from a table saw the crew used on my porch made it into the home, and I’m still cleaning it up. It also rained, so the crew tracked in mud over the floor. Bother. I was cleaning the floor, at least partially, every day until Saturday.

Dead mosquito

A fleet of mosquitoes would follow me around outside, so it’s no surprise an armada found its way in. I decided to stalk them for a while. Thanks to the new windows, it is quieter in my house now, and at its quietest I can hear a mosquito in flight a few feet from my ears. I just don’t have a good sense of the direction to the mosquito without seeing it. Most of them I squash with my hands, a few I bagged with my Dust Buster type tool, and I stomped on one. A few times I’ve gotten two in a row (quick successive successful attempts), and once I got two with one blow. Sometimes its a bloody mess, but I’m not tasting them back. Hunting them is enough for me.

I think I might be getting good at this game. I hope so, anyway. There hasn’t been a shortage of mosquitoes for me to go after yet, and I’ve still got plenty of itchy spots. At least I’ve got more motivation for this game than Whack-a-Mole. I always thought that one was rather dumb.

— Jeff, Mosquito Hunter (not to be confused with an exterminator)