daantje.nl

After installing Mac-OS X Tiger, Ubuntu-eee and Xandros on my Asus EEE-pc 900, I now swiched to Debian Lenny. Installing was easy. Running a normal Gnome now. For the wireless I used these links:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Debian_5.0_(Lenny)_on_a_ThinkPad_X200#Atheros_Chipset
http://wiki.debian.org/NetworkManager
http://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse
Everything else worked out of the box ;) Nice and easy installer too! I think this one is a keeper. And I love Debian!

I want to have internet all the time. And I have… I have a HTC Touch Cruise running Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro with a HSDPA connection. Now this is a way to connect the EEE to the HTC via bluetooth and use the windows mobile device as a gateway to the internet. By the way, I’m running Ubuntu-eee… If you are running Xandros, the default distro, try to Google on “Xandros bnep0 windows mobile”

First get the right software. Open a terminal and install the Bluez gnome utilities.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install bluez-gnome


Now open the file ‘/etc/default/bluetooth’ and be sure that the following is set;

BLUETOOTH_ENABLED=1
PAND_ENABLED=1


Now I did a reboot, you could restart some services, but I was lazy. Now, after you insert your Bluetooth dongle (or when you have it build in), you should have a bluetooth icon in the upper right corner. With that tool you should be able to pair with your Windows Mobile device. If you don’t know how, try it the other way around, use your mobile to pair with your eee. After the exchange op pins the two devices should be paired.

Open up the terminal again and do the following command to scan for your mobile…

sudo hcitool scan

You should get something like this;

Scanning ...
00:17:83:xx:xx:xx HTC_P3650

This is the mac address of your mobile device and you’ll need it later on to connect.

Okay, we have a working bluetooth dongle and we can see the mobile… Now some config we need to have to get the link working. Append the following to ‘/etc/network/interfaces‘;

iface bnep0 inet manual
down dhclient -r -pf /var/run/dhclient.$IFACE.pid $IFACE
down pand -K
up pand -Q -n
up dhclient -pf /var/run/dhclient.$IFACE.pid $IFACE


We are done configuring the eee. The following steps should be made every time you want to get the eee online:

Open on your Windows Mobile device the application ‘Internet Sharing’, you can find it in your Programs folder. Start a Bluetooth PAN connection and wait for it to start.

Open up a terminal on you eee and do:

sudo pand -c 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx -n

Ofcource, you’ll have to replace the 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx with the mac address of your device.

You should get this as result:

pand[8033]: Bluetooth PAN daemon version 3.26
pand[8033]: Connecting to 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx
pand[8033]: bnep0 connected


Now bring the network interface up and get an IP from the windows mobile device:

sudo ifup bnep0


Now wait for the following result, it should look something like this:

pand[8060]: Bluetooth PAN daemon version 3.26
pand[8060]: Inquiring
pand[8060]: Searching for NAP on 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx
pand[8060]: Connecting to 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx
pand[8060]: Connect to 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx failed. Connection refused(111)
pand[8060]: Searching for NAP on 00:16:CB:xx:xx:xx
Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Client V3.0.6
Copyright 2004-2007 Internet Systems Consortium.
All rights reserved.
For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/

wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
wifi0: unknown hardware address type 801
Listening on LPF/bnep0/00:10:60:a2:8c:dd
Sending on   LPF/bnep0/00:10:60:a2:8c:dd
Sending on   Socket/fallback
DHCPREQUEST of 192.168.0.85 on bnep0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67
DHCPACK of 192.168.0.85 from 192.168.0.1
bound to 192.168.0.85 -- renewal in 111983 seconds.

YES! We have an IP! You can double check with the ‘ifconfig’ command, or just try to open up Firefox and start browsing ;) Now close your eee, walk to the pub, get a nice cold one. Open your eee and start browsing the net ;) w00t!

To get the interface down again, use:

sudo ifconfig bnep0 down


Most of the info I’ve used, can be found in this forum post. Ive written a little shell shell script to bring the connection up, because it’s hard to remember all of this after some beers ;)


#!/bin/sh
sudo pand -c 00:17:83:xx:xx:xx -n
sleep 5
sudo ifup bnep0
echo "Drink beer!"

Don’t forget to make the file executable with ‘chmod +x myscript.sh’, or something like that…

It has been a while after my last post, been very busy with a few big projects. But I found the time to buy a Asus EEEpc. It’s a real small laptop running Xandros Linux. I’ve reinstalled the little machine with Ubuntu. There is a dedicated Ubuntu distro for the eee. You can find it on http://www.ubuntu-eee.com. The first attemt to install it, I used a USB stick, but it crashed after a vew seconds… The USB stick was corrupt. After a view tries I thrown the stick in the trash an got a SD card. Now the installer did his work without any errors! Now I’ve got a real distro! Apt-getted quanta, apache, php, mysql and now I can develop anywhere!