Usually this is a pretty straight forward affair, but I had a bit of a problem – may laptop would only find the TFTP server if it was directly wired to it via a crossover cable (no doubt my POS Speedlink router was partly to blame).  After a couple of hours of faffing I finally managed to get a successful install with the following steps:

1. Download a copy of TFTP32 for Windows
2. Directly wire your laptop to your desktop pc (which is running the TFTP server) with a crossover cable
3. Follow the Ubuntu Windows Server Netboot Wiki Entry to get the TFTP Server configured – make sure you set everything up to point towards your Router.  (ie: My router defaults to 192.168.1.254, so I set that as the gateway and gave the DHCP Server in TFTP32 a sensible range of IP Addresses to serve out.
   
4. When the laptop boots via PXE, follow the guide right up to the Network interface selection (should be just after the Keyboard layout).
5. At this point, unplug the cross over cable and wire the laptop directly into the router, wait a couple of seconds for it to autosense the connection and then proceed with the Ubuntu install – it should discover your router and receive a new IP Address via DHCP
6. Sit back and smile as your laptop successfully downloads the required packages from the Ubuntu archives.

Hope this helps someone out there

Step One: Opening another bottle

As with most things in life, this guide kicks off with some WINE, in this case we are going to be installing the latest build available from WineHQ which happens to be 0.9.52. If you already have WINE installed on your EEE then you can skip his section. Incase you are unaware, WINE is a compatibility layer which, in a nutshell, allows you to run (some) Windows applications under Linux. We are going to add the WINE APT repository to our APT Sources, so that when new WINE builds are released we are automatically kept up-to-date.

• Opening a Terminal

To open a Terminal window on the Asus EEE, press the CONTROL, ALT and T keys at the same time. A new black window should appear, enter the following commands into it:

• Adding the WINE APT Repo GPG Key

(Make sure you select all the code above, as it can overflow on narrow screens (like on the EEE!)). The code above will download the .gpg key from budgetdedicated.com (which is where WINE hosts its repos) and add it to your list of trusted sources)

• Adding the WINE APT Repos to your Sources

(Again, Make sure you select all the code above, as it can overflow on narrow screens (like on the EEE!)). The code above will create a new APT entry in your sources, the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list can always be removed in the future if you want to stop using WINE.

If you are having trouble following the above two steps, you can get the instructions for adding the WINE Repo’s in Debian Etch 4 (aka Xandros) direct from WineHQ.

• Installing WINE from APT

You are now ready to install WINE using APT. First you need to update the list of APT Packages with apt-get update:

Next you want to actually install the WINE package:

Once WINE is installed you will be ready to move on to the next step:

Installing SlingPlayer

Before you can start installing SlingPlayer you will need to configure WINE and register the required dll files that SingPlayer expects.

• Registering SlingPlayer DLLs

First off you will need to download the SlingPlayer Dependancies zip file, this file contains various components and libraries which are installed by default on Windows XP, but are not part of the WINE default bundle. This zip file has been kindly created and hosted by the Sling Community, so go give them some love.

Once you have downloaded these files, you need to copy them to your WINE System32 folder and register them with the WINE Windows Registry (it’s times like this that you really appreciate how wonderful Windows really is…). Extract the .zip file to your desktop and them copy the following files to /home/[username]/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32.

• msxml3.dll
• qcap.dll
• quartz.dll
• msxml3r.dll
• dxdiagn.dll

You can copy these files by using the Terminal: (the following example assumes your username is “jonny” and you extracted the SlingPlayer Dependencies file to your desktop, modify to suit your enviroment.

I only run Linux on my laptop at home after our experiment with Linux on the desktop wasn’t met with success. I wasn’t planning on upgrading from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04 in the near future because of the lack of a CD-ROM drive for my laptop (well, more the lack of a power supply for my Lacie Firewire CD-RW). As a result, I was pleasantly surprised to see Ubuntu’s update manager pop up in the corner of my screen telling me that a new ‘distribution release 7.04′ was available complete with a nice chunky (got to love the Gnome) “Upgrade” button begging to be pressed.

The installers first step was to pull down the “Upgrade Assistant” which ‘guides you through the install process’. Now my laptop is not the fastest (733mhz P3) but this step took an age before the assistant actually appeared. Top indicated that the CPU was having a bit of a nap, so I presume the delay was due to the sheer number of “updaters” eagerly following the same path as myself.

I gave up for the night and tried upgrading again a few days later.  This time the Update Assistant appears immediately, a good sign!  The update took about 60 mins to download all the packages and update them, upon completing I was asked to restart the system.  During the update I was still able to use Firefox to browse the web, a privilege that would certainly be unheard of on any other major OS!

My initial impression of 7.04 is that not much has changed, the new control pannel is quite snazzy (not that I need to make much use of it now my laptop has been set up) and Wireless Access Points are now automatically detected (no more dropping down to the terminal to switch!).

One application that I recently discovered was Putty for Symbian OS, this fantastic little app allows me to connect to my remote linux servers from both WLAN and GPRS connections – sure, you’re not going to be doing any application development with it, but it’s great for rebooting a server or doing remote diagnostics (or just showing off to friends!)