Archive for the ‘Action Shots’ Category

webbooks in Woking

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Yesterday was the Woking Means Business trade show, we had a stand there so we could show local businesses how they could save money by using Free and Open Source software. Here is a (bad) photo of our computer laden stand. (Alan Bell on the right, Alan Lord is on the left)

on the stand from left to right is a Novatec laptop (they are one of the few suppliers who will sell you a computer without operating system), an Elonex webbook, an OLPC XO laptop, the pink Elonex ONE and on the shelf is a monitor attached to another Novatec laptop and a little Elonex ONEt. All running Free and Open Source software.

We had internet access on all the computers, thanks to another webbook hidden in the cupboard below. The other webbook had an Orange 3G dongle plugged in and was connected to a standard wireless ADSL router (not plugged in to ADSL of course). With a bit of messing about with the settings we got the webbook to act as a NAT router and internet gateway for all the others. We were connected for about 8 hours doing all sorts of things, demonstrating updates and installation of software and using our web based vtiger CRM system. It worked flawlessly and is a really great setup for anyone who wants internet access for a bunch of computers.

To get it working there are a couple of magical incantations required on the webbook, specifically,
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
to allow it to forward packets from the wireless interface to the mobile broadband interface, and then
sudo iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/16 -o hso0 -j MASQUERADE
to set up a firewall rule to do network address translation (NAT) for the 192.168.0.0 subnet (the local network) with the external interface being called hso0 (if you have the Orange dongle the network card is called hso0, if it is 3 or T Mobile then substitute hso0 for ppp0). Finally on all the other computers we had to set their default route to point to the IP address of the webbook with the dongle and also edit their /etc/resolv.conf dns settings to point to the Orange DNS servers, if I had set the webbook up as a DHCP server this could all have been automatic.

Posted in Action Shots, Geeky | 6 Comments »

A giant amongst laptops

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

Here is my webbook out and about on the amazing hexagonal basalt columns of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. It is really quite remote and surrounded by very big cliffs but I managed to pick up a weak GPRS signal on the dongle and I slowly looked up the Wikipedia page for the causeway.

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Action Shot #1: out and about with the webbook

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

Here is the first in a series of action shots of the webbook finding interesting uses, Helen H writes:

“I got one because I’m a freelance researcher with AQA (Any Question Answered) and wanted to be able to work when I’m away in my campervan. A full-size laptop takes up too much room; the webbook & dongle is the perfect combination to do a bit of work when I have an odd hour to spare without taking up valuable space. I was already an Ubuntu user so was delighted to find it used this OS. It is also, of course, great great fun!”

If you have an action shot to share then please post a comment and tell me about it.

Posted in Action Shots | 3 Comments »