The webbook with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed has been available in-store for a few weeks now, but finally, in a very low-key way the Ubuntu models are creeping onto the Carphone Warehouse website. The home page still links to the last remaining XP models (they are not kidding when they say “while stocks last” they can’t have many of these ones left) however, if you look past the home page, in the Mobile Broadband section then scroll down past the XP version and look at the top 10 offers you will see the first two are for the webbook “with Linux system” on T-Mobile and 3 (leave the Orange one for a few days, that is still XP). Hardly a strong sell, but there it is. I am told there will be product images and they will even admit it is Ubuntu linux soon.
The T-Mobile deal looks excellent to me. Unlimited bandwidth (there is a fair use policy of 3GB per month, this does not mean they stop you at 3GB, it just means they reserve the right to throttle you down to a slower speed if you go beyond 3GB and if they can be bothered) and just 25 quid a month.
If you have been thinking about getting a mobile broadband dongle now is the time to get one along with a fantastic little laptop.
[...] Bell has a bit more detail and comment over on the webbook blog, but if you simply can’t wait and must go and order one right now, here’s the page. [...]
Hi,
Can’t seem to find a more appropriate place to ask this, so i’ll ask here:
How do I restore the webbook to a factory default Ubuntu install? After tinkering away, I’ve managed to break audio. I’ve followed numerous tutorials, but i’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to sort it is to restore to factory default.
I had a look on the elonex website, but they only seemed to have support for XP.
Any help you can give would be fantastic, and great site btw!
Also, for the record, I love my white webbook when its working properly!
Phil
this is a totally appropriate place to ask that question, but we are still working on the very best way to do a factory default restore. The original plan was to make a DVD or something like that, but that sucked because the webbook doesn’t have a DVD drive built in and we didn’t want to send customers out to buy extra hardware. We have a solution now based on an SD card, I will send you a mail and get details so I can post one to you. I like the white one best too.
Thats fantastic. I assume you can get my email from these posts?
Great blog by the way.
One more question – what’s the script update_wb.sh in the root directory supposed to do? Is it just to update the webbook software (stuff like wader) or something else?
hmm, that script is supposed to not be there. I am a little annoyed that it is, as you will understand if you read it. If you have a USB CD rom and install the Ubuntu Alternate CD in OEM mode, then run that script perhaps from a USB drive it will return the webbook to factory state. The guys doing the build in the factory were not supposed to copy that script to the root directory and then leave it there . . .
ah. always interesting to hear stuff like this. Am I correct in thinking that you are a key developer in the Webbook? who’s responsible for leaving the script?
hmm. Just looking through that script- are you aware your telephone number is there? along with alan lord. :S
also, why is wine and virtualbox installed along with the webbook software?
yes, I am aware of that, hence I am slightly annoyed. An email has just gone to the factory, the script was supposed to be run from a USB stick, not from the root of the filesystem. Wine and Virtualbox are there because we like them and we have plenty of room on the 80GB drive for a few little indulgences. We wanted to encourage people not to replace Linux with Windows so we put Wine on because it runs most Windows applications and Virtualbox because if people really want to have Windows on the webbook then they can try it in Virtualbox and hopefully reach the conclusion that everything they ever wanted is available in Linux anyway.
fair enough. Good work on it though. Although I always prefer something like Fluxbox due to using less screen estate, and using much less resources.
On the subject of wader, is there going to be some kind of dev work to provide some features like in the windows app – sms, data use logs etc.? If so, how long is this going to take? Is there active dev for the webbook software? such as drivers etc? i keep reading conficting information…
yes, there is indeed activity and plans. I am writing this on a webbook running Compiz with the cube and wobbly windows etc. Looks really good. We need to correctly package this so it will survive a kernel upgrade then we can put it in the repos. There are plans to enhance Wader, including SMS, I don’t yet have dates I give you though.
the webbbook can support compiz? thats incredible! wouldnt have thought that the low power of the device could support it. when can you provide instructions/details of how to do a recovery. Just a note – the carphone warehouse don’t seem to be able to help at all. They refered me to the geek squad – who were extremely unhelpful -
GS: “Go to the control panel please sir”
Me: “I Don’t have one, im running Linux”
GS: “Well you need to delete the drivers”
Me: “Where do i get the new ones”
GS: “There on the dongle”
Me: “Yes, but they’re only the Windows drivers!”
GS: “Sorry can’t help you anymore”
Carphone warehouse tech support were slightly more helpful – after i finally got the number
Me: “How Do I Restore The Device To Factory”
CPW: “Boot Into Recovery From Grub”
Basically they instructed me to drop to a root prompt from recovery mode, delete the home directory, remove the user, and reinstate the oem install.
This however, did not restore it to factory!
The webbook is fantastic, but until proper tech support exists, people won’t want it.
All I can say is thank god i found this blog!
thanks for the feedback, I will make sure that gets passed on. With all new things it takes a bit of time to get everyone up to speed, GeekSquad have been putting together some documentation on the webbook and they do indeed have some first rate Linux geeks, but they can’t all turn into Linux experts overnight, but they will be converted, resistance is futile. Deleting the user and going back through the OEM wizard will fix quite a lot of things, but it isn’t the same as a full nuke and restore. We were kind of hoping we would have a little more time before folk started breaking them
lol sorry about that
im a natural born tinkerer though. with most things linux though, i find you can mess about as much as you want, and it still works. for example, iv managed to break sound, but everything else works. In fact, i’m writing this on my webbook
i understand that it takes time for people to get up to speed, but it took three trips to different CPW’s to even get the number to CPW tech support. If stores like CPW are gonna sell Linux, i fully support and even encourage it, but the support has to be there, as most people will immediately ask stuff like ‘Where’s the Start Menu?’, and people like me are gonna break it
As a side note, the demo model in one of the stores i visited had a broken setup – it was showing busybox – not the best first impression for the first time would be linux buyer…
if you are tempted to do a rebuild and run the update-wb.sh script you may have to remove virtualbox from the package list. It is in a bit of an odd state at the moment as the current version of it’s kernel module is built for the 2.6.16-20 kernel which has not yet been released.
Haven’t a clue if this is the right place to ask this question, but here goes.
I originally had Linux on my Webbook (which I bought from the Carphone Warehouse) but after headache after headache, decided to install Windows. I’m no good with Linux and decided I should stick with an operating system I know how to use.
However I’m having a slight problem with the Drivers for my Webbook now that I’ve installed Windows – which is no surprise, and is expected when you re-install an operating system, however it isn’t that there are non – obviously because there are XP versions of the Webbook which means the XP drivers for the hardware that makes up a Webbook exist, it’s just that when you attempt to download the XP drivers from the Elonex website, the zip file (webbookxpdrivers.zip) that I assume is supposed to contain the XP drivers for the Webbook is 0KB. When you attempt to open the folder, a message appears saying that the file is ‘damaged or corrupt’.
I called technical support and was told that they had the same problem and that I would need to contact Elonex to let them know about the issue, except I don’t know how! I assumed that tech support was Elonex, but it must be outsourced.
I know this isn’t a tech support website, but would really appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction?
yes, I get the zero byte zip file too. The Windows stuff is not really my game, but I will give someone a prod and get the download fixed for you. So what headaches did you have with the Linux build? What was missing from it that you wanted? What can I do (apart from providing recovery media) to get you to see the light and return to the pathway to Software Freedom?
Well, the problem I had was that whenever I tried to play music on my webbook through earphones, the sound would play through the speakers and the headphones. I have no experience using Linux and had tried everything I could find/think of to get that to stop from happening.
I’m very used to Windows, so may have been hasty in making the decision to install XP.
By the way, thanks for what you did in getting the drivers on the website, whatever you did it seemed to do the trick and the zip file is now 44mb, however when I try to extract the files and folders, I get a nasty error from WinRAR saying: C:\Users\Home\Desktop\webbookxpdrivers2.zip: The archive is either in unknown format or damaged.
ah, yes the “headphones not muting the speakers” issue does kind of suck. I am not surprised you had difficulty solving it. We didn’t discover it for a while and it took me ages to find a solution, and I am not all that happy with it now. It all has to do with telling the sound driver what layout of speakers and headphones and microphones it has. I will do a bit more testing to see if I can get the headphone-muting and the volume control and the microphone all working at the same time then I will post an article and probably push out a fix through an automatic update.
oh, the zip file is broken for me too on Linux. I will give the Windows guys another prod.
Well if you can get the headphone issue sorted in Linux, I’ll give ubuntu another go =]
Will you be putting ubuntu drivers on the website aswell?
The Ubuntu drivers are a lot easier to work with than Windows, we just put them in the repositories and they will get installed with the automatic update process.
I am having the same issue with the latest xp drivers for the webbook, the archive appears to be corrupt.
If i get the linux version on t-mobile..which is my original plan of action…i would want XP..they only offer ubuntu.
I used ubuntu for ages, but i need windows for newsgroup downloading and using frontpage/dreamweaver/photoshop cs2
its just basic stuff i do but i couldnt cope with linux again!
Just been to CPW in North Wales and played on an Ubuntu model for a bit…asked the manager if he had them in stock and he said that they weren’t sold as seperate units other than with a package. I told him that he was wrong and that he should check his own website…he scanned the box and low and behold the price came up. “I suppose I can sell them like that then” he said!!! I can feel a buttering up evening with my household manager coming up…I think I may by a Webbook instead of an Aspire One. Ubuntu pre-installed wins it for me….well done Elonex.
Phil
Paddy,
I think Frontpage and Dreamweaver are both HTML editors? There are tons of these on Ubuntu, just a matter of finding one you like. Personally I use gedit, it does syntax highlighting and I don’t want much more than that. More generally I use Joomla! and WordPress as content management systems so I don’t hand craft much HTML anyway. Scream is OK, but it takes over your mime types in a very hard to fix way, we preinstalled this on a few of the first webbooks, but it associated itself with .html files and URL links so we took it out again. Eclipse is a good IDE for most things including HTML. I have never used Photoshop either, the Gimp does everything I want with graphics. I am working on a little Gimp/webbook tutorial.
I just thought I would check I was right about Frontpage and Dreamweaver being fancy HTML editors so I looked them up, seems I was basically right, but what I was shocked by was the prices.
Frontpage £339.38
Dreamweaver £322.98
Photoshop CS2 £534.98
that comes to a grand total of £1197.34. Wow. That is about 5 times the cost of the webbook.
Bl***y hell. That’s a lot of cash just to make some rather bad HTML markup. Honestly, both FP and Dreamweaver create really BAD markup littered with stuff you neither want nor need.
Hand crafting HTML isn’t hard and you can make sure your page is compliant with the W3C recs.
On Ubuntu I use Bluefish for almost all coding, be it HTML, PHP, CSS, Javascript, Bash and it will handle many others.
If you really *must* use a WYSIWYG html editor then I would have suggested trying Nvu (http://www.nvudev.com/index.php). As it says on the home page: “Finally! A complete Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (which stands for “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.”
However, Nvu was rather buggy and development seemed to slow to a crawl so enter Kompozer (http://www.kompozer.net/) ” KompoZer is a complete web authoring system that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing.
KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.”
You can install Kompozer, for free, using Synaptic.
I agree with Alan Bell, The Gimp does almost everything Photoshop can do – and it’s free too – and you can even get an add-in package that will chnage the GUI to make it look and feel like Photoshop. For Vector Graphics, rather than using the hugely expensive Adobe Illustrator, try Inkscape, it’s free too.
Cheers
Alan (The Open Sourcerer)
You can install it, for free, via synaptic
Hi there, please help! I purchased the 24 month T-Mobile mobile broadband package including Ubuntu Webbook last week and have had nothing but problems. I had difficulty in getting the USB modem to connect with th Webbook and once this was sorted the USB Modem crashes the machine every time I connect, after about 5 minutes of being connected the Webbook freezes and eventually goes black & unresponsive. I took the Webbook back to Carphone warehouse and they replaced it with another Webbook, however, the same thing is happening with the new Webbook. I was given the Telephone number for Elonex who told mw that the Webbook is not compatible with the Ubuntu Webbook? Can you make any suggestions, please?
Hi, I’ve just got my webbook in the past few days. Is there supposed to be a horrible corrupt graphic just before ubuntu boots into the desktop? It looks like the graphics drivers have gone awol for a few seconds.
@Louise that sounds like a power/voltage drop issue. What dongle do you have and which USB port are you plugging it into? Did they swap the dongle or just the webbook?
@Dave,
No, that is not supposed to be there, we can’t claim that one as an intended feature! The webbook has a shared memory graphics card and at the moment we are using a fairly simplistic graphics driver, I think that corruption is just a load of rubbish sat in the shared memory area before it gets initialised correctly. It doesn’t seem to happen on the new drivers I am testing so hopefully you won’t have to live with it for long.
Alan, a few questions please?
Is the graphics card up to showing flash player 9 required by some sites?
Can the hard drive be replaced and upgraded to provide more space?
I’m not brave enough just yet to start taking it to bits myself
Final question .. is a BIOS upgrade in the pipeline for some of the niggles?
Cheers
@Dave, I can hopefully help a little bit here (Alan Bell is on hols this week):
The graphics card should be fine yes. The new driver that we are testing seems to work well and even allows the full 3D desktop experience (Compiz).
It is a standard 2.5in slim format SATA drive so it “could” be replaced with a higher capacity unit. You need to be aware about possibly breaking any warranty conditions though and I am not sure if CPW will be offering upgrades like this.
I’ll pass on the BIOS upgrade for now.
Hope this helps.
Alan
@Dave: Just to say that the Flash 9 player is working fine, even with the old driver. Re the HD, I took mine out (just because I HAVE to do that sort of thing, I will be replacing it soon but not right now) and there were no seals or “stuff” on the screws that I could see, so warranty-wise, if you have to return the machine (I really nope not because I’ve become very attached to mine!) just put the original drive back in. I can’t really see though that there is more of an issue with upgrading the drive than the RAM. The drive slides out of the drive door, then there are just four screws to undo to take it out of the tray.
@Dave, as The Open Sourcerer said the hard drive can be upgraded, and it is pretty standard stuff. It does work with some SSD drives however we tried a very fancy 64GB SSD drive (as seen in the Macbook Air) but that did not work. I would be very surprised if you found a sata HDD that didn’t work, but with SSD your mileage may vary.
Thanks Gents, I upgraded the RAM to 1Gb today and it flies now. (Today I found myself in PCWorld talking someone out of buying an Eeepc nasty plastic thing with an awful OS, I sent him to CPW
)
It’s good to see CPW now properly advertising the Ubuntu version of the webbook, but it’s a shame that the contract is more expensive, unless you go for T-Mobile, who don’t have as extensive coverage as the other networks. Hopefully CPW will introduce some flexibility into the choice of bundled contract to best meet users’ cost and geographical needs? Can I ask whether the networks’ various modem dongles all work with Ubuntu and are (fairly) easy to set up and get using? Sadly, it’s often the case that some peripherals aren’t very friendly to systems other than Windows..
You will also doubtlessly be aware that “another well known chain” offers a mobile broadband bundle with a different netbook, that works out a fair bit cheaper over the overall length of the contract. I’m afraid I have to be quite cost-conscious, so hopefully CPW will respond to this competition appropriately ..
Hi,
I built & maintain the web site for Waltham Abbey FC (http://www.wafc.net) and produce the programme. For a while I have been looking for a small laptop so that I can write the match report and do ‘near’ live updates – after I have got over the excitement of us scoring or depression of letting in a goal!
I started the season with an Asus P701. It was ideal albeit a tad small… then I discovered the webbook at CPW and bought a standalone one – I already had mobile broadband. I took it home and promptly obliterated the linux build and replaced it with XP!
Then the problems started…
I did not have the correct drivers so the display, sound and WIFI failed to work. No probs I thought, will put linux back on… er no! Every distribution I tried failed. Opps! Have I now got a £220 brick ?
Phoned up the support the next day… they were not very helpful at all. Kept on trying to refer me to the hidden partition which was not there as the drive had been formatted. Eventually the guy I spoke to understood what I wanted – an iso so that I could restore. Four hours later he got back to me and said that nothing could be done and the machie would have to be returned!
In the meantime, I got talking to a very helpful chap at Elonex. He knew exactly what I wanted and promised to send me a CD.
Sure enough the CD turned up the next day. It contained the XP drivers and it works like a dream…
But, I don’t really like XP (although it is miles better than Vista) and still want a linux build.
Fortunately, an archive file of the build was also included on the CD again as promised along with a program that would allow me to extract it. Unfortunately, for the life of me I could not get it to work.
Can you help ?
Thanks in advance.
@David,
yes prices dance about from month to month with things bundled in creative new ways. I have no idea what they will do next, I stick to the technical stuff. Like for instance which modems work. It should in theory work with most dongles and most networks. We have only tested it extensively with the ones it is sold with. I plan to talk more about the mobile broadband side of things in a few days.
@Derek
Hi, the trick to get a random distribution of Linux working on the webbook is to fix the xorg.conf file. Normally this assumes a screen size of 1024×768 and you have to change this to 1024×600, I will post a working xorg.conf I think, sounds like it would be useful. When you get it going can you send an action shot of the webbook doing match updates?
Hi All
I am considering the webbook mainly as mobile “player” of BBC iPlayer content. Interested also dabbling in Linux O/s. Has anyone downloaded any programs on iPlayer ( not streamed live through internet ) and played back later as I believe it is possible now with firefox.
Any thoughts greatly appreciated
I don’t think you can download the iPlayer stuff with Firefox, all I have ever seen is the streaming flash thing, which works fine but the frame rate drops a bit if you use it full screen. Is this some kind of flash streaming video saver that you are thinking of? Do you have any links to information about this?
So can you use flashplayer on your webbook?
I have downloaded different versions but all of them come up uncompatible or something.
i tried most of the mozilla firefox linux versions but cant get em to work. If im to have mobile internet I would like to be able to use it =]
hope you can help, and please reply to my email i have a habit of losing addresses.
Thanks muchly =]
yes, indeed you can and it is a lot easier than downloading stuff. All you could ever want is available under system-administration-Synaptic Package Manager. If you are after Flash, then scroll down to the flashplugin-nonfree application, mark it for installation and apply your changes. If you want to keep track of the blog then follow the RSS feed.
The webbook works really well with Windows XP on it But a lot of people are forgetting that there is a lot of Linux software out there for WINDOWS. ie OpenOffice. The GIMP and even TUX paint. There are probably more. I haven’t googled yet.
I had a spare 160gig SATA drive doing nothing and I installed win XP onto it via an external USB DVD write. Downloaded the win version of all the drivers and all went really well. Downloaded FireFox and the add on Download helper also flash player. All works fine. The T-Mobile dongle installed fine and NO Graphics card corruption at start up and shut down.
Now I’m not knocking Ubuntu, just waiting for a way to do a total backup/restore disk and also somework around for Flash etc. Oh and my book from Amazon Ubuntu for Dummies.
The webbook is really great.
Demi
I have just purchased a webbook from CPW on 3 network with linux os…..
I was wondering if anyone knew the limits to upgrading this….
I want to upgrade the RAM and HDD but need to know the limits before wasting money on overpowerful RAM sticks and Drives…..
I dont expect too much but might as well get the most out of it as its a lovely piece of kit…..
Also if I do upgrade the HDD how do I get Linux on the new disc as it does not have a CD/DVD Drive…..
Tony
@TonyakaLinuxNoob
well done!
The RAM limit is 1GB. I have heard that the maximum supported HDD is 160GB, however I have no idea why there should be any limit to the size of hard drive that works, I guess nobody has yet tried it with a 2.5″ SATA drive bigger than 160GB. If you upgrade the HDD then you would have to install Linux via a USB CDROM drive (although a USB memory stick would also work in theory, but the CD is easier) You will have to fix the xorg.conf for the 1024×600 screen after installing. I can understand the RAM upgrade, but why do you want to upgrade the disk? Isn’t 80GB enough?
The reason for upgrading the HDD is because I am contemplating putting my 160Gb SATA from my Samsung Q45 into the Webbook and Getting a SSD for the Samsung, but this is a long way off as I hate the headache of reinstalling os (also the samsung runs on crappy vista, lol) so may just do a ram upgrade, wanted to know about HDD for future reference…..
If I do this how hard is it to multi boot my samsung with vista premium and ubuntu, what is a good multi boot software to use (i’ve heard of GRUB but never used it)…..
I’ve had enough of Windows lording the software market and think its time to have a change of scene (i’ve been using windows since 1995) and linux based Ubuntu looks amazing but a bit daunting. (For example you said I would need to fix xorg.conf, how do you mean fix?)
Tony
fixing xorg.conf and RAM information sorry, meant to go back and put links in my previous comment. GRUB is the GRand Unified Bootloader and is the Ubuntu default bootloader. That is the application that does the menu you get to if you press escape on bootup. So you would end up with windows in the menu. You can set it to wait at the menu for a few seconds on bootup so you can choose which operating system you want to run.
@Demora, yes absolutely there is loads of Free and Open Source software that runs on Windows. OpenOffice.org, Planner, Firefox, Thunderbird, Virtualbox etc. etc. You can install Windows and then install all that stuff and end up with a useful computer. We wanted to start with a useful computer when it comes out of the box and not pay a tax to Redmond for doing so.
I have the same issue as dave see below..
August 16th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Hi, I’ve just got my webbook in the past few days. Is there supposed to be a horrible corrupt graphic just before ubuntu boots into the desktop? It looks like the graphics drivers have gone awol for a few seconds.
I also need to install Flashplayer but not gettig anywhere.