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I returned to work yesterday, after a fairly relaxing week off, to find an Eee PC 900 and an OpenStreetMap high‐visibility vest on or under my desk.

I haven’t touched the Eee, yet, except to charge the battery. Rest assured that I will be replacing the operating system, likely with Debian GNU/Linux. I noticed some packages relating to Eee PCs in Sid, which is promising.

I wore the high‐vis vest on my way home. The vest features an OpenStreetMap logo with the host part of the URI (www.openstreetmap.org) above and “SURVEYOR” below. There’s a picture on the OpenStreetMap wiki. Visibility for me on the road, and visibility for OpenStreetMap.

Richard Moore purchased an Eee PC on Friday. I know because I went with him to Toys R Us. He had been waiting for quite a while for one from Clove Technology, but they kept sending apology emails, and it was getting doubtful whether it would arrive in a reasonable time. It was as much news to me as it was to Rich that Toys R Us had them in stock and you could just walk in and get one.

I was expecting the white version (only white and black are available for now) to look a bit tacky, but it actually looks quite smart. It has a solid feel to it, and the keyboard is usable. I was very close to purchasing one myself, but I put the little leaflet that you had to take to the counter back in its holder, unable to immediately justify the expense, and whether I’d actually use it. I’m still somewhat tempted, so I’ll see how Rich gets on with his.

Update: Rich has written about the Eee now, and Ben Higginbottom also visited Toys R Us and succumbed.

Twice a year ManLUG has an InstallFest, where people bring in their computers and install GNU/Linux on them, and picking the brains of the other attendees. Normally they aren’t that interesting to me, and I’ll just chat to people, or get on with something on my laptop. I was going to go about installing a few GNU/Linux distributions on some virtual machines, which seemed quite suitable for an InstallFest, but instead got distracted by a Netgear router.

The router is a Netgear DG834. The initial difficulty was finding the exact model so we could be sure we were following the right instructions. All we had to go on was the model name of “DG834” but the OpenWRT wiki documents the DG834G and DG834GT. It has a TI AR7 processor, so that ruled out the DG834GT, and was an older model (the case design also gives that away), so we concentrated on the documentation for the DG834G version 1. The firmware version was reported as 3.01.25, which also helped identify it. I saw the note about firmware from this version onwards using LZMA compression, and spent some time attempting to build the patched squashfs. I didn’t manage to build it because I was missing the lzma library. I grabbed the LZMA SDK, but that didn’t help much either.

Simon Hobson came over for a bit of a nosey, and got me back on track. As per the instructions for the DG843G, we backed up the flash devices, and modified the one containing the bootloader. I didn’t have a hex editor, so used vim and xxd to edit the image. Vim mangled it, and the checksum didn’t match the expected checksum after the change. Lesson learnt. Instead of opening binary files in vim, hexifying with ‘:%!xxd’, editing then de‐hexifying with ‘:%!xxd -r’, I first run ‘xxd’, edit the result, then run ‘xxd -r’ on it. After copying the modified bootloader back, and restarting the router, we were pleased to find that it came back up successfully.

Unfortunately that’s all we had time for, and we only managed to change four bytes. The plan is to perform the install at next month’s meeting, after Jim Jackson’s talk on IPv6. It should prove to be another interesting meeting, and not just because of the router: I’ll be paying attention the the IPv6 talk.

I currently use IPv6 at home via a tunnel broker (Hexago, formerly Freenet6), but I haven’t updated any of my servers to do so. One of the reasons blocking it was the lack of support for stateful filtering in the Linux kernel. As of version 2.6.20 this changed, and Bytemark (yes, that’s a sneaky referral link, here is a non‐referral link) have some kernels with the relevant options in testing, so I shall be requesting a block of the IPv6‐space from them soon (yes, Bytemark are great, they’ll give you IPv6 connectivity as a free extra).

Via Slashdot, Meet the 5-Watt, Tiny, fit–PC. It’s a neat‐looking and neat‐sounding little device (the sales bumf says it’s about the size of a paperback) claimed to only consume 5 Watts. It’s not packing a great deal of a punch, as you might expect for a small, low‐power device, but it’s enough that it easily beats my desktop of about 8 years ago (now used mainly as a local file and web server). That might be a long time in the computer world, but it was functional. If you’re only doing the occasional browsing and reading mail it should be fine. It lives on the web at http://www.fit-pc.com/