Yesturday afternoon I was at Ubuntu Live: London. This was a co-hosted event between Canonical and IBM.

The Canonical presentations were aimed mostly at businesses, and sysadmins in particular, delving into the Ubuntu Server distribution. IBM on the other hand went deep into Ubuntu Desktop model – this speaker was really entertaining. Mark Shuttleworth was there too of course – smart guy.

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The Ubuntu Eee team announced over Twitter that the new version of Ubuntu Eee (Intrepid Ibex) will be released on the 1st January 2009.

It seems this next version may come with a new name, to avoid Copyright conflicts. No biggie.
I think Ubuntu Eee will continue to be successful, no matter what name it goes under. The Netbook Remix style is just so user-oriented. But not in a newbie way, like the original Xandros OS that comes preinstalled on Asus Eee PCs.

I’m really looking forward to the new version – I’ve been enjoying Intrepix Ibex on my desktop for a few weeks now. There’s only one bug on my Eee, that I hope gets fixed.
I installed a new wifi card, as posted earlier. It works fine with BackTrack3, but to get it working in Ubuntu I had to disable ACPI. Which is obviously not ideal, because I then lose all power management, including the battery icon/status.

I wonder if we’ll be seeing a new theme ^_^

I just installed a new wifi card in my Asus EEE PC 901. The reason for this is that the default RaLink card doesn’t support injection. So I bought a card with an Atheros chip, knowing they have nice support in madwifi (linux drivers), so I can pentest wifi security to my heart’s content.

I went with the GIGABYTE WI07HT from Oxfordtec, because the WI01GT was sold out.
Installing the card was as simple as unscrewing a couple of little phillips screws, and popping out the antenas, placing the new card in and popping the antenas and screws back into place.

After installing the hardware, I booted up my eee, whihc is running Ubuntu-eee, only to be greeted with kernal errors:

CPU#0 stuck for 11s

OHNOES!

I tested my BT3 usb thumbdrive, the wifi works fine in here (which is a positive, because BT3 didn’t like the RaLink card at all!), so I knew it wasn’t a hardware issue.
Of course I had wifi drivers coming out of my ears after I’d installed madiwifi, madwifi-ng, and a karma-patched madwifi. None of which did me any good.

Disabling Wifi in the BIOS menus is the only way I could boot back into Ubuntu eee. This lead me to the idea of checking for BIOS updates.
It turns out Flashing the BIOS to the latest version ended up fixing the problem.

Create a FAT32 bootable USB disc (using HP’s Disc Util), and Windows ME DOS files (98 DOS files do not work).

Then just copy AFUDOS and the latest firmware ROM onto the disc, and boot from it (Hold ESC during eee’s startup for the option to boot USB).
The command is;

afudos /i1111.rom /obackup.rom

Where 1111 is the number of your new firmware. This will also backup your old firmware to a rom called backup.rom.

You can download all the tools (AFUDOS, HP Disc Util, DOS files). And your latest BIOS firmwares here.