Eee-control Ubuntu

As I pointed out in my earlier article about finding the best notebooks for Ubuntu, I highlighted that one of the things we shouldn’t overlook is the Asus Eee netbook. These are decent little computer rocking a rock solid low-powered Intel Atom CPU. The exact model is the Asus-Eee 1005PEB-RRED01S netbook. However anyone looking to pickup a comparable cousin would do very well with an Asus 1005HA-PU1X-BU.

In either case, one of the things you may have noticed with newer Eee netbooks is that they only come with Windows installed and you are left to your own devices when it comes to getting another operating system installed. But perhaps just as importantly, is finding a way to gain all the extra functionality that comes with the Asus Eee netbook. This brings us to a helpful little application called eee-control Ubuntu. At its core, its function is to give you control over things like netbook fan control, turning the wifi on/off, turning the card reader on/off, performance settings, among a few other little surprises.

Installing eee-control in Ubuntu

With any of the last few Ubuntu releases, the following technique will work  great for getting this software installed for you. First thing is to open up a terminal window and paste in the following to get eee-control Ubuntu going for you. Yes, you could do this using the GUI method, but this is MUCH faster based on my experience.

Paste in: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:eee-control/eee-control

Now paste in:  sudo apt-get update

And last, paste this in to install eee-control:  sudo apt-get install eee-control

If everything went well, you should have had eee-control Ubuntu install without any problems.

A tour of eee-control on my own Asus Eee netbooks

(HD available, just click on the area that says 360p)

Troubleshooting your eee-control installation

Problem 1: You’re told by the terminal that you’re missing something like python-smbus and/or python2.7. If this happens, try to see if you can find them in Synaptic. If this doesn’t work, go ahead and head on over to the Ubuntu package center to see if you can find them there. Thanks to the Debian base Ubuntu uses, this “shouldn’t” be an issue. But just in case, you’ll find them at the package search portal.

Problem 2: You’re being told that the package or software cannot be found. Not a problem at all, just open up Synaptic, goto Settings, Repositories, Other Software, scroll to http://ppa.launchpad.net/eee-control/eee-control/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main – you’ll see this twice. First is main and the second is main (Source Code) With each of these, highlight, then click the edit button. Under the distribution area, if you failed with natty, change it to maverick. Then click OK, then close. Now Synaptic will tell you of the repositories having changed. Click close, then in the upper left of Synaptic, click reload. If you don’t get any failures there. Do a search in Synaptic for eee-control, then install it.

I rebooted my computer, but eee-control isn’t showing up?

Two things come to mind. I’ve never tried eee-control under Unity. So it’s entirely possible that the Unity interface is hiding the needed applet. I highly recommend running under “Ubuntu Classic.” The second possible issue would be that eee-control didn’t set itself up in the auto-start area. Check for it by going to System, Preferences, Startup Applications. It should be labeled as Eee Control set to run /usr/bin/eee-control-tray on start-up. If this is verified as missing, use the previous command to set it up by hand.