One of the things I use the Asus for is listening to radio over the Internet, specifically Test Match Special. Yesterday it stopped working. The BBC site told me that it now requires a more up to date version of Adobe Flash. Quite why you need Flash to play radio is a mystery to me, but there it was: no Test Match Special unless I upgraded.
Now bear in mind that the Asus is supposed to be targeted at general consumers. It has a nanny interface to protect them from anything awful like command lines. So doing the upgrade should be easy, right?
Ha!
The Asus does actually have a built in software upgrade system. But the Flash player, probably because it is a plugin not a stand-alone application, is not handled by that. You have to upgrade it manually.
When you get to the Adobe site it can detect that you have a Linux system but not which flavor of Linux. You have to know that yourself. The Asus, because it protects you from the O/S, doesn’t have any simple means of telling you which upgrade file you want.
Google is my friend, so I can find these things. I even found a very helpful web page explaining exactly how to go about installing the upgrade, which requires you to open a command line interface — you can’t do it from the GUI. Unfortunately the instructions don’t work, probably because the standard Asus boot doesn’t log you in as an Administrator (you get permissions errors).
All of these things are, of course, solvable. Given enough time I can research the problem online and get it sorted. But what I want to know is, how is someone who hasn’t spent 30 years programming microcomputers supposed to cope with this?
Just upgrade to the ubuntu netbook remix. Runs a lot better than the native EEE O/S and the interface is much cooler, too. http://www.canonical.com/projects/ubuntu/unr
Terry:
You shouldn’t have to upgrade the O/S just to make a computer usable.
Cheryl #2
precisely.
Linux can’t take over until its uber-geeks start developing for non-geeks (or hell freezes over).
Neil: Linux isn’t the problem. Adobe is . . . Flash is a tentacled horror, and not the nice kind. Well, not just Adobe either. See, there’s dumbed down, and then there’s too dumbed down–i.e. developers trying to set stuff up for simplicity but disabling access to useful things in the process; so perhaps what is needed is more user testing and feedback.
*sigh*
All the web chimes and horns are just invented to bring on engineered obsolence, I swear.
Cheryl: That said, I’ll be curious if you find a way to get ahold of the command line on the ASUS, since it seems like the only solution….and I recall trying to find your IP address as well when we were trying to resolve that internet issue, something they should have made easier. However much the XO gave me fits, even before we stuck Debian on it you could get at the command line.
Val:
Ctrl-Alt-T, but you have to know that. You can’t get at it through any of the interface commands.
Hi Cheryl, sorry to hear my instructions on how to update Flash Player didn’t work for you. The version of Linux supplied on the EEE, Xandros, has a number of problems and does not represent the best that Linux can offer. To be honest, as someone who has used Linux for a long time, I think the Xandros supplied was quite poor in a number of respects, and I really wish Asus had just put Ubuntu on the machines and not tried to have their own version of Linux.
I realise that you should not have to do this, but I would strongly recommend that you install Easy Peasy (http://www.geteasypeasy.com/) on your machine. This is a variant of Ubuntu Netbook Remix that is a but easier to install for novices, as a bonus, it comes with Flash 10. This won’t be the only improvement though, as it is a much better user experience, the Netbook Remix interface is designed to get the most out of the limited size of the screen. The whole process of installation should take about an hour.
Liam:
Many thanks for dropping by. I appreciate how hard it is to get these things right for everyone, and your post was easily the most helpful thing I found.
Having been programming microcomputers for 30 years, I don’t think I need anything easy (though many other people will). What I lack is time. Also the back-up disk for the Asus is back in California and I’m in the UK so I’m not going to do anything drastic to it right now.