Apache ran fine, and MySQL, PHPMyAdmin and PHP5 were all installed and working correctly.  However it was not possible to place a web site into a folder location within my /home/myuser/www folder.

The steps to solve this were actually very simple:

1 – create the www folder and create a dummy index.htm page to test the site with.

2 – Create a new Virtual Host by using terminal to issue the following commands – changing your site name and user folder as necessary.

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite

gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite

change DocumentRoot line point to /home/myuser/www

change Directory line to point to /home/myuser/www

3 -  Ensure the user account folder can be accessed by Apache by changing the permissions.

chmod +x /home/myuser

4 – Secure Apache

gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/ports.conf

change the Listen line to read

Listen 127.0.0.1:80

5 – Enable your new site usinge:

sudo a2ensite mysite

6 – Change folder permissions to ensure the home folder and the user home folder can be browsed by other users, else Apache will return messages about files not found.

7 - Restart Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

8 - Test your new site http://localhost/

A list of netbooks supported and known issues can be found here – https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks

Download Ubuntu 9.04 NBR from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook

You will need either a CD/DVD/USB pen/Memory Card to create a bootable copy of the Clonezilla Live software as well as a Hard Disk/USB pen/Memory Card onto which to write the backup.

Clonezilla is especially useful for creating a backup of your netbook, such as the EeePC.  A 4GB memory card and an old 128MB USB pen allow me to take snapshot backups of my EeePC so that should it ever get lost or stolen I can easily recreate my customised install of EeeBuntu without having to reinstall all of the addons, and applications manually.

First download the Clonezilla Live CD/DVD image by visiting the Clonezilla at http://www.clonezilla.org/ the live distribution ISO image file is, at time of writing, approximately 100MB in size.

If your PC has a CD/DVD drive use your favourite CD burning software to create a CD from the ISO Image.  It is important you use the create CD from disc/ISO image and not just create a regular data disc by dragging the ISO file onto the disc!

If your PC does not have a CD/DVD drive but has a USB or memory card reader then you can use Unetbootin also available free from http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/  Unetbootin is available for both Windows & Linux.

• Insert your USB/Memory Card – a memory card or USB memory drive with at least 100MB of space is required.
• Simply  download run the Unetbootin software and select the Disk Image option (half way down the screen) – see screenshot below.
• Select the ISO image downloaded from the Clonezilla site.
• Select the USB/Memory Card drive letter from the list and click the OK button.

UNetbootin Dialog Box

After clicking OK, UNetbootin will copy the ISO contents to the USB drive/Memory card, this may take a few minutes so be patient.  You should see a screen like this whilst UNetbootin does its work:

UNetbootin Progress Bar

Now that you have a bootable CD/DVD or USB/Memory card it is time to boot your PC using your newly created copy of Clonezilla.

1, When Clonezilla starts up you will see a boot screen that lets you pick the operating system settings to use when booting.  Select the default “Clonezilla Live”.

2, Clonezilla will then scan your computer to determine the hardware installed.

3, Select your language and keyboard layout from the options presented.

4, Select the operation you wish to perform, device-image disk/partition to/from image.  This will allow you to backup one disk or hard disk partition to another disk.  In the case of a netbook you would use this option to backup from the SSD drive to a SD memory card.

5, At the Mount clonezilla Image directory screen select the destination that will be used to store the backup.  Select local_dev Mount local device for a local drive or memory card/USB pen.

6, Insert your USB device or memory card.  Clonezilla will then scan the computer to identify the hardware available.

7, Clonezilla will then display a list of available disks, hda1 is usually your main hard disk that you’ll likely want to backup.  The destination drive will be named hdb1 or sda1/sdb1 etc.  It’s important that you select the correct disk/partition at this step else you may accidentally delete all your data, so please be careful.  Remember you’re selecting the destination not the source drive here!

8, When you’re sure you’ve selected the correct drive press the Enter key.

9, The Choose the mode screen will then appear and allow you to select whether you wish to perform a backup or restore.  Select the savedisk option.

10, The Priority menu then allows you to select which programs will be used to perform the backup.  Select the first option in the list -q Priority: ntfsclone > partimage > dd

11, On the next screen select the -c Client waits for confirmation before cloning option.  Which may well be the only choice you have at this stage.

12, Clonezilla allows several different options for compressing the backup.  The first option in the list -z1 Use gzip compression (fast but smaller image) offers a good balance between speed and space saving.  It is recommended that you select this option.

13, If desired change the name of the backup, or simply accept the default.

14, Finally you get to select the disk that you’d like to backup.  As before you will see a list of disks with ids such as hda etc.  You should also see some descriptive information that will help to identify the disk.

15, Clonezilla will then provide a summary of what is to be backed up, to where and how.  Make sure all of this is correct and then (and only then) select Yes to the Are you sure you want to continue question.

Clonezilla will then create a backup of your disk as requested, you just need to leave it to do its work and wait for it to complete, depending upon the size of the disk you’re backing up this could be a while so go and get a cup of coffee.

Restoring from a Backup

To restore your computer back to a previously saved disk image created with Clonezilla simply follow the steps described above for creating the backup.  However, remember to select the disk you want to restore at step 7 as this is the destination for the restore operation.  Then at step 9 select the restoredisk option.

Installing and uninstalling applications causes space to be used with temporary files and install files that can safely be removed, thereby freeing up valuable storage for yet more applications or important files.

Removing Language Files

Most applications install language files that allow the application to support more than just one language. Assuming you only ever use on language on your PC then you can safely remove all the other language files and free up some space. A great utility for automating this task and allowing you to select which languages you would like to keep is localepurge. To install and run localepurge simply open a new terminal window and type the following:

$ sudo apt-get install localepurge

Removing Unused Kernel Files

Open synaptic and search for installed applications. Then search for “linux”. This will return a list of images, headers and restricted modules that are installed. Any that do not match the current version of the kernel that your EeePC is running can safely be removed, thereby freeing up space on you SSD.If you’re unsure which kernel you EeePC is running then open terminal and use the uname command:

$ uname -r

Remove Unused Applications

Remove unused applications using either Synaptic, Aptitude or the apt-get command. Be sure to use the Completely Remove option to remove all files including any configuration or setting files in order to free up the most space. This can be done from terminal using:

$ sudo apt-get –purge remove <application name>

Clear the Cache

To clear out the apt cache folder after installing and uninstalling applications simply run the following commands from the terminal:

$ sudo apt-get clean

$ sudo apt-get autoclean

Remove Redundant Program and Library Files

Finally to tidy up any remaining redundant libraries or programs left over from previous installs use the autoremove option. However, check the list of programs and libraries that it intends to remove before pressing “Y” to confirm the removal!

$ sudo apt-get autoremove

Mandriva Linux install is very simple and the OS works well, however I was unable to configure an encrypted home folder using Mandriva. So I switched to a customised Ubuntu distribution called Ubuntu-eee (now known as Easy Peasy – don’t know why). This generally worked well but wifi was temperamental and USB_PERSIST support was missing.

Finally, I tried Eeebuntu 2 and after installing both Base and NBR (NetBook Remix) versions I opted to use Base which included everything needed to get started installing applications that I needed and allowed me to install only those applications that I actually needed.

My Asus EeePC now runs the following software:

• Eeebuntu 2.0 Base
• OpenOffice 3
• Firefox 3 – Web Browser
• Thunderbird – Email Client
• Pidgin – Instant Messaging Client
• Picasa 3 – Google’s excellent photo organiser
• F-Spot – Photo organiser – useful for uploading to Gallery2
• GIMP – Image Editor
• FireFTP – Firefox add-in – FTP Client
• Cups-PDF – PDF printing
• Dropbox – File Synchronisation
• Stellarium – useful to star gazing
• Apache, PHP & MySQL – for web site development and testing
• Totem – video player
• Banshee – iTunes like audio player
• Audacity – Easy to use sound editor
• LocalePurge – removal all unnecessary language files and free up valuable storage space.
• Wine – run windows applications within Linux!

Click the “Add/Remove Software” menu item in the Administration menu.  This will start Synaptic, the application used to manage the installing of software on Ubuntu based Linux PCs.

In Synaptic click on the “Settings” menu and then select the “Repository” menu item.  In the new window click the “New” button and enter the following details for the OpenOffice 3 repository:

• URL: http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu 
• Distribution: intrepid
• Sections: main

Then click the “OK” button and the new OpenOffice 3 repository will be added. 

Then click the “Reload” button to force Synaptic to refresh the list of software that it knows about.

Now OpenOffice 3 will show in the repository list and will be available for installing.  If you’ve already installed a previous version of OpenOffice then the automatic update service will identify that the upgrade is available and will prompt you to perform an update of your system, after which you’ll have OpenOffice 3 installed.

Terminal Method

Alternatively for those more familiar with terminal you may like to use the following method.  First from terminal open the sources.list file:

$ gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

add the following lines to the bottom of the sources.list file and save the file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

Then from terminal run the following two commands to force an upgrade to the latest version of OpenOffice (assuming you already have an older version installed).

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

1 – Install Luks & Pam-Mount by typing the following at the Terminal:
    apt-get install cryptsetup libpam-mount

2 – Inset a blank SD card into the internal card reader… I found SanDisk Ultra 4gb SDHC class 4 to be the most reliably card in this temperamental card reader.

3 – Edit /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml  (I used sudo gedit to do this).  Insert the following line in the “volume” section of the document (replace username with your username)
    <volume user=“username” fstype=“crypt” path=“/dev/sdb1” mountpoint=“/home/username” />

4 – If this is a clean libpam-mount install then add the following line to the start of the /etc/pam.d/common-auth file:
    auth optional pam_mount.so use_first_pass    

NB – the use_first_pass keywork can be omitted with Ubuntu 9.04 as it appears that this keyword has been removed from pam-mount.

5 – Then add the following line to the /etc/pam.d/common-session file:
    session optional pam_mount.so

6 – reboot and use GRUB to enter recovery mode, drop to terminal as root when given the option and then make remaining changes from this location.  Alternatively you could use sudo to run a lot of this whilst logged in as the user.

7 – In the terminal move your existing user’s home folder to a temporary location (replace username with your user’s account name)
    mv /home/username /home/username.original

8 – Create a new empty home folder for the user for use as a mount point of the encrypted drive:
    mkdir /home/username

9 – Set ownership of the new home:
    chown username.username /home/username

10 – Create the encrypted volume
    cryptsetup –c aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 –y –s 256 luksFormat /dev/sdb1

11 – Open the encrypted volume
    cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 chome

12 – Create the file system
    mkfs.resierfs /dev/sdb1

13 – Mount the filesystem to the user’s home (or any other location you wish) and then copy the files from username.original into the encrypted home:
    mount /dev/mapper/chome /home/username
    cp –a /home/username.original /home/username

14 – Close the volume
    cryptsetup luksClose /dev/sdb1

15 – Reboot Eee PC and log in as normal.  If you get errors about permissions on then repeat step 11 and then type chown username.username /dev/mapper/chome and then try again.

If using with Ubuntu-eee then because USB_PERSIST is not fully configured if you suspend the EeePC it will loose it’s connection to home on the SD card when it is woken up again.  On Eeebuntu 2 this issue does not occur and suspend works as you would expect.

The free service comes with 2GB of storage space, which is very generous and you can really make good use of this especially if you have an netbook with limited storage space such as Asus EeePCs.  If more space is required then an upgrade to a Premium account will give you 50gb of storage.

The great thing about the Dropbox service is that it not only allows you to upload or download files from your secure storage space via a clean, uncluttered and easy to use web based interface but it also allows automated background file syncing to a folder on your PC.

Dropbox provides executable for Windows, Linux and Mac that will create a folder on your computer, e.g. “My Dropbox” and will then run as background services and will automatically upload the contents of this folder to your secure storage area.  Any amendments made to these files either via another computer linked to the same Dropbox account or via the web based interface will automatically be downloaded to the “My Dropbox” folder thereby replacing the older version of the file.

The Dropbox service allows netbooks and other computers to use the Dropbox service to keep important files in sync between multiple computers whilst still allowing access to the files when offline.

Dropbox allows the user to selectively share folders with other Dropbox users or make them publicly accessible to the rest of the world.

Should you accidentally delete a file from you Dropbox folder the web client will allow you to restore the deleted or older version of the file.

I have been using Dropbox to keep files in sync between my EeePC netbook running EeeBuntu Linux and my desktop Windows XP based PC without any issues for the past couple of months.  I no longer need to carry a USB memory stick with me all the time and can even access my files from other PCs without any trouble at all.