GPG is an open-source implementation of the PGP encryption standard, useful for encrypting and signing digital communications. Think sending a letter in a sealed envelope rather than a postcard.
I’m currently using MacGPG 1.4.9 along with the GPGMail extension to the Apple Mail application on OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard). At present, GPGMail is incompatible with OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). The installation is fairly simple, but can be confusing for those unfamiliar with PGP/GPG. I’ve outlined the process below.
- Download and install MacGPG. The disk image opens a graphical installer.
- Import your keypair, or create a new one. (If you don’t like the command line, GPG Keychain Access provides a nice GUI to do this)
- Download GPGMail. This adds GPG functionality to Mail.
- Quit Mail
- Launch the GPGMail installation script.
- Restart Mail. There should be a PGP screen in Mail > Preferences.
Your public key is relatively useless if nobody else knows what it is. I suggest making it available using a system like the MIT Public Key Server.
Before I went travelling I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my EEE because I wanted something relatively stable and that I was familiar with. Now that I’m back, I want to hack around with it a bit so, so yesterday I installed Arch Linux on it.
There is a pretty comprehensive guide to installing Arch on the EEE which I followed for the most part. Between that and the beginners guide, the installation and initial configuration were relatively straightforward. I installed from the 2009.02 FTP USB image, using a wired ethernet connection to download the required packages during the installation phase, but the EEE wireless card was supported “out of the box” on the first boot (after selecting the wireless-tools and netcfg packages).
The base installation was simple enough after a bit of reading. However, configuring Xorg almost drove me mad! After spending most of the day reading through the ArchWiki Xorg article, I finally came upon the (partial) solution of ignoring the xorg.conf file completely and relying instead on the startx command and the hal daemon. This left me with a couple of problems related to the keyboard layout, but did give me an X11 environment capable of supporting Gnome.
Installing Gnome was as simple as typing pacman -S gnome, but I’d recommend installing the gnome-extra package too while you’re at it, as the gnome package is pretty minimal to say the least!
I had no problems with sound or the internal microphone, and following the ACPI section of the guide enabled the hotkeys, OSD and power button to function correctly.
I’m still tweaking my setup here and there, but the system seems stable so far. It was a lot more work than simply installing Ubuntu or Fedora, but I think it was worth it to get a smaller, faster system running on the EEE’s (quite limited) hardware.
