Hacking Express gate (Asus Splashtop)

[supamoe25]

Oh sorry Kano... i had to read more carefull.

Will test it to night when i'm at home.

so long...

[Kano]

A little hint: when you converted the IMG to be used in Vbox for testing then you have to delete the splash.idx file before flashing it into the onboard usb storage.

[Rael]

Terminal in ExpressGate

Hi,

Can any of you post a set of instructions (step by step) so as to get the terminal working in express gate? I have read Drosky's posting but is a bit confusing to me.

Thanks in advance,

Got a terminal working in express gate. There was an xterm binary in /bin, but it didn't run due to a missing shared library. I copied over an rxvt binary from Puppy Linux. I don't yet know how to create a launcher for it in the normal panel, so I started it from xinitrc and it works great It's now much easier to poke around.

The file manager that is installed with express gate is brain damaged so you can only view USB storage devices, so I also copied over ROX, which works fine other than using default icons, since I didn't bother copying over all of its data.

Next project might be to get mplayer working so internet videos besides just flash can be viewed, maybe also xpdf to be able to view pdf files.

[Amarus]

This is somewhat outside the thread's scope but I have a question:
Is it somehow possible to replace Express Gate with another *nix distro?
I'm dual booting Vista (I need it for university) and Ubuntu on an Asus laptop (M51Va) and it would really be great to boot Ubuntu right away just by pressing a different button instead of using a bootloader. I know it wont be exactly an instant-on but I don't care that much.

Although I'm studying Informatics Engineering (Computer Engineering in some countries), I'm still rather noobish in the land of the *nix. But I found this thread really interesting and I'm planning to experiment around with this stuff.

Thanks in advance.

[Mangust]

The music player is not included in ExpressGate v1.3.3.1; I managed to find it when I used ExpressGate for Asus laptops; sorry I don't remember the version; all I did was to copy the file on my USB that has ExpressGate; for you it will be ASUS.SYS folder. The file is va-music.sqx, The music player can play only files that are stored on you computer.

Can someone send me this file va-music.sqx? I've searched the web but I can't get it anywhere, and music player is a good thing

[simw]

COnfused about express gate!

Hi

I'd be really grateful if someone could help me out here. I have an
M3A78-T mobo which comes with Express Gate (the non ssd type i think) which is fine, but... I currently just have Windows XP on my system drive (which Windows calls drive H for some reason) and want to install ubuntu on it (as a dual boot system pref controlled by GRUB) but I'm not sure if having express gate will cause problems. My original plan was just to uninstall express gate, install ubuntu and then reinstall express gate. Alas I can't uninstall express gate (when I try I get an error saying about an invalid Drive: C:\ - which of course is because there is no drive C. I guess the s/w is trying to uninstall some stuff from drive C expecting that's where it will be and getting confused because it's not there on my machine).

Any way, what do you think will happen if I just try and install ubuntu on the drive and ask ubuntu to sort out compressing my drive and creating any partitions it wants to in the process in the normal way?

Secondly, is there some easy way to update the express gate (the windows based update mechanism also fails because of the invalid drive error).

Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Sim

[Kano]

Does not matter, at all, the splash.idx file is only searched in case of hd install express gate. Be sure you use a recent version of it however because older versions expose apache networkwide on port 1080 - with full drive content.

[Forgedreality]

Hello. I just registered today because I can't seem to find any information on this anywhere, and you guys seem to have done considerable work with Expressgate.

I have an Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard, which has its ExpressGate located on the SSD.

I downloaded the latest update, and extracted the zip. I then renamed the .DFI file to .GZ and extracted that using WinAce.

I now have an .IMG file, but I am unable to do anything with it. Do I need to be running linux to actually access/modify this file? I would like to add additional screen modes, a terminal, and possibly other applications, but I'm stuck where I'm at because my version of ExpressGate appears to be quite dissimilar from the hd-based versions.

Any help anyone can provide would be GREATLY appreciated. Thank you.

[Kano]

I never had a system with direct support for Expressgate, that means that ExpressGate has for your system a currect model entry. Not sure that you can override those settings the way i used for the custom way. The IMG needs to be stripped like i showed it in another thread, also you need a relatively old squashfs tool, so basically you could use Kanotix Thorhammer to do that. Not that easy to do without Linux experience.

[Forgedreality]

I never had a system with direct support for Expressgate, that means that ExpressGate has for your system a currect model entry. Not sure that you can override those settings the way i used for the custom way. The IMG needs to be stripped like i showed it in another thread, also you need a relatively old squashfs tool, so basically you could use Kanotix Thorhammer to do that. Not that easy to do without Linux experience.

I have used Linux quite a bit, and am fairly comfortable with unix-based commands, but I don't have a linux install to work with at the moment. I was dual-booting between Ubuntu and XP for quite a while, but I ended up removing the Ubuntu OS because I didn't see much point in having XP and Ubuntu when a main use for my computer is gaming. :\ It's unfortunate because I believe it to be a far superior OS in many ways, but its lack of support is frustrating.

Anyway, assuming the .img file I have is the same format as the other version of EG, I can load the file in a hex editor and remove the first 48 bytes, correct?

I have never tried the Thorhammer distro, but I suppose I could give it a shot if there were no way to modify the files in XP.

edit - Thanks for your response btw. :P