6. Utilities Menu

Some other important programs are included in the Utilities menu. You get Virtual Network Connection (VNC) for remote control, a basic calculator and a PDF viewer.

Configuration

In the Configuration page, you can prepare your USB memorystick / keychain. This will put a .auditor file on the keychain, which will contain some persistant settings. When you boot the ASC with the prepared keychain in the USB port, the .auditor file will be read and your settings will come back. You will also be able to save other information to the keychain. We were able to save the screenshots that we took to our USB Cruzer keychain.

Figure 9: Settings and files can be saved to a USB flash key

Even though the ASC detects most network and wireless interfaces, you still have to configure them with settings such as IP address, SSIDs, and WEP keys. The configuration menu makes this easy by providing intuitive menus. One nice feature is that the network interface configuration will automatically come up after you setup your wireless SSID and WEP keys.

The last option is very interesting as it actually will install all the operating system and all the programs to the hard-drive. This is still somewhat experimental and we did not test it out.

Documentation

Almost every one of the networking tools has documentation. The ASC makes life easy by putting the documentation in the main menu bar. If you are used to command line, you can open up a terminal window and look at the MAN pages directly. The documentation is a great learning resource as some of these tools are not well known.