Asus eee PC and Ubuntu

Installing eeeXbuntu

I downloaded an ISO of eeexbuntu (http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ubuntu:eeexubuntu:home) and burned to CD.

My first thought was to boot the cd as a livecd and install from there. This does not seem possible at the eee does not seem to recognize the usb cd as bootable. Here is what i did:

1. Plug in an ethernet cable
2. Press F2 while starting up to enter the BIOS
3. Goto Boot, Hard Disk Drives and set the USB CD-ROM first
4. Goto Boot, Boot Device Priority and set the USB CD first
5. Goto Boot settings and disable Quick and Quiet boot
6. Save and exit the BIOS
7. When booting press ESC for boot menu

The problem is the boot menu only contains two choices, the internal ssd and the usb/ cardreader. The card is still a vfat partition with just files on it so it can not boot. It is interesting that you can set the card reader to be the 1st hard drive and then set the
removable device to be the 1st boot priority. This should mean you could install to the 16 gig sd card and boot from it using the internal 4 gig for storage. You would have to gparted the sd card as ext2 most likely but it is an idea...

As for now - we need to create a bootable USB stick. The web site list a number of methods so we will try those next.

Making the Bootable USB

We boot an spare ubuntu machine using the burned cd of eeexbuntu. It comes up as a live cd and we do:

1. Select “Start or install Xubuntu” at the boot menu
2. Select Applications, Accessories, Terminal from th xbuntu menu
3. At the terminal prompt we type:

   sudo /cdrom/mkusbinstall.sh --autodetect

Which runs a shell script to set up the USB drive as a bootable device. The script runs and asks us to Insert the flash drive, which we do and it now formats it with a parted /dev/sda1 set 1 boot on command and starts copying files.

We ignore the one cp error message about the checksum file not being found. Once this is done we remove the usb stick and place it in the eeePC.

Booting the EEE

We boot and press F2 to go to the BIOS. We change the boot device priority so that Removable Device is first. In the hard disk drive section there are now 3 drives listed - the internal ssd, the usb stick as 2 and the cardreader usb as 3. We make the USB stick the 1st Drive and press F10 to save the setttings.

We reboot and up comes xubuntu so we select the first option live/eeepc, on the menu and the liveUSB stick starts loading and the x desktop appears.

Installing

We double click the install icon and the ubuntu installer appears. The Ubuntu graphical installer is too large to fit on the screen. To accept a setting press ALT F to move forward to the next screen and ALT B to go back. You can also holding down ALT and drag the installer around.

The main decision is when the gparted partition tool runs. We want to format and to install on the sdhc without a swap partition. We have 1 gig and plan to upgade to 2 gig.

We select manual. The screen lists the following partitions:

dev/sda which is the interal 4 gig ssd has sda1, 2467 mb, sda2, 1513 mb and sda3 and ads4 which are both 8mb. The sdhc card in the slot is /dev/sdb which has sdb1 with 16066 mb and the usb stick is /dev/sdc1.

We select /dev/sdb1 and choose ext2 as the file system with a / mount point and click OK. We decide to leave the ssd partitions alone for now. The idea is if we boot off the sd we can also gparted the ssd later. The result is an error:

"File System has an incompatible feature enabled"

Ok, after some reading i decided to make this a primary ext3 partition with a / mount point but the same error message turned up. We went back and deleted the existing partitions on the internal ssd and created a primary ext3 with a / mount point and selected the sdhc as ext2 with a /home mount point. This was ok. When we go forward it asks us about swap space because we did not create a swap partition. The reason is that a swap needs to be as big as the physical ram and a 1 gig swap on a 4 gig ssd doesn't make sense. We select continue and press enter.

The system sets up the partitions and formats them and installs. When finished we reboot and remove the stick and press F2 to change the bios settings back to quiet and to make the ssd the 1st hard disk.

The system comes up the the xbuntu logo but then the file system check fails and a maintenance shell is opened. We press CTRL D to close the shell and resume booting and login at the prompt.

We get a message ' battery may be broken' and there are 171 updates available. There are also 4 desktops, which seems a bit much on a netbook but it might make sense as each app could be full screen. CTRL-ALT-left/right will move between the 4 desktops

Fixing the Problems

The default installation leaves a line at the top of /etc/apt/sources-list that references the Xubuntu CD. This means that if you try to install some packages apt-get will fail because it can't find the CD. To fix this open a terminal and do:

sudo mousepad /etc/apt/sources.list

and put a '#' in front of the cdrom line. Next we remove the power manager and use the Battery Status Plugin from XFCE:

sudo apt-get remove gnome-power-manager
sudo visudo

and followed the rest of the instructions at:
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ubuntu:eeexubuntu:customization

Note:
The eee has a really neat built-in BIOS upgrade utility. Just put the new BIOS on a USB stick, rename it to 701.ROM, hold Alt-F2 at boot, and it will perform a BIOS flash automatically. The utility is built into the BIOS itself. Or you could make a bootable DOS USB stick, put the flash utility and BIOS image on it, and boot from it. There's no need to with the built-in utility, though.

Well, it's taken all evening and the results are not perfect - many dialog boxes are set to a fixed size (windows also does this) and thus hard to use. I must say i'd rather have a netbook that worked with the standard ubuntu distro - you would think this is a selling point - maybe cannonical should start issuing 'Works with Ubuntu' stickers like those win95 and xp stickers microsoft used. The machine would be so much better if they had removed the webcam and speakers from the lcd panel and made the screen bigger it would have been 1" wider and over half and inch taller making a 800x600 resolution and so avoiding the problems. This could be done without changing the nice form factor.

I looked at a Dell mini 9 and in fact made the purchase until the checkout - they had some new program with mastercard in which i had to sign up and remember some number for all future online purchases. What brainiac thought that up? Make things more difficult to buy, gee what an idea...so i cancelled at checkout and left the cart. Wrote Dell to explain why they lost the sale.

Update

Well, i was not happy with xbuntu and did not want to waste more time with ebuntu or easy peasy. So i decided to restore the original os. Since i had reformatted the internal ssh which contains two 8 mb hidden partitions for the auto-restore (press F9 at startup) this is not as easy. Here is the procedure

Restoring the OS

1. Put the system DVD in a windows machine and run the Restore utility
   
2. Place a 2gig minimum USB stick in the windows machine
   
3. The software formats the stick into a bootable system
   
4. When done put the usb stick in the eee pc
   
5. Start up the eee PC and press F2 to go to the BIOS
   
6. Change the os install setting from Finished to Install or Setup
   
7. Goto the hard drives setting and make the USB stick the 1st hard disk
   
8. Set the USB stick to be the 1st device in the boot devices list
   
9. Press F10 to save the settings and restart the machine
   

It should now boot up to the usb stick and ask you to install. Type yes and away it goes. When it is finished:

1. Reboot the eee pc and press F2 to enter the BIOS
   
2. Change the OS install setting to FINISHED
   
3. Change the hard drives so the internal ssd is 1st
   
4. Change the boot priority so that the internal ssd is 1st
   
5. Press F10 to save the changes and restart
   

Now the system should come up and ask you to create and account, choose a time zone, etc. Then you can go to settings and re-install the updates. On the plus side this fresh installation runs much faster than the install it came with and the desktop update now works. On the minus side - why does every install require a reboot? Linux installs rarely require reboots, that is more a windows 'feature'.  Another minus is that if you want to re-use the usb stick you have to reformat it with the asus update utility which sets it to a fat16 partition, however once that is done you can then reformat the stick in windows as fat32.