Popagandhi

A short field report + the painless way of getting Ubuntu working

I picked up the 8G version of the insanely popular Asus Eee PC while on holiday in Taipei last December, the same model that’s been in short supply everywhere else except Asus’ motherland. The Taiwanese version of the Eee PC comes in traditional Chinese out of the box, and there are Chinese characters on every key. Not a big deal — once you switch it to English, if you know how. Salespeople at any proper Taiwanese shop stocking the Eee PC will be able to do this for you, especially if you can’t read Chinese (but really it’s just editing some lines in a config file).

Out of the box, the Eee PC loads a custom version of Xandros Linux. It’s designed to be a simple and easy OS that anyone can use, perhaps too simple and too easy. It’s fine for a day or two, with everything you’d need built in: Firefox, Skype, Open Office, various utilities, but the striking similarities to Fisher Price computers will gnaw at the heart of the geek until he/she relents and (a) enables advanced desktop mode for Xandros Linux, to get a proper operating system or (b) installs Windows XP © installs another flavour of Linux, to get a proper operating system that doesn’t suck (in short, that isn’t Windows XP or Xandros). I went with (a) for a month, having been too busy and unmotivated to get around to putting Ubuntu on it like I’d planned. Xandros drove me nuts. I hated everything about it.

So I decided to put Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) on it for real. But first, lacking an external CD drive (the Eee PC doesn’t have one) and unwilling to borrow or buy one, I decided to go with the flash disk installation option. Secondly, my primary computers run Mac OS X. I don’t have in my possession, or within my proximity, any Windows computers. Most of the available tutorials online for Ubuntu installation on Eee PCs assumed you were running Windows/Linux. I decided to forge ahead anyway, figuring a half-broken Ubuntu install is possibly better than a proper version of Xandros, which I could no longer stand.

The journey towards putting a great operating system on a great little machine wasn’t as straightforward as I would have liked. There are now some custom options such as eeexubuntu, but I wanted a full default Ubuntu install. The first step was to get a USB flash drive that would boot Ubuntu.

The following assumes your primary “other” computer is a Mac with an Intel processor, and that you have a USB flash disk of at least 1GB. My installation was performed with a 2.0Ghz MacBook, and a 4GB Imation Nano flash drive. Most of my steps were mixed and matched from some truly great resources for the exact same task (mostly the one at Pendrive Linux, Sample the Web and the Ubuntu community), but I had only achieved success through trial and error, as will be described in the following steps. You don’t need to be a geek or a Linux expert (I’m not, I’m just good at following instructions), anyone can do this as long as they’re reasonably… technically literate.

1. Download Gutsy Gibbon (Desktop edition, Standard personal computer). This is a .iso file of approximately 700MB.
2. When you are done downloading the .iso file, Open Disk Utility. Click Burn. Browse to the .iso file. Insert a blank CD and burn.
3. Switch your Mac to a wired Ethernet connection, if you’re using Airport. Wifi won’t be working in Ubuntu when you boot into it, and for some reason it seems you need to be connected to Ethernet before you boot into it. Just do it.
4. Now you have a Live CD of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. Insert it into your Mac, and restart. At the startup chime, hold down the “C” key. This will boot your Mac from the CD, and your Mac will bootup into Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. If this takes a considerable amount of time, don’t worry. It’s fairly normal at this point.
5. Once inside a Live session of Ubuntu, open a terminal window (Applications>Accessories). Type: sudo su to gain superuser access. At this point, you should probably print out a copy of this page at Pendrive Linux, because you’ll really need it.
6. Follow steps 4 to 20 at the Pendrive Linux tutorial carefully. It’s too long to reproduce here. Follow very carefully. I had to repeat the whole process several times because I kept making careless mistakes at some point (I’m too bloody impatient).
7. If you make it as far as step 17, congratulations. That long mumbo jumbo you just typed out (cp -rf casper disctree dists install pics pool preseed .disk isolinux/* md5sum.txt README.diskdefines ubuntu.ico casper/vmlinuz casper/initrd.gz /media/ubuntu710/) was really just a command to copy all the necessary files from the CD into the flash disk. It will take a while to write approximately 700MB of files from the CD to the thumb drive, so give it some time, you’ll know it’s ready when the size of the flash disk stops decreasing (in a file manager window). Because I’m so damned impatient I ended up with an incomplete version on my flash disk and had to start over.
8. Complete steps 18-20. Once you get to step 20, restart, remove CD from Mac, boot back into OS X. Remove flash disk, and insert into Eee PC.
9. Power on Eee PC. At the boot screen (the one with the horrible grey/white splash screen that says “Asus Eee PC”), hit the Esc button immediately. This will give you the option to select booting from the flash disk. Select that.
10. If at this point, if you get a blank boot screen, you probably didn’t carry out the steps in the tutorial carefully. The first time I did it, I removed my flash disk from the Mac while the files were still being copied. If at this point you still can’t boot into Ubuntu, it may be a syslinux issue. I ran into this problem, and got around it by editing the isolinux.cfg found in my flash disk at this point, and removing all references of /casper/ and /install/. For example, kernel /casper/vmlinuz should be edited to simply kernel vmlinuz. Once you’re removed all references to /casper/ and /install/, save the file as syslinux.cfg. This should do the trick.
11. If you manage to boot into Ubuntu on the Eee PC, that’s not all. Start up a Live session of Ubuntu from the flash disk. Once in, click Install, and begin the installation process. You’ll find that because of the Eee PC’s 7″ screen and its resultant lack of screen real estate, you’ll have trouble seeing entire windows. Throughout the entire installation process, to navigate to the “Forward” buttons, simply hold down “Alt” and drag the window upwards.
12. Important point to note. When asked about the partitioning of disks, go for “manual” rather than “guided”. You’ll have to make a few custom options. The wisdom of the crowd suggests: not having a swap disk (if you look at the partitioning table, it’s there as sda2, sda5 or something like that, and labelled ’swap’ — just remove it), and choose ext2 rather than ext3. This is to ensure optimum performance for the Eee PC, avoiding too much writes since the Eee PC’s storage medium is a flash disk. Set your primary disk (mine was labelled sda1) to ext2 by right-clicking and editing it; make sure its mount point is set to / instead of /media/sda1.
13. If your installation was successful, remove flash drive and boot Eee Pc normally. You’re still not done. Make sure your Ethernet connection is still connected to it. You’ll notice several things are broken: the Fn keys don’t work, you can’t increase or decrease volume or mute using the keyboard shortcuts, wifi obviously doesn’t work, and you get a worrying notice saying “battery is broken”. Ignore all that.
14. There are several ways to fix these, and I did most of this through typing in too many things in the command line. But because I’m a lazy ass, and no amount of my command line kungfu (or the lack of it) could solve the issue that was wifi and window movement (you’re not able to alt-drag windows if they overflow now, in a default install, and no amount of tweaking which worked with everything <7.10 could solve this) — but a nice package of scripts over at ubuntu-eee fixes the main issues, including wifi and the inability to move windows upwards. The script will also resize your fonts and icons to a size that will greatly benefit your 7″ of precious real estate. Download the package, put it into your flash disk or memory card, then open a terminal and install it in two blindingly simple steps. You’ll notice things changing a bit on your system.
15. Reboot. Once you boot back in, the world will be a better place, and the starving children will have been fed, because Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon now works like a dream on your Eee PC, which now no longer has horrible Xandros. Well, for me anyway.

Your mileage may vary, but at this point I do consider Ubuntu to be the most usable desktop Linux (and I’m not alone I’m sure). Note that a full install is almost 2GB, so on my 8GB Eee PC I still have some disk space leftover, but if you’re running on the 2GB or 4GB models I’m sure you’ll consider distributions with a smaller footprint. For now, I quite like the idea of having this tiny little thing running a proper, grown up Linux. I am aware of the possibility of putting Leopard on it but (a) I don’t want to breach Apple’s EULA (b) apparently wifi doesn’t work © I don’t want to run Leopard off what is admittedly an underpowered processor with just 1GB of RAM (and the other versions only have 512MB). Gutsy Gibbon suits me fine for now. I was dabbling with Linux long before I discovered OS X; today, I’m pleased to have a great desktop Linux on a great little machine. With the MacBook running OS X as my primary machine, and the Eee PC running Gutsy Gibbon, I don’t think there’s much else I need, computing-wise. All Eee PC owners should head to the indispensable Eeeuser.com website, wiki, and forum. This thing is so light (0.9kg) and tiny that when I toss it into my bag, I scarcely realize it’s there, and yet it’s a real computer with a real operating system — in the size of one of those made-in-China DVD players. It’s the most perfect thing.