netbook + ubuntu

[amezri]

Greetings from Pevensie! It's the new family netbook. Well, actually, it's mom's netbook, but I can borrow it if I need to.

Pevensie is an Asus Eee PC 1000, 40GB SSD (actually 8GB and a second 32GB SSD), and 1GB RAM, running an Intel Atom processor. The system comes preloaded with a Xandros distro which, after playing with it for an hour, I decided was pretty annoying. Trying to tweak things was nearly impossible and it was difficult to do normal things like figuring out how much space is being used and setting up other user accounts.

Last night I downloaded Easy Peasy 1.0, an Ubuntu distro modified for netbooks. All reviews said this was the best for the current netbook line. So, what the heck, it didn't seem like that big of a deal to set it up. After the .iso finished, I created a bootable SD card.

This morning, I popped the SD card in and started the install. My first snag? Figuring out the partitions. A stop at the Easy Peasy/Ubuntu Eee forums let me know that I should set it all up manually. Once that was done, the rest was really easy. within the hour, the OS was installed and the machine was up and running. I updated things that needed updating and fiddled with some custom settings.

From the Ubuntu Eee forums:

If you have two SSD's then DON'T use guided. Use the manual partitioning.

You first create a new partition table, then select the 4GB drive and create a new partition, make it primary, and use the beginning option, set the mount point to / and choose the EXT2 file system instead of the EXT3.

Then select the 16GB drive and create another new partition, go ahead and make that one primary as well and also use the beginning option, set the mount point to /home and choose the EXT2 file system on that partition as well.

Then when you get prompted to make a swap partition just ignore that and continue.

I hope this helps you out and remember that if you use the guided partition when you have two drives you might not be able to use the second drive.

There was also the issue of it asking to install every time I logged in. For each user account, log in -- go to Preferences -> Sessions -> Remove Ubiquity.


A number of users expressed concern that once installed, the wireless wasn't as effective as it was in the Xandros distro. I haven't seen that problem at all and the only weirdness I noticed was sound output being low, but that was fixed a bit in volume properties.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with this netbook once Easy Peasy was installed. I think this is a pretty neat little piece of tech to take on trips when I don't want to drag around a full sized laptop.

Comments

[xpashax.livejournal.com]

That's the exact laptop I'm saving up for. 1.8ghz is plenty of power for what I want to do with it on a daily basis. Got my desktop for the gaming. My only concern is that the keyboard will be too cramped, but I was able to get used to my Workpad z50 so I'm sure I'll adapt to the EEE.

[amezri.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that the keyboard is a bit cramped, but probably something one could get used to with frequent use. The two finger scroll on the touchpad is pretty neat. I think you have to fiddle with a config file to get the horizontal scroll and zoom to work, but I don't think I'm going to try that. LOL