After having owned my EEE 1000 (linux version) for a few weeks now, I have become obsessed with getting the perfect setup.
The onboard OS Xandros is ok, but I got bored with it after 5 minutes and just didnt feel as nice as Ubuntu has on my other machines. The boot time is pretty good and it ‘just works’, but thats about all it does.
Instructions
First thing you will need is a USB stick (pref 1gb+) and a way of getting Ubuntu onto it. The distro I went for was Ubuntu eee (Hardy Heron 8.04), but you could use stock Ubuntu(Gnome), Xbuntu (XFCE), etc.
Once the ISO is downloaded, use something like unetbootin to make the USB stick bootable and copy it over. More instructions for this can be found here.
When you have a bootable stick, reboot and hit escape at startup to get the boot menu, choose USB and wait for it to load up.
Once in you get a desktop (as this is a live distro after all), with a single ‘install’ icon. Run this and click through until you reach the partition section. You can either wipe the lot so its just ubuntu, or keep xandros on there for the other half / incase you break anything.
Then setup your user account and press go. It will now start to partition and install.
Once that has done, reboot and you have a fresh copy of Ubuntu. Unfortunately not everything will work, you are initially without working wireless and ethernet, amongst a few other things.
The eeeuser.com community seems to think the easiest way to get it all up and running is to install a custom kernel.
To do this we need to manually download the two packages
- linux-image-2.6.24-21-eeepc_2.6.24-21.39eeepc1_i386.deb
- linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.24-21-eeepc_2.6.24-21.30eeepc3_i386.deb
and put them onto the eee and run them. Using the terminal, navigate to the directory where you saved the two .deb packages and use this command.
sudo dpkg -i linux-image*.deb linux-ubuntu-modules*.deb
Reboot, and you should have a new entry in your GRUB selection. Choose this. When you are booted up you should have net access, so now its time to update your repositories.
wget http://www.array.org/ubuntu/array.list
sudo mv -v array.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
Install the Array.org repository public key:
wget http://www.array.org/ubuntu/array-apt-key.asc
sudo apt-key add array-apt-key.asc
sudo apt-get update
Finally you need to install the remaining eeepc-optimized kernel components
sudo apt-get install linux-eeepc linux-headers-eeepc
This should have pretty much everything working except the Fn hotkeys, so see how to activate them here. That page has some other useful bits on it too.
Once you have a good working install, back everything up with info from here
Things that now work
- Sound
- Shutdown bug
- Compiz
- Webcam
- Wireless
- Ethernet
- Fn keys
- Multitouch
Things that dont
Filed under: Geeking by mort
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