Before I begin, a couple of notes:
First, I’d like to publicly acknowledge D. D. Tannenbaum as the first person to actually leave a real substantive comment on Whipped Cream Difficulties. (There was one spam comment before his, which I guess makes some sort of pathetic statement about the state of the Internet.) Thank you, sir.
Second, another size comparison:
That’s my (somewhat beat up, as I’ve been toting it for a while) copy of Learning Python, 3rd Edition. As you can see, the eee is only slightly larger than the book; you can’t see this in the photo, but it is substantially thinner. I wanted to get a weight comparison between the two as well, but I don’t have a scale that will work well for that purpose; manufacturer’s quoted weight for the eee is 2.9 pounds.
On to The Ubuntuing.
There seem to be a fair number of choices for Ubuntu based netbook friendly distributions. I decided to go with the Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix for what I think are two good reasons:
- Official Ubuntu support.
- John Wells, who’s done a detailed and excellent guide to installing Ubuntu Jaunty on the eeePC 1005HA and 1008HA. I don’t recall what combination of search terms I put into Google to find this, but I’m glad I did find it; I ended up following the instructions on that page to the letter. Mr. Wells, if you’re reading this, consider it a public endorsement and thank you.
The entire process took about three nights, not because of any real problems, but mostly time issues. I spent most of the first night just downloading the Ubuntu Netbook distribution. (I was also working on a couple of other things in the background; laundry, and upgrading the internal SD card in the N800 from 4GB to 8GB. Actually, I outsmarted myself trying to do the latter. I imaged the 4GB card, then used Disk Utility to restore the image to the 8 GB card. Problem with that was I I ended up with a 4 GB partition on the 8GB card, and 4GB of unpartitioned card. In retrospect, I should have just mounted the 4GB image and done a drag-drop to the 8GB card. Easy to be smart later.)
The second night was pretty much all verifying the MD5 hash of the image, setting up the Ubuntu USB boot disk, and doing the actual Ubuntu install. There’s excellent instructions for the first two steps on the Ubuntu site; again, this is just a matter of the steps being somewhat time consuming (especially the USB disk setup, which took a little longer than I expected). Likewise, the actual Ubuntu install was fairly straightforward, merely time consuming.
One of the two minor problems I ran into during the install was setting up the eee EFI partition; I was able to allocate 16 MB for the partition, but no matter how I configured it, I ended up with unusable space. If I added the EFI partition before the home partition, everything after it was marked as unusable. I ended up creating the home partition last, and leaving 16 MB of unusable space at the end of the disk; I still haven’t figured out how to use that space to set up the EFI partition, but I’m not really very worried about that. The EFI partition is just present to speed up the boot process by caching BIOS information, and I haven’t noticed Ubuntu taking a long time to boot.
The other minor problem I ran into was setting up the wired networking, and that was entirely my fault; the instructions on Mr. Wells’s page work great, but it took me a few minutes to realize that the last command is sudo insmod atl1e.ko (note the 1) not sudo insmod atlle.ko. Once I figured that out, wired networking worked without problems. (Something else that threw me for a loop is that the sudo make install command terminated with an error; it appears to be a minor error that involves writing something to the man pages, and doesn’t seem to impact the wired network functionality.) I do have to re-execute the insmod command every time I reboot if I want wired network functionality; I haven’t figured out how to make that a permanent fix. (I’m also not too worried about that, as I don’t plan to use wired networking that much, and I expect this to be fixed in the next version of the Netbook remix anyway.)
Likewise, with wired networking set up, downloading the backports package to get wireless networking working was a snap.
The third night was pretty much just doing Ubuntu updates and going through the last few steps on Mr. Wells’s page; installing the tray utility and setting up the touchpad and hotkeys.
One thing I did notice over the course of the third night (Thursday) was that the wireless networking went to heck in a hand basket; the connection to my network kept dropping after a few minutes and refusing to reconnect. I’m not exactly sure what was going on; I ended up doing most of the remaining steps using the wired network. But by Friday night, I was able to take Project e over to the home of some friends I was meeting for dinner; I noticed no instability on their wireless network, or on my wireless network since then, or on the wireless network at my parent’s home in Dripping Springs (where I’m composing this post now). (I suspect a possible connection between installing the wired network driver and the wireless connectivity issue, but I haven’t been able to establish this yet.)
As a side note to the above, this entire post was composed using Project e and the tools that shipped with the Ubuntu Netbook distribution (including the F-Spot Photo Manager for importing and editing the above photo). The touchpad and keyboard are taking a little bit of work to get used to, but the entire experience has not been unpleasant.
Additional side notes:
- While wired and wireless networking took a little work, I’m impressed that Bluetooth and the built-in webcam worked out of the box. Suspend/resume also works very well.
- I’m actually not annoyed by the Netbook Remix Interface; at least, not yet.
- Ubuntu performance seems more than reasonable; downright jaunty, as a matter of fact.
Next steps:
- I’d like to take the memory up to 2GB and set up an external optical drive. That’s probably a couple of weeks away.
- I need to get the Alfa WiFi adapter I bought at DEFCON set up and working; not as a substitute for the internal WiFi, but part of the reason behind this purchase was so I could work with long range and higher power wireless connectivity in a high-speed low drag form factor.
- I also need to start installing some tools, such as Wireshark and Kismet.