Skin of Stars

Now doesn’t that sound like a bad book title? Or even something from the Harry Potter series, which incidentally I’ve just finished listening to the audio books as read by Stephen Fry.

Anyway, i digress. Following on from my previous two EeePC posts, firstly on adjusting the default desktop, then on changing to a full KDE desktop, I’m going to spend today talking about removing the whole Xandros OS and installing Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. Lets first recap as to why we’d want to do this. The Xandros OS that comes with EeePCs is woefully out of date. Open source, and especially desktop Linux, is a fast moving beast. Where one day setting up wifi or connecting to a VPN or playing a DVD may be difficult in Linux one day, the following will not be true the next day. So having a system which feels a few years old and struggles to keep up seems pointless, and in my opinion explains some of the return rates found with Netbook Linux editions. As a further struggle on EeePC, the simple mode is a nightmare to tweak, especially considering those things that we want to tweak should really be done for us anyway. So what I propose is that we update with arguably the easiest and most widely supported distro out there, Ubuntu. I’m going to keep the actual method very succinct as there are 101 tutorials out there (links at the bottom). I’ll stick with what to do and what to avoid:

Ingredients
* Copy of Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Desktop. It’s fine to get the Long Term Stable Hardy if you like, but I do recommend the new one.
* Unetbootin for putting Ubuntu on your USB stick
* Ahh yes, the spare USB stick of 1gb or more

Method
Open Unetbootin with your USB stick stuck in your machine (you don’t have to do this on your Eee). Unetbootin gives you the option of downloading straight to your USB from the web, but we’ve already downloaded our distro so we just need to select the Diskimage ISO radio button and browse to our downloaded file and hit OK (This is another one of those things you used to have to do manually in the past, ahh the advances of technology *sigh*). It will tell you when it’s done.

Next we safely remove our hardware (unmount in Linux parlance) and plug it into our little Eeep. Press the power on button and start hitting F2. This takes us to the BIOS menu. I had loads of problems getting this to work right, you have to go to the Boot tab and make sure that your USB key is top of the list in the boot device order (this just means where the computer checks first for an operating system, all computers have this). This is what caught me out, you need to check in both the Boot Device Priority settings AND Hard Disk Drives. for some reason it changes with each consecutive boot which one you need to change, so check both. Save and exit (F10 I think, but it should say).

You should now be booted into an Ubuntu desktop. We’ve not done anything irreversible yet, so for now we can just play. You’ll notice that your WIFI and webcam isn’t working yet, that’s because you don’t have all the drivers you need. That can be fixed once you have installed.

So, let’s assume we are brave and we are going on with the install. Most things you just need to follow the instructions, but here is where I shall give you a little advice. At the partition stage do not use guided, use manual. There are two hard drives in the Eeep, for the smaller of the two (4GB) it should be just system files. You want to set aside 100mb for mountpoint /boot and the rest for mountpoint “/” (known as root). The other hardrive you want a swap the size of your RAM, 1GB in the 901 (some places say twice the size, but one should be ample) and the rest for /home, where all your personal files will be stored. I’ll assume you have finished the rest of the install without issues.

Now we have rebooted into our new Ubuntu system we need a little moding to make everything work just right. First and most importantly you need the Array.org Kernel. There are instructions on the site as to how to get it. This will fix such things as WiFi, webcams and hotkeys. After that I recommend adjusting the layout to better suit the screen size. This is very easy to do by right-licking the panels and modifing to suit your needs. Here is mine:

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A quick recommendation of some things to avoid.
* Don’t use a specialist distro like ubunu-eee. I know it makes things look easy but you’ll be in trouble if they stop supporting. Standard Ubuntu is stable and here to stay.
* Avoid using user made scripts that claim to ease all your woes. They may just cause you more problems than they fix and because you didn’t do each bit yourself step by step you won’t know how to fix it.

Now, here are some of those tutorial links:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/installing_ubuntu_8.04

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=51041

In my blog post the other week I discussed how to use the terminal to add software to your EeePC. Though this is the simplest approach we find that we come across certain disadvantages. Firstly, the only way to launch our newly installed software is to type it’s name into the terminal. It is possible to adjust the interface and add icons to desktop by editing the simpleui.rc file. Let us be honest though, this is not exactly what we want to be doing – editing config files is so 1970s. Infact, this whole simple desktop layout is a little on the weak side. What we want is a full desktop environment, with start buttons, automatic adding of new programs to menus and all sorts. This is our plan for today.

Once again we shall need our trusty terminal, so first things first hit Ctrl+Alt+T. Now enter the following:

wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/eeepcrepos/key.asc

sudo apt-key add key.asc

rm key.asc

With these three lines have downloaded a trusted key, added it to our software manager (apt) and finally removed the file. Next job is to add the software source which the key corresponds to. So enter sudo kwrite /etc/apt/sources.list into the terminal and add the following line to the bottom of the file:

deb http://download.tuxfamily.orgeeepcrepos p701 main

Save and exit. Then type sudo apt-get update into the terminal. Now we are all set to install the full desktop. Into the terminal we shall type:

sudo apt-get install advanced-dektop-eeepc

Now to try out our new desktop we just have to press our power button, you will then find a new icon added to our logout menu saying Full Desktop. Hey presto, we now have one of the most powerful desktop environments available in the open source world, KDE 3.5. This is a system that easily rivals the Windows interface in versatility and power, yet still has a similar feel to more common desktops.

Now we know how to add new programs, modify our interface and even get a decent desktop to our little Eee. Well, that is all just great, but for me (and perhaps you dear reader) this is just not enough. The Xandros distribution that comes with this machine is just not modern enough, for example it still comes with Firefox 2, which is sluggish compared to it’s latest iteration. I have also been having problems with connection to certain types of WPA2 at my university which apparently is tied to Xandros. What we need is a thoroughly modern operating system, installing that shall be the subject of my next EeePC post.

Firstly, my apologies for missing last weeks post. I was having a delightful holiday in Italy with various members of my family and the g/f. Lovely it was, we stayed in a Trullo and a fun time was had by all.

Before I left I got myself a new computer, a netbook of the EeePC 901 variety. After consideration of the various flavours of netbook available (Acer One, MSI, different types of eee)I carefully selected this for the following reasons: a) Atom Processor, I saw little point in getting another Celeron as I would want this for working and so to have at least a little bit of spunk. b) 20GB SSD, you get more hard drive space if you select.. c) Linux pre-installed. I guess it was obvious I was going to get a Linux version, I see no point in paying more money for lower quality equipment just to have XP, especially if I’m just going to remove it anyway.

As Tony has previously pointed out, these machines come with a restricted user interface (they are for newbies after all). So with the machine barely out of its box it was time to start nudging and adjusting. Here’s what we want to do: add more software, customise the interface in the normal mode and if we want to go further see how we can get a more traditional desktop.

First thing you need is access to a terminal so you can use the command line. This would often be the very thing that people new to Linux would want to avoid, but if you want to feel like the machine is working for you rather than the other way around then a bit of time at the command line is just what the doctor orders. Fear not, there is nothing too demanding here, just press Ctrl+Alt+T. There, now isn’t that hard to see?! One of the points of any Unix-like system is choice, there are many paths to follow that can get you to the same endpoint, in this instance the terminal offered (xterm) is very hard to see with the small screen. You can change it quite easily to the more user friendly konsole:

sudo update-alternatives –config x-terminal-emulator

Select konsole and the next time you Ctrl+Alt+T you’ll get a terminal where you can adjust font size as well as the colour scheme.

Now to have the choice of adding software. Xandros, who built the eee’s distro, is based on Debian, and as such means there is a lot of software out there for it. We now have to add the repositories (a central server where all the software is held) to our list of sources. Grab your trusty terminal and enter the following to pull up a text editor

sudo kwrite /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add the following to the bottom of the file

deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/u[kg-srv2 etch main contrib non-free

Save and quit, then in terminal run

sudo apt-get update

After that you can install new software using the Synaptic package manager by typing

sudo synaptic

from the terminal.

The problem now is that you can only access the programs you’ve installed by typing their name into the terminal. What you really want is to add icons to your usual interface. These will have to be added individually to a configuration file… but I think thats enough for one day. I’ll post the method for that and how to get a full desktop later in the week. In the meantime I’d suggest having a browse through the eeepc user wiki.