Ubuntu distro for Asus Eee PC 901?

Hey, so I just recently bought an Eee 901 (Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM, 4GB SSD soldered, 8GB SSD attached) netbook, and I've been searching on different distros of Linux that I could use on there instead of Windows XP.

The thing is, though, that there are a LOT of distros specifically tailored to the Eee, including the official Asus one. That one, though (which is a customized Xandros OS), has lost all support from Asus, so I'm looking more towards the Ubuntu flavors.

There's Ubuntu, eeebuntu, eeeXubuntu, and a whole bunch of other ones. I'm curious: do any of you have any experience with these or with the 901? If you do, which one would you prefer? I'd ask this in a more Eee-centric forum, but... honestly, the technical lingo is just way beyond me. Me, I'm a Linux virgin, so yeah. Any help would be great.

Thanks a lot, all.

 

I've tried a couple of distros on mine. They tend to have the "netbook remix" interface applied, which is cute for a little while, but at the end of the day, the screen is still 1024 pixels across, and the gnome bottom panel isn't that fat, so all the simple interface does is make it look and feel like a toy, when it really is a fully fledged computer. It also has some very annoying behaviour with fullscreening things that shouldn't. If your eyes are half good, setting the fonts to 96 DPI helps with maximising what you can see on screen, I think some versions set it to a bigger number making the fonts easier to read, but have the end result of making it worse by forcing you to scroll so much more, and again make it just look like a toy...

All the annoying stuff can be disabled though, resulting in essentially a default Ubuntu with a custom kernel, which kind of leads to where I'm getting: the best solution I found was just to load a stock standard copy of Ubuntu on, then add the Array.org repository: http://array.org/ubuntu/

To actually get it on there, the main problem is that 8.10 doesn't support the wireless by default, so you need to use an ethernet cable to add the repository and download the customised kernel. Instructions are really easy to follow, and you end up with less preinstalled stuff to have to remove than most of the other distros out there. God only knows how many dodgy patches and hacks these derivative Ubuntu varieties have applied.

That said, the next version of Ubuntu is officially released in just a few weeks, promising better netbook support right off the bat. I'm not sure how it will go with the hotkeys and power management stuff, but once it is released I'll be giving it a whirl on mine. Hopefully Mono isn't so deeply ingrained that it can't be removed, else I'll end up putting something else back on the same day.

The way I've done it is to shift Windows onto the 8GB drive (as a 4GB partition), use the 4GB drive as / and use the remaining 4GB of the 8GB drive as /home. The SD card slot can also be taken advantage of as additional storage, so even with keeping Windows on the computer to demonstrate to people how much shittier it runs isn't too bad with space.

 

Gah. Sorry for not coming back to this thread.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the useful info. Not only did it pertain to what I wanted to know, you managed to make it bite-size enough that I could understand almost everything.

Huzzah!

That said, my netbook should be getting here either today or tomorrow, so I'll test out your suggestions then and get back. Thanks again, OzMick.

 

So... just to make sure I'm correct on this, a lot of those custom Ubuntu's (eeebuntu, Ubuntu Eee, etc.) just have a lot of unnecessary junk on 'em?

How about hardware support out of the box? I know that's been discussed all over the net to death by now, but since you say you've actually worked with all (or most) of the different distros, which would you say has the best built-in support?

This is the part that actually confused me. What's up with the "/" and "/home" stuff? I'm guessing it has something to do with the Linux filesystem or something, but it's a real head-scratcher.

Anything on that would be great. Thanks again.

 

By unnecessary junk, it is stuff that you may find useful such as skype etc (would be handy for someone unfamiliar with all the different programs available on Linux), but I would rather be given a minimal set of programs and install what I want. Some may also try to skimp on space, so may install something like abiword, when I'd rather have the entire OpenOffice suite on there. I also don't like the Mono project or Tomboy or F-Spot, and you don't need DVD burning software unless you have an external USB burner.

Hardware support by default should be just fine with any of the eee distros. Notably, the 901 has a different wireless chipset to the earlier models, and I think the touchpad is different too, but only a very minor inconvenience. A customised kernel takes care of everything, so you shouldn't have any dramas if you just check what the distros claim to support. http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewpoll.php?id=64869 As you'll see, there is no distinct "best" distro, the best thing to do is have a play and learn. The more you play around, the more you'll know what is important to you and how to configure.

As for / and /home... Linux doesn't work with drive letters like Windows. The alphabet puts a limit on the number of drives possible, and for other reasons it is just a dumb, primitive concept. In Linux, EVERYTHING is a file essentially, and everything is one big tree under / (root). If you need an analogy, think of C:\ as the equivalent of /. /home is like C:\Documents and Settings, where all of your private files live, so it deserves to have a reasonable amount of space. Linux is designed to support multiple users, so you're best off not fighting it and putting things only you need in your own home folder (a shortcut to which is ~ ). In Windows where each drive has a letter (C:, D, in Linux you have a mount point. You can mount a drive to any folder you like. So where you might have a D: used for TV, on Linux you can put it somewhere like /tv or /home/michael/tv or anywhere you like. Linux is flexible.

You should also know that Linux by default separates users and administrators, 99%+ of the time you'll be working as a user with restricted privileges. The super user on Linux is also called "root" (just like how Windows didn't invent control-alt-delete, they only made it "popular", the origin of the "rootkit" term that Windows made popular, thanks to Sony, comes from the concept of getting root, or administrator privileges). This user separation is also what makes virus propagation particularly difficult under Linux, if a system is infected, it will generally only affect a single user account, leaving all other users and the actual computer itself fine, all that needs happen is the user account be reset and all is fine, unless something extremely nasty has taken hold with administrator rights, which are considerably harder to escalate to on Linux than Windows, where a lot of users run as administrator by default, and a lot of software demands administrator rights.

Get your hands dirty and just have a play around. Look at it as a hobby at first, there is a bit of a learning curve, so forget most of what you know about Windows, get a live CD, play around, have some fun. You sound pretty switched on and can actually write in proper English, if you need help we're happy to lend a hand if you're prepared to have a go and try to learn for yourself too.

If you want to do some reading, there are plenty of Linux tutorials on the net.

 

Thanks, OzMick. I've been messing with a Live USB for the past day now, and I've got one last question:

How would I go about cloning my current Windows OS to my other SSD? I know it involves imaging and then doing stuff and stuff there and some more stuff, but it's still a bit mind-boggling. At least to me.

So any suggestions? Thanks again.

 

The DVD that comes with the Eee has a copy of Ghost on it and a clean default Windows image too, from inside your preexisting Windows install you can run that, and then put a fresh image from the DVD onto the other drive. There are also ways to boot from a USB drive with Ghost on that, allowing you to clone the existing drive, though I've never particularly bothered with working out how.

You can also install partimage in the Ubuntu live USB session, though I don't think it comes preinstalled. It behaves pretty similarly to Ghost, and as you're not accessing any drives, can image the existing Windows and duplicate it to the other drive. Partimage is also able to do backups to/from network drives, just need to have them mounted as you would any normal Windows (samba) or NFS share.

Before removing the existing copy, be absolutely sure that the newly transferred one is working. Change backgrounds and make sure that both work independently, you'll need to play around with the boot order in the BIOS.

 

Cool. That's a lot of great advice. A few more questions, then:

1.) Is it possible to partition my 4GB USB drive so that I can boot both Ubuntu and my backup of Windows? I know that unpartitioning doesn't erase files, but I'm worried about getting rid of the single 4GB partition, splitting it into two partitions (one 1GB for my Live USB, the other 3GB for Windows), and no longer having my data. Paranoia, I know, but still. Any way to get around that, d'you know?

2.) Actually, I think that first one's the most important one right now. I can probably figure out using Ghost and/or partimage by myself.

EDIT:

Actually, I remember my question. At the bootup menu, I usually see both the SSDs and my USB drive. Perfectly normal; I can boot my Live USB just fine. However, both of the SSDs are named the exact same thing. "SSD something something," "SSD something something," and "USB Kingston DataTraveler."

Any way to change up the SSD names? Through the setup menu, perhaps?

 

I tried the exact same thing, but had no luck. Don't let that stop you though if you're determined. The problem comes from the fact that Windows loads USB drivers after the main boot sequence, not as part of it (or something to that effect). So when the USB stick you're trying to boot attempts to load up the USB drivers, the USB bus resets and... There are a whole bunch of tutorials that claim to work, but not so much for manipulating an existing install in the way we're interested. http://www.ngine.de/article/id/8 is where I drew some inspiration from. Only leaving 3GB for the Windows partition might be cutting it a little close too. If you own a full copy of Windows, you might have more luck with nLite'ing your installer disc (loads of discussion on the eeeuser forums too): http://www.nliteos.com/nlite.html

I understand that there are ways that aren't to convoluted to put the restore image and Ghost on a bootable USB stick, so it is hardly the end of the world if you do accidentally nuke everything.

Performance won't be outstanding on the Eee, but if you're interested there is a program called Wine that can be installed to Linux, which will allow a lot of Windows programs to run. I'm just playing Oblivion at the moment, and have played a couple of the GTA games (SA, VC) to completion under it, so there is a good chance that any really vital programs might just run. dosbox is also useful for really old DOS programs/games. If there is anything you run on Windows that you can't find an equivalent for in Linux, shout out, there usually is something, it might just be a bit harder to find.

 

...yeah, now that I think about it, I'll probably just stick with the one OS... No incredibly important files on here, anyway.

Before I install Ubuntu, though, how would I go about wiping my drive? Any hard drive wiping software out there? Which sounds incredibly contradictory, now that I think about it, but oh well. A USB-booted wipe, perhaps. I've got a copy of WipeDrive, but it's on CD, and I don't have a USB CD drive.

Anyway, I'll probably just wipe both drives, install a fresh copy of Ubuntu off my USB stick, connect it to the net and download the custom... kernel... or whatever it was you first linked me to, and then work from there. The only game I'm really interested in putting on there anyway is Medal of Honor and its expansions, so I don't think I'll be needing Wine at all. (WINdows Emulator, I'm guessing?)

One last theoretical: Since it's possible to boot directly off a USB drive, is it possible to simply copy this system to the USB and use that as my primary drive? I've read some guides saying it's possible, but... eh, you know. Never hurts to ask. If not, then that's fine, too. Can't hurt to just have Ubuntu on there and mess around with it.

 

You can just get a large SD card and install Ubuntu onto there. It will run slower than if you put it onto the internal drive, and I believe there can be problems if the computer goes into standby, something to do with the USB either being powered down or reset. By rights there shouldn't be any data loss as everything should be flushed out first, but an inconvenience. That said, if you just turn off suspend and get in a habit of shutting down fully, the boot speed probably isn't so bad.

No need for any external disk formatting utilities, all distros have this built in as part of the installation process. Ubuntu has a nice graphical installer that lets you pick how you want things done, so relax. If you're talking about the kind of wipe that generates random data, I would strongly advise against using it on the Eee - the hard drive in the Eee has a limit to the number of writes to each sector. Normally I'd not care too much about the life span of it, but a GOOD disk wiper will do something like 30 passes across the whole drive, which is a bit excessive for the Eee. If you've got something sensitive, just destroy those individual files. The SSD in the Eee also moves information around so that individual sectors of it wear out evenly, so there is probably no guarantee that a wipe will even wipe the sectors you want it to when using a tool designed for traditional hard drives.

If you want to see if something runs OK in Wine, look here: http://appdb.winehq.org/ , although it does look like MoH:AA has been ported to run natively (Quake III engine would help with that!). Never been big on FPS, so no idea beyond what a single Google query brought up. I think that Wine officially stands for Wine Is Not (an) Emulator, it is actually just a clean room open source reimplementation of the Windows APIs, so there isn't a massive amount of overhead involved as in a normal emulator where instructions have to be translated. There is also a project to completely build a Windows compatible OS, based upon the work of wine, ReactOS. Don't hold your breath waiting for it though, they keep moving their targets, but maybe given another 5-10 years it will be good for when Microsoft is extinct and legacy apps need somewhere to run from.

 

Wow, that's... very interesting stuff, the part about ReactOS and Wine. That's really cool.

Anyway, I'm sticking with XP for just a while longer, until I can figure everything out. It's actually not TOO bad, but still... Ubuntu looks like it'll be more fun. Plus the games on there are a hell of a lot better than Solitaire!!!! and Hearts!!!!

About the only thing I'm worried about now are the four hotkeys above the keyboard... but I'm sure there are ways to configure those to do what they did in XP, except for maybe the over/underclocking feature. Unless you know of anything.

But that's that. Thanks again for all the help.

 

I've only ever bothered with turning wireless on/off myself, the Array.org kernel should enable all the buttons, but they may not do what you want unless you tinker. That said, with a little tinkering, you can make them do ANYTHING you want them to, such as opening favourite utilities etc, I've never really had need for any of the silver buttons I think... There is a program in the repositories that are added with a tray utility, through that you can enable/disable bluetooth, wireless, camera, memory card, and can change power state/clocking. I think that tray utility was written by Asus themselves for the distro they provide on some Eee models so is full featured, and being open source, everyone else is able to benefit from it.

 

Okay, OzMick. I went your way and put Windows onto the 8GB drive as a failsafe in case I completely freak out Ubuntu. I managed to work everything just by copying the entire drive over using xxClone.

Anyway, one problem I encountered was keeping the entire 8GB drive partitioned for Windows. Bad on my part. If you've got any tips on repartitioning it without having to boot the USB again (though I could certainly do that... it wouldn't take too much time), that'd be great. I'm looking up some guides online as we speak, as well, but most of them have to do with rebooting the Live CD. I'll see if I can figure something out, though.

And as for the Asus repositories, you think you'd be willing to give me a thorough guide through the installation process? Like, explaining what the various Terminal jargon means. "Sudo" I figured to mean something like admin access, but some of the other stuff from what little I did (which was mostly just installing the custom kernel) was more than a little confusing.

I know it's asking a lot of you, and I should just search through the net myself, but it IS a daunting task learning how to program and junk without any sort of "formal" teaching environment.

Anyway. Thanks again.

EDIT:

A few more questions: Upon powerup, I get taken to the OS boot menu.

I've got a slew of options here:

- Generic kernel (and safe mode or whatever)
- Generic kernel (again, also a safe mode)
- Array kernel (safe mode)

- Under "Other OS" or so, the XP

1.) Why are there two "generic" bootups?

2.) The XP should be on the second hard drive, so it shouldn't even be an option. Or is it just the Eee accessing all OSes on all drives?

3.) Any way to get rid of one of those generic bootups? It's a pain having to manually select the EeePC one all the time. (And on the tail of that, would getting rid of BOTH generics let me boot automatically to Ubuntu without having to go through the OS screen again? (If I want to boot Windows, I'd press Esc at the beginning and select the second drive.)

I'm fearing that I already royally screwed myself. Heh.

 

The live USB is probably the easiest, otherwise just install GParted:

Code:

sudo apt-get install gparted

And then in in System->Administration->Partition Editor you should be able to intuitively do what has to happen.
"sudo"... Ubuntu doesn't have a normal administrator account, it instead has a group of users who can temporarily run instructions as an administrator, which the first account is always a member of. The traditional way of switching users in a terminal is to run "su [username]", or to just become root, "su". Ubuntu just makes you use "sudo [command]" to run the one command as administrator (thus su + do, to do something while switching user). So whenever you see something that starts with "sudo", you're running as administrator (known as root). So be careful, but don't be afraid, don't do anything stupid involving the command "rm -r" unless you are absolutely certain of what you are doing etc.

You can in fact do all of this through screens, but it is a lot easier to give command line instructions than to tell people to click here, open this tab, type this, say yes to this, no to that... It makes things look hard, but it is actually pretty easy once you understand the individual instructions. From a terminal you can type "man [instruction]" such as "man wget" to find out what things are doing.

Code:

wget [url]http://www.array.org/ubuntu/array-intrepid.list[/url]

Downloading the repository information for where your new kernel is hosted, along with the other Eee specific stuff. Just getting the details, not installing just yet... You could just browse to that file and save as, "wget" just downloads a file from an address.

Code:

sudo mv -v array-intrepid.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

Add the repository into the list to actually use... MUST be root, we don't want any old person jumping on your computer and adding a repository that isn't trusted.

Code:

wget [url]http://www.array.org/ubuntu/array-apt-key.asc[/url]

Downloading a digital signature for the repository, so that downloaded files can be checked as being genuine

Code:

sudo apt-key add array-apt-key.asc

... and as root again adding this signature as trusted, don't want just everybody to do this.

Code:

sudo apt-get update

Updates the cache of known packages, including the repository we've just added.

I know, we've all been there. And you've had a go, which is good to see, so happy to help, and hopefully you stick at it and help a few other people see the light yourself!

Two generic options: one boots normally, the other "single user" or "recovery mode" should drop you into a terminal as root. Useful if things are broken or you forget passwords etc, as you don't need to enter any passwords, but dangerous if someone you don't trust has access.

The XP option: Linux doesn't stomp all over everything like Windows. It recognizes that Windows exists, and lets you have the option of using it. No harm done if you ignore it, but saves having to go into the BIOS to use it if you want to!

Using the Eee one by default: You'll need to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst, and being a key config file, you'll need to be root. We'll use gEdit, so from a terminal, "sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst"
There will be an entry near the top "default 0". The options that come up normally are numbered from 0 up, so change that to a "2" and you're probably set with the default option. If you don't want the menu screen up for long, change the "timeout [X]" number to a lower number of seconds. If you don't want to see the screen at all, you can create a new line that just says "hiddenmenu" (hit escape before the timeout is reached and you'll see it, so set the timeout to 1 or 2 and you'll hardly notice. If you want to password protect the menu so that entries can't be selected or edited without a password that can be done too, but won't go into just now.

Hardly! Sounds like you're going pretty well. Good luck!

 

OzMick, I just went ahead and got rid of the Windows OS altogether, and I reinstalled Ubuntu and did all that good stuff and now everything's working honky-dory.

A few things, though (of course):

When I access the menu, I don't see anything. It's just a blank screen. What's up with that?

On a completely unrelated note, my brother decided to put Ubuntu on our old Pentium 3, and he can't get the Ethernet working. He said he downloaded the Ubuntu driver for it, but he doesn't know where to go from there. It's an ".exe" file.

EDIT:

A few more questions on top of that.

1.) We figure he has to run Wine to install it, right? If so, will he have to always keep it open or some such thing?

2.) Never mind, figured it out.

3.) The thing about the kernels is that after installing Adamm's kernel, there seems to be one more "generic" kernel that gets installed. So there are three kernels I can load: the eeepc one and two generic ones. I'm not sure which one is the original, though. I want to make sure to keep at least one of them, just in case anything freaks out on me.

 

Can you explain what you mean there? Is it blank when you're editing through gedit, or when the computer is booting? If you put in the hiddenmenu option, it doesn't display the menu at all, if that is what you refer to.

You don't need wine. Wine is only to run programs, not drivers. There is a very, very good chance the ethernet card he has is supported, but it isn't detected. Can you please get him to type in a terminal:

Code:

lspci

and post the output. This just provides some information about the devices in his computer, from that should be able to work out what has to be done to bring his card up. There is a good chance that a kernel module (a driver) just needs to be manually loaded. I did see before with the "apt-get install xxxx.exe" attempt, nice idea, but the whole apt-get thing only works with programs that are in the activated repositories (such as the one you added above). Only the tip of the iceberg, but all part of the better security model than Windows, only things in the repositories are trusted and installed in a straightforward manner, so no need to visit all sorts of questionable websites to download executables.

Editing the menu.lst file doesn't forever remove the ability to boot from them, so don't panic. And I actually completely removed the old kernel myself to save a bit of hard drive space. The beautiful thing about the live CD/USB is that if you do accidentally break anything, you can often just boot up with the USB, edit the text file etc and you're back in business, the live USB is as much a tool to fix and test things as it is to install.

If you just want to make them disappear from sight, try putting a # symbol at the start of each line for the options you want to disappear. If you want to know which one is the correct one, you'll notice on the lines that start with "kernel" one should have the word "single" at the end - this one is the one you want to HIDE. I think I kind of described the "single user" or "recovery mode" thing previously.

 

Mick .. n00buntu..

sudo su- XD

and lspci -v would be better

 

Well, it opens up gedit, but there's nothing there.

1.



2.



As for the P3 issue, I'll pass on the word and update you.

(I'll try both "lspci" and "lspci -v". Thanks, varnull.)

EDIT:

Pictures. And also, is there a setting I need to configure to allow my computer to upload pictures? I couldn't seem to do it on my Eee, so I had to switch over to another computer.

 

The file is /boot/grub/menu.lst

A bit of a tip for the command line: try pressing the Tab button to auto complete file names and directories. One press will fill in as much as it can, either the whole file name or the common letters at the start, and a second press will print out what the different files/directories sharing that starting pattern are. Saves making a lot of typos on file names, and can make crawling around directories on the command line much faster.