Ubuntu on EEE PC

A few weeks ago I set out to upgrade Ubuntu on my EEE PC 901 from Intrepid to Jaunty. It was an, um, interesting experience, so I'm jotting down these notes for next time. Upgrading from Update Manager was not an option, because my root partition was not big enough to host the upgrade. The 901 has a 4GB SSD that I'm using as root and an 8GB (or 12GB) SSD that I've put /home on. It turns out that 4GB is OK for running a modern operating system, but a little short for updating it.

The usual procedure for upgrading is to use the official ISO images to boot from. As always you need a USB stick, or an external optical drive. I settled for the former, as you can see below.

The good news with Jaunty is that a special netbook edition is available for download. With previous editions you had to start with the desktop edition and do lots of tweaking, to arrive at a satisfactory result. With the netbook edition however things were unbelievably smooth. Everything worked out of the box with my EEE PC. Well, almost everything, but I will get to that in a while.

The first step after downloading the ISO (for the security paranoid at least) is verifying the download:


$ md5sum ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img
8f921e001aebc3e98e8e8e7d29ee1dd4 ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img

Then, we can write the image to the disk. I used Ubuntu ImageWriter (package usb-imagewriter) from another Ubuntu PC:

That went very smooth. Next step was booting the EEE PC with the newly formatted USB disk. Hitting ESC on boot, allows one to change the boot drive sequence. If this is the first time you are replacing the original OS, you probably need to disable Boot Booster from the BIOS first.

The installation process is quite simple. The only important thing was partitioning in my case, since I wanted to preserve my /home partition intact. Last time I installed Ubuntu I went with ext2 filesystems, trying to squeeze as much life from my solid state disks as I could. After doing some more research on the subject, I decided that I'll probably throw away my EEE long before the disks begin to wear out. Either that, or I'll throw an SD card in the expansion slot. Life is full of choices, particularly on the $300 range.

So I selected manual partitioning and chose ext3 for my first SSD. This is a screenshot from my first attempt. No, actually it was my second attempt. I screwed up the first one. Turns out I screwed up this one, too. See if you can spot why.

It may not be that obvious, but swap should not be on the first disk. If you are using swap at all (and I know many suggest that you don't), it would be a better choice to put it on the second disk. With 1GB of RAM, swap should be at least 1GB, which leaves only 3GB for Linux. The default installation needs something north of 2GB, so that leaves less than a gig to install software you use. Unless of course you are planning to play symlink tricks, in which case I should probably offer my condolences. Anyway, I ended up chopping 1GB with gparted from the second disk and redoing the installation again, but fortunately you won't have to.

What you should definitely do however, is put aside 16MB of space in the first disk for enabling Boot Booster in the BIOS again. This is an ASUS feature that persists the BIOS configuration on the disk, shaving a couple of seconds on each boot. It may not seem much, but think about how many times you are going to boot this thing. If you add them up, it starts to matter. Boot Booster needs only 8MB of disk to function, but I found that the installer's partition editor would only allocate one cylinder for 8MB, while we need two. Using 16MB did the right thing.

The regular customization I always do is to put /tmp and /var/tmp on tmpfs, so that many common operations don't touch the disks at all. Put the following lines in fstab to do that:


tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noexec,nosuid 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noexec,nosuid 0 0


After editing /etc/fstab the proper way to remount these file systems is by following these steps:

1. Log out of the Ubuntu desktop in order to minimize the number of open temp files.
2. Press CTRL-ALT-F1 on your keyboard. You should see a login prompt. Login with your usual user/pass.
3. Clear out the files in the existing /tmp and /var/tmp directories.
   sudo rm -rf /tmp/* /var/tmp/*
4. Mount the filesystems using tmpfs.
   sudo mount /tmp
   sudo mount /var/tmp
5. Reboot the EEE PC.
   sudo shutdown -r now

Next, from the boot-as-fast-as-you-can department comes another tweak. In /boot/grub/menu.lst set "timeout 0" in order to skip the kernel selection delay. If I ever need to boot a different kernel, I'll change it back to something larger, thankyouverymuch.

1. Log out of the Ubuntu desktop. (Yes.. I said log out. This will go a long way to ensuring the fewest number of temp files are currently open.)
2. Press CTRL-ALT-F1 on your keyboard. You should see a login prompt. Login with your usual user/pass.
3. Clear out the files in the existing /tmp and /var/tmp directories.
   sudo rm -rf /tmp/* /var/tmp/*
4. Mount the filesystems using tmpfs.
   sudo mount /tmp
   sudo mount /var/tmp
5. Reboot the EEE PC.
   sudo shutdown -r now

Now in order to enable back Boot Booster follow these instructions for configuring the small partition we created earlier. When you reboot make sure to enable the option in the BIOS (it will be hidden when the proper partition isn't found).

Now you are all set. At least if you have no use for WPA-secured WiFi. Because if you do, you'll hit a bug with the included rt2860 driver. The details aren't that interesting, but the available options are two: either use the array.org kernel or patch the driver. The former solution used to be necessary with Intrepid, since lots of things were not working with the default kernel. However after trying out both, I don't see much need for Adam's kernel in Jaunty, unless you are terrified when encountering patch, make and their ilk. Since I'm on first name basis with them, I went with the second option, hoping that a future kernel update will bring along the fixes.

All in all, the process this time around was very easy. Almost easy peasy. My EEE PC with Ubuntu Netbook Remix makes me almost forget that I'm not on my beloved Mac.

Almost.