Spent a bit more time with Ubuntu 8.04 on the Eee [UPDATE: running that for ages. Updated this post now that I have re-installed the thing with Ubuntu 9.04]. The thing seems fully functioning now, hooray! So how do you get there?
- In the BIOS, set the hard-disk order to prioritise the USB drive (not under “boot”, but under disk order (iirc)
- boot from a ubuntu Live USB, install to the big harddisk (this’ll leave you Xandros on the small disk)
- Restart, install the eeepc kernel from http://www.array.org/ubuntu/index.html
- Tweak, twist turn and floptimise: follow the instructions at www.array.org or http://wiki.eeeuser.com/getting_ubuntu_8.04_to_work_perfectly?s=hardy
- Just in case your microphone is not working, check http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=33794
- Comment out the cdrom entry in /etc/fstab — it gets in the way of automounting USB disks in Ubuntu
- Get all of your packages in full on there:
- Shell: zsh
- Editor: vim (instead of vim-tiny)
- Text-writing / work: LaTeX (texlive package)
- Conversion tools: psutils (psnup/psselect/…)
- Version control / work: Subversion
- Online movie playback: totem, totem-mozilla, totem-xine (ignore totem-gstreamer, it plays WMV’s frame by frame) [update: not needed any more? works out of the box in 9.04]
- Music: XMMS (the old package!)
- offline movie playback: mplayer
- VoIP: Skype.
- Software config tweaks:
- Put a launcher on the desktop for gnome-terminal with zoom=.7
- Change all font settings (right-click on desktop, properties-> fonts) from 10 to 8 points
- Add ServerAliveInterval 240 to $HOME/.ssh/config (to prevent idling out)
- Fix zsh keybindings:
- bindkey “\e[A” up-line-or-history
- bindkey “\e[B” down-line-or-history
- bindkey “^A” beginning-of-line
- bindkey “^E” end-of-line
- bindkey “^?” backward-delete-char
- fix Firefox backspace button behaviour:
- surf to about:config
- change “browser.backspace_action” to 0
- Skype: fix the sound settings (the defaults are broken since 8.10 apparently) [update: this is still crappy in 9.04, but in a different way. Hope Skype will come out soon with a new version with better sound support]:
- Incoming Sound: HDA Intel (hw:intel,0)
- Outgoing Sound: pulse
- Calling: pulse
Quirks noticed so far:
- The “mute sound” key sometimes does not mute sound, but it will show the muting/unmuting picture
[Edit: posted a help-request here]
[edit2: found out that if you change the sound device to the realtek, the mute will work — until you press another key. Apparently, after that, the sound device setting is forgotten. No workaround yet.]
[Update: this works in Ubuntu 9.04 out of the box (with Adamm’s kernel)] - Received video in skype sometimes stalls a bit (that happens on other systems too) and then suddenly defaults to a tiny window. Doubling the size of this doesn’t matter. Have noticed once that after another stall, the effect disappeared again. Could be related to the feeding webcam “hickuping” the feed, wouldn’t know why though.
- BIOS update warnings:
Some of the default settings in the BIOS might get in the way. Example: boot order (not in the BIOS “boot order” menu by the way), webcam (turned off by default. :S).
Solution: upon upgrading BIOS, check for quirks! - Fn-keys: the Fn-F5 also doesn’t work out of the box (it duplicates the effect of the mute key actually, while it ought to be switching displays).
[Edit: workaround: use xrandr –auto] - Non-Eeeebuntu, but still weird:
The time in Xandros (original OS) is off by 2 hours. Setting time so far did not get me a permanent solution. Changing time in the BIOS did not help (although that used to be off by 2hrs too).
[Edit: probably caused by the interaction between 2 os’es and the BIOS on my machine. Every time I set time on the one os, it is off on the other os.]