Helpful bits for eeePC users that want Ubuntu

1. Get Ubuntu Installed.

To get the ball rolling, you’re going to need a way to install Ubuntu on your shiny new eeePC.  If you don’t have a USB CD/DVD drive laying around, all is not lost.  You’ll first want to download the Ubuntu Hardy Desktop x86 iso, either from the Ubuntu Website, or a torrent, or whatever.  In the end, you want to have an ISO to work from.

Next, hit the UNetbootin site and download the latest UNetbootin.  Get a USB flash drive formatted with the FAT32 filesystem, at least a 1GB drive please.  The Ubuntu install unpacks onto the drive to the tune of about 700MB.  Fire up UNetbootin, point it at the ISO you downloaded, tell it which USB drive to write the image to and wait.  Go get a cup of tea, or something.  Come back in 5-10 minutes.

Plug that thumb drive into your eeePC and turn the system on.  Tap gently on the ESC key several times, until presented with a boot menu.  Select USB: from the list and boot away into the Ubuntu livecd installer.  Now just do what comes naturally.  Read a bit about your particular system’s setup first, to make your life easier down the road.  For example, my eeePC 1000 ships with 2 SSDs inside, an 8GB and a 32GB.

I left the /dev/sda3 and /dev/sda4 partitions alone (the BIOS loader partition and an EFI loader partition, respectively), and created a single /dev/sda1 partition with what space was available after removing partitions 1 & 2.  This is mounted on /, as fs type ext2.  I’ve got the larger SSD split into a 30GB /dev/sdb1, mounted on /home as ext2 and left the remainder unpartitioned (for the moment).

Let’s stop and talk filesystems for a minute.  Why ext2 and not ext3, xfs or jfs?  As much as I’d like to use a journaling filesystem, those cause more write operations than a non-journaled fstype, such as ext2.  And as we all know, flash devices have a finite lifespan for write operations.

2. Kernels, Drivers and Flash Drives, oh my..

If you’re on an eeePC 901 or 1000 model, after you reboot, there will be no working network for you.  This is easily remedied, thanks to Adam M.  Hit his site, get the kernel and modules debs, toss them on a flash drive, connect the drive to the eeePC, install & reboot into that new kernel.  Voila, now your onboard Ethernet (Attansic) works, as does your Wifi (Ralink).  Log in and get that stuff all setup, per Adam’s docs.

3. More Flash Life Prolonging…

What writes to the drive constantly without mercy?  Syslog.  You want syslog to stop doing that.  Don’t worry, it’s pretty painless..  Open your /etc/fstab, as root (use sudo or gksudo along with the text editor of your choice) and add these 4 lines:

tmpfs        /tmp         tmpfs    defaults    0    0
tmpfs        /var/tmp     tmpfs    defaults    0    0
tmpfs        /var/log     tmpfs    defaults    0    0

After saving, reboot.  You’ll now occasionally see errors about files in /var/log missing, or something like that, but are you really that interested in reading the log files on your netbook?  If you need to really capture log data from it, either add a small SD card mounted on /var/log, or send your syslogs to a syslog server over the network.

4. Hotkeys

On the eeeuser forum, there’s a great thread, started by elmurato, which is all about getting the various hotkey combinations working on your eeePC.  I used his “new” scripts on my eeePC 1000 and it all worked fllawlessly.  There’s really not much to say here on this.

5. Disk Encryption

I tried using full disk encryption on my /home, but personally found it far too slow for everyday use on a machine this small.  If you want to go this route, be warned, performance delays will come along for the ride.  You’ve been warned.

Log out, and drop to the console, login as root (if you haven’t set a root password yet, do a sudo passwd root before trying to log in).  Do a ps -fu <yourusername> and make sure you’ve killed all remaining processes belonging to that user that hung on after you logged out.  Now, in order:

cd /home
tar -cvf /root/<yourname>.tar yourname/
cd /root
umount /home
modprobe aes-i586
modprobe sha256
modprobe dm-mod
modprobe dm-crypt
luksformat -t ext2 /dev/sdb1
cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb1 home
mount /dev/mapper/home /home
cd /home
tar -xpvf /root/<yourname>.tar

Next, update your /etc/fstab to mount from the correct spot.  You’ll change from mounting /home from /dev/mapper/home, rather than the UUID=…. entry.  Next, you’ll also need an entry in /etc/crypttab like:

home    /dev/sdb1     none     luks

This entry creates a /dev/mapper/home that uses the physical volume of /dev/sdb1 at boot time.  During the boot process, you’ll get prompted for the passphrase that you set way back when you did the luksformat.  Lastly, don’t forget to add the aes-i586, sha256, dm-mod and dm-crypt modules to your /etc/modules file.  Since you don’t boot from /home, no need to worry about re-creating the initrd with the right files in it.