Clogging The Tubes

I’ve been running the release candidate of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) on the netbook (the Netbook Remix, or UNR edition) for a couple of weeks and, with only a few minor niggles, it’s been going really well. It’s reasonably fast, stable and very usable.

Since the final version is released today, I figured I should install it from scratch. The issues that I had with the RC version (mostly related to sound recording in Skype) still seem to be there (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks) but since I have an external USB plantronics headset to use, this isn’t such an issue for me.

So, for those of you who’re interested, here’s how I went about installing 9.04 from scratch on my Acer Aspire One netbook, armed only with a 4GB San Disk Cruzer USB flash drive (£7 from Tesco) and my main Windows Vista desktop PC.

Download Stuff

When I first tried the installation, I had the devil’s own job to get the .img file burned successfully onto the USB drive. I tried *many* times to get a reliable procedure, and this is what I recommend.

Firstly, from windows, there are a few tools that I’d get hold of:

• winMD5Sum (http://www.nullriver.com/products/winmd5sum) a simple MD5 checksumming utility to ensure that the big .img file has downloaded correctly.
• win32 Disk Imager (https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/+download) to do the writing of the .img file to the USB drive.
• Finally, the main .img file for Ubuntu UNR from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook This is a big file (947MB) so get the kettle on, as it may take some time, particularly if you’re unfortunate enough to be stuck with hebrides.net http://www.hebrides.net/ or (shudder) dial-up …

Check the download

Install winMD5Sum from the downloaded file, making sure you enable its “Send to…” integration.
Right-click on the downloaded .img file and select Send To … winMD5Sum. As the file’s pretty big, this may take some time to complete.

Go to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuHashes and copy and paste the md5 hash value for ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img from the table into the Compare field and click “Compare” – if the MD5 Check Sums are the same, you’re good to go, otherwise it’s back to the ubuntu site to download the .img file again, as something’s gone wrong.

Next to be sure, I reformatted my USB key as FAT32, then ran the win32 Disk Imager downloaded earlier.
In the device dropdown, select the drive letter assigned to the USB key (in my case E:) and browse to the downloaded .img file from the Image File file select box, then click write. Put the kettle on again, as this took *ages* on my machine …

When that’s done, safely remove the USB drive and move along …

Installation

Power-down the netbook, making sure you’ve backed up anything important as this will wipe *everything* that’s there.

Plug the USB key into the netbook, and start it up. Press F12 when the prompt appears onscreen, and select the USB FDD option from the Boot Option Menu. After selecting an installation language, the main ubuntu menu will appear. As I’m paranoid, I’d recommend selection the “Check disk for defects” option first, to make sure that the USB key has been written correctly. If any errors are found, go through the reformat and write img steps again.

From here on it, it’s a simple process of following the prompts to install the system. When you reach the partitioning screen, I’d recommend just using the whole disk. Beware that this will overwrite everything already on the disk, but you’ve got a backup already, haven’t you?

The installer will then run through its tasks in a pretty hands-off manner. It took about 20 minutes on my machine to finish, after which it prompts to remove the USB key and reboot.

First Boot

First boot was quick (around 20 seconds) to the familiar UNR launcher screen.

Out of the box, the system is very usable. There’s a good range of default applications installed, hardware seemed to all be functioning correctly (with the expected exception of the right hand card reader, which only works if the card is inserted before booting – this is a known bug that I’m sure will be fixed soon), and for a lot of people, that’s probably as far as they’ll need to go.

As we all know though, I’m not most people …

Tagged: aspire-one, netbook, ubuntu