Uber Geeky!

I’ve done a few of these dual boot installations with impressive results from the latest Ubuntu Netbook Edition. The OEM hard drive layout seems to be quite common across models. Here I’ll document a general approach to take to get your Eee PC set up with dual boot Windows and Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

Make sure you have updated the firmware using the little ASUS updater tool that comes with the OEM Windows. You can find it in the start menu. Here’s the screen shot from the 1005P model…

Incidentally, this was the first time I’ve touched Windows 7. Nice to know it’s possible to get the classic theme happening, but that didn’t seem to speed it up much. I must admit it seemed to perform a little better than Windows XP. The browser didn’t just hang like it did on my Windows XP Eee Top when I visited some flash intensive sites. Still, it was far less responsive than Ubuntu.

The BIOS update tool is very straight forward. Just be patient while it finds your latest BIOS, downloads and installs it. Having the latest BIOS image generally results in better device support from Ubuntu out of the box.

The next thing to do, follow steps 1 & 2 from here… http://www.Ubuntu.com/netbook/get-ubuntu/download

Once you have a USB device with an Ubuntu image on it, insert the USB drive and reboot. During the boot process, usually while Eee PC logo is displayed, press and hold the ESC button. A blue boot menu will eventually be displayed. Select the USB device and press “Enter” to boot the Ubuntu installer image. Once it starts up, click “Try Ubuntu-Netbook 10.04″ and wait for the desktop to load.

Now you need to run Gnome Partition Editor. You can either find it under the System menu, or press Alt+F2 and type “gparted” and hit “Enter”. The screenshot below may be of some assistance in confirming your actions are correct.

Now if you wait a moment you will see a graphical representation of the partitions on your hard disk. It will vaguely resemble something like this.

There are two partitions you’ll want to hang on to. The first one contains OEM Windows (the “C:” drive), the second one is a handy recovery image. If you use Windows to browse the net, you’ll be needing that recovery image to clean out all the root kits and trojans from time to time. Otherwise you might want to keep it in case you ever want to sell the Eee PC to a Windows user who wants a clean image.

Ubuntu needs you to add two new partitions minimum, a swap partition and one for the root directory. Unfortunately, you can only have 4 partitions on the drive, so the last two just have to go.

Optionally, the Windows partition can be reduced in size, this is especially useful if you don’t plan to use it very often. I tend to shrink it to about twice the size of the currently used space. After resizing the Windows partition you’ll need to move the recovery partition so it’s flush against the Windows partition. You can use Gnome Partition Editor to do all these things, so have a play. If you do the wrong thing click the undo button in the tool bar. Once you have something that looks similar to below, press the Apply button (the big tick). It will take some time to perform the operations. Be patient and make sure the netbook it not running on battery power at the time as these operations could be destructive if they fail.

If you have resized the Windows partition, Windows will perform a disk check the next time you boot it. This is to be expected, just be patient and let it do it’s thing. It will eventually complete the check and reboot. Windows will start fine.

The next step is to install Ubuntu. From the menu, click “Install Ubuntu-Netbook 10.04″ from the favourites menu. The Wizard will firstly prompt you for your language, timezone and keyboard layout. When you get to step 4, Partitions, select the last option as seen here.

On the next screen all you need to do is set the EXT4 partition as the root as seen below.

Then just follow the bouncing ball to begin the installation process. Sit back and enjoy the progress bar and obligatory forced advertising as it completes.

Once it’s installed, reboot. You will notice a 10 second menu to select between Ubuntu and Windows. Firstly, some notes about the GRUB menu. The last Windows entry is usually the Windows recovery tool. Don’t use this tool unless you really need to recover your Windows installation. Recovering Windows will lock you out of this boot menu, and you will have to use the USB boot image to recover it in order to regain access to Ubuntu (see Recovering Ubuntu After Installing Windows). I’ve also noticed on the Eee Top that the Windows partition becomes hidden and Windows will not boot after recovery. You can easily use gparted to remove the hidden flag from the partition if this is the case. But enough about Windows.

Boot into Ubuntu (just wait 10 seconds, or press “Enter”). Now visit the HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks page and find the model of your Eee PC. Here you will find useful information about getting better device support for your particular model. Or if your model is not listed, add an entry with notes about how perfectly it works.

Enjoy the superior performance of an Ubuntu Eee PC.

Update June 17, 2010: Please ensure you do have a look at the hardware support page linked above. There are some important changes to make to the grub config you’ll need to perform to get hotkeys working correctly. On top of this, check out my recent post on clicking noises and disabling APM. You may need this too if you have a clicking SATA hard drive.

Tags: Eee PC, Linux, Netbook, Ubuntu

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Consumer Electronics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.