Sam Ruby: Easy Peasy

Easy Peasy

Thu 08 Jan 2009 at 13:55

My Eee PC just got an upgrade. I installed Easy Peasy, meaning I moved from an Xandros based distribution to an Ubuntu based one. The netbook remix interface is real nice, two finger scrolling works, and I get Firefox 3. Performance even seems snappier.

There were a number of annoyances with Xandros, the big one was that I could no longer apply updates as it ran out of disk space. I had to do a system restore to get back to a usable system, and then I didn’t know which updates were safe to apply and which were not.

You can “burn” the “live” image to a USB flash drive using the System => Administration => Create a USB Startup Disk, but you need to update the MBR on that flash drive using lilo: lilo -M /dev/sdx. You can find the right device to update using fdisk -l.

Insert the USB flash drive into your Eee PC, press power on, then press and hold the Esc key. You’ll shortly be asked to select the boot drive, and select the USB card. From there, you are onto a normal Ubuntu installation.

I selected the “Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer” option, and first opted to take a full backup of the hard drive to my server. I doubt I will be going back, but disk space is cheap these days...

fdisk -l | ssh rubys@rubix dd of=eeepc/fdisk
dd if=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 | ssh rubys@rubix dd of=eeepc/sdb0
dd if=/dev/sdb1 | ssh rubys@rubix dd of=eeepc/sdb1.img
dd if=/dev/sdb2 | ssh rubys@rubix dd of=eeepc/sdb2.img
dd if=/dev/sdb3 | ssh rubys@rubix dd of=eeepc/sdb3.img
dd if=/dev/sdb4 | ssh rubys@rubix dd of=eeepc/sdb4.img
dd if=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1 | ssh rubys@rubix dd of=eeepc/sdb0.md5
dd if=/dev/sdb1 | openssl md5 | ssh rubys@rubix dd of=eeepc/sdb1.md5
dd if=/dev/sdb2 | openssl md5 | ssh rubys@rubix dd of=eeepc/sdb2.md5
dd if=/dev/sdb3 | openssl md5 | ssh rubys@rubix dd of=eeepc/sdb3.md5
dd if=/dev/sdb4 | openssl md5 | ssh rubys@rubix dd of=eeepc/sdb4.md5

On the target machine, these images can be mounted using:

mkdir eeepc/sdb1
sudo mount -o loop eeepc/sdb1.img eeepc/sdb1

Video, wifi, suspend/resume all work fine, sound required a slight adjustment. I found it easier to apt-get install gnome-alsamixer.

Update: As I tend to use suspend/resume more often than boot, it took me a while to notice this Ubiquity issue, which is easy to fix.

Thanks for that. How long it takes to boot this OS ? One thing I like with Xandros is the fast boot.

Posted by Guillaume at 10:45

Cold boot to login prompt: 76 seconds

Wakeup from suspend: 13 seconds

Hardware: Asus Eee PC 900A

Posted by Sam Ruby at 13:58

One thing worth adding: typically when login completes, wifi is already active. With Xandros one typically would have to wait...

Posted by Sam Ruby at 14:02

Thanks. On my Eee PC 701 (4G Surf) :

Cold boot: 30 seconds

Wakeup: 8 seconds

Posted by Guillaume at 10:00

Guillaume: while I am not in a position to make a timing, I can assure you that I never saw timings anywhere near that good that with Xandros on my 900A.

Posted by Sam Ruby at 11:46

That’s odd, maybe Xandros became bloated on the 900A. Or you were using the “advanced mode"? Me, I’m running the "Easy mode”, and I think it is faster on boot.

Posted by Guillaume at 20:16

I think the easy-peasy 1.0 is much better, I have the 900A with 2GB ram, and it runs like a champ. I have never had any showstopper issues. The only complaint that I do have is that my wpa & wpa2 wireless gets broken after about 20-30 minutes, and requires a reboot, because of this I wish they would release updates more frequently.

Also, does anybody know what the inside of this thing looks like, I am too afraid to open mine.

Posted by Chance at 02:27