Howto: Install Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Special Kernel

Why would you do this?
The Ubuntu Netbook Remix does most everything you can do in Linpus with a few more capabilities. Here's a few benefits I've found:

• I found the launcher interface much more effective.[/*:m:36y4dfom]
• There's a much wider range of software easily available in the Ubuntu repositories.[/*:m:36y4dfom]
• The menus can be configured from the control panel without editing XML files.[/*:m:36y4dfom]
• Many fixes for Linpus you can find on these boards come automatically here.[/*:m:36y4dfom]
• UNR has a full-screen tabbing interface that makes good use of the limited screen real estate.[/*:m:36y4dfom]

There's Installing UNR[/b]
I'm mostly pulling my information from this guide. For this step, you'll need some USB storage key, which needs, I believe to be just over 1 GB. You'll also need about a gig of free space on your drive.
Download Image
As of this writing, you can click on this link and grab the information for the installer. Just click on the link, select save, and wait a while.
Put Image on USB Key
Put your USB key in the drive. If you're on a linux machine, bring up a terminal (hit alt-F2, type "xterm"), and type
sudo dd if=/path/to/your/downloaded.img of=/dev/device/you/saw/in/dmesg bs=1M
On Linpus, I believe this will literally be:
sudo dd if=/home/user/Downloads/unr-1.0.1.img of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
If you downloaded the image to a windows system, there are instructions for installing that image on a USB key, but I don't have personal experience with them.

Either way, after a few minutes, you will have a UNR installer on your USB key.
Install UNR
This is pretty simple. Turn off your Aspire with the USB key inserted. Hit F12 for the boot menu. Choose the USB key from the menu. Follow the instructions.
What Works
At this point, you have a setup I was pretty happy with for a few months. Boot up is about twice as long as Linpus, and the right card reader doesn't work, but I thought the new interface was definitely worth it. These problems, however, can be fixed.

Installing the Sickboy Kernel
There is an ongoing discussion of the kernel on the forums you can look at. This part is pretty simple. Just click on this link and download the .deb file. When you get it, the system will ask you if you want to install. Select yes. Let it back up your menu.lst file. When you're done, you can reboot.

The boot time shrinks to slightly longer than Linpus, and the right card reader now works.

What Still Doesn't Work
The LED for the Wifi still doesn't work. You can turn Wifi off and on. There's just no way of telling that you have. One of these days, I'm going to try a solution on a Debian site that says it gets the LED working. I haven't tested suspend and hibernate, and I've heard mixed reports. I can't get the microphone to work with Sound Recorder (though I've heard that's true of Linpus, too). The Sickboy kernel is still going through a few changes, so some of these problems may be solved in the future.

 

Doesn't seem to do anything? Anyone know how to correct it? :?:

 

Damn and blast. Either I'm wrong about where Linpus puts the image or where Linpus mounts the USB key. Here's how you find each one.

Find UNR image

• Bring up a terminal (Alt-F2 "xterm")[/*:m:10gsgaoz]
• Type "find . -name unr*.img[/*:m:10gsgaoz]
• A file with a full path should come up. It will be something like, "/home/user/desktop/unr-1.0.1.img"[/*:m:10gsgaoz]
• Posting what this full path would be on this forum would be very handy.[/*:m:10gsgaoz]
• Use this file for the "if=[file you just got]" portion of "sudo dd if=[file you just saw] of=/dev/sdb bs=1M[/*:m:10gsgaoz]

Find USB Key device

• Bring up a terminal (Alt-F2 "xterm")
• Put in your USB key
• Make sure your SD cards aren't in the drive.
• Type "df" and hit return.
• You'll see a list of stuff. One of them will look something like this:
  
  Code:

  Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
  /dev/sda1             51486580  18528152  30343048  38% /
  /dev/sdb               1076152   1032548     43604  96% /media/disk
  

  Look for a line that says "/media/disk" (or "/media/something"). Unless you have an SD card mounted, this will be your USB. We're looking for the "/dev/sd###" across from that. I think it will be /dev/sdb
  
  So, you type
  
  sudo dd if=/unr/image/file of=/dev/ofusbkey bs=1M
  
  And that should work. If someone who still has Linpus could tell me the file locations, I can correct my original article.

 

em... or maybe I'm an idiot? just rebooted the machine and tried it again and it worked.

Oh well we know it's right (however you might want to edit the original post, you have a typo that says "Dowloads" which might confuse a few people).

 

Maybe you're not an idiot, though. There's a good many things that will make your USB key mount as /dev/sdc, /dev/sdd or something else. It mounts the USB key as the next letter. If you'd taken the USB key out and put it back, that might change the device.

Thanks for catching the typo. Incidentally, there's an Italian distro called Linux4one that's supposed to be UNR plus a bunch of Aspire One fixes, so that might be as good as this and might have fixes for stuff that doesn't work here.

 

Did anybody try this linux4one distro? How do I install it?

 

if you are having problems with wifi/wifi LED you can download the windows wifi driver from here; http://download2.dvd-driver.cz/atheros/ ... 0.3.85.zip

Install ndisgtk package from the Ubuntu repositories via synaptic package manager (using your regular cable internet and ensure the multiverse and universe repositories are enabled).Then unzip the windows driver zip file and find the net5416.inf file, and install it by clicking on the icon which appears as 'windows wireless drivers' in your administration menu.

then restart and wifi and the wifi LED should work fine.

It is also worth noting that easypeasy linux http://www.geteasypeasy.com/ is a version of ubuntu for netbooks and works well out of the box, you still need the wifi hack but it seems to work ok for me so far...

andy

 

There's a forum under Ubuntu that's dedicated to Linux4One. As of last recording, it doesn't support the Wifi LED. It boots slowly (it takes a minute, which is like an unmodified UNR). It might later on. I've also heard it has a working microphone in Skype, which I haven't confirmed or denied for this setup.

 

Does that mean I'd be running wifi with an emulated Windows driver? Do you know if easypeasy has support for suspend or hibernate?

That makes three distros dedicated to the AAO (Kuki, Linux4One and EasyPeasy). All of them have some gaps so far. I think it'll make a huge difference when one of them manages to cover all the bases.

 

not sure if easypeasy supports hibernate or sleep yet. i guess the wifi would be running under the emulated windows driver but it certainly did not slow the machine down and actually had no problems at all in my install and usage.

you could also add mint linux to your list, it was for me the most painless install requiring only the wifi driver to complete (mint has the windows driver tool pre installed so it was just a case of running the dowloaded driver).
hibernate and suspend both work, the only thing i didn't try yet is the card readers, otherwise it seems superb.

 

I'm having trouble getting UNR installed. I've used dd to copy the .img file to my USB HDD. I booted and press Enter to boot the linux kernel. Some init messages go by then it says:

sdb: unknown partition table

/dev/sdb is my USB HDD. It then gets stuck looking for installation sources, checking every five seconds. So it seems I need to format and/or partition my USB HDD in a specific way to get this to work. Any hints? FAT32 right? It's a 40Gb HDD so I can't create a single FAT32 partition.

thanks, Andy

 

I've done two UNR image installations (trying out Ibex in between). The second time, the USB key was partitioned to one big linux partition when I started. The dd command wrote a partition table and more stuff. I think the first time, the USB key was one NFS partition, and again, dd wiped the table.

Here's things I can think of. I must confess I'm flailing here.

• Try it with an SD USB key instead of an HDD. I don't know why that might make a difference, but it's a difference between how you installed and I did.[/*:m:2icccewy]
• Clear out all partitions on your USB HDD and try the dd command again.[/*:m:2icccewy]

There's a topic for UNR 1.01 under the Ubuntu forum. If you post there, someone might be able to resolve that better. If you find something that works, I'm curious to know.

 

Thanks for the hints. I tried formatting the drive to a single ext2 partition. I then used dd again and it does indeed change the partition table. I still had the same error trying to boot it. Back at my Ubuntu desktop fdisk -l showed:

Code:

Disk /dev/sdb: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
64 heads, 32 sectors/track, 38154 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 2048 * 512 = 1048576 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x8ef631df

This doesn't look like a partition table
Probably you selected the wrong device.

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1   ?     1031512     1987932   979374166   66  Unknown
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb2   ?     1684255     3610201  1972168331    7  HPFS/NTFS
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb3   ?     1601472     2555310   976730017   7d  Unknown
Partition 3 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sdb4   ?      135809      139872     4161536   6f  Unknown
Partition 4 does not end on cylinder boundary.

Partition table entries are not in disk order

However the drive still automatically mounts and shows files. It appear as a 1.0Gb msdos partition. Did you get the same thing?

Andy

 

Except I don't remember those boundary errors (and they may have been there), that does look like the table that UNR created on my key. It created four partitions, one of which was NTFS. When I get a chance, I'll reinstall the image on my USB key and see what the partition table looks like.

This forum might have some information about it, since it's all about the UNR install. You might want to try Linux4One. I think it's likely you could install Linux4One and install the Sickboy kernel for the fast boot.

 

Thanks for your help. I have it installed - the solution was to switch from the USB hard drive to a Sandisk Cruizer USB flash drive. Note that fdisk -l still gives the partition errors, but I guess it is supposed to be that way. Once I've completed the setup I'll post to my blog with the exact steps.

Andy

 

i need help.
i have just installed unr on my aspire one 110 following what it is written on this post.
everything went well with my installation but now i'm not able to connect my aspire to a wifi network. my connection manager sees the wireless network but when i click on it my pc tries to establish a connection without success.
previously with limpus there was no problem at all...
please someone help me

 

I haven't seen those symptoms, and I'm afraid I'm a little baffled. I've had wifi trouble with one version of the sickboy drivers, but it didn't even see the networks.

This latest release of the kernel has worked pretty well and even has the wifi LED working. The netbook seems to be a little fussy about what it considers to be a real flipping of the wifi kill switch, but it's worked reasonably well.

If you go back to the original UNR kernel (which will cost you some boot time and the right card reader), does that work with wifi?

 

how can i go back to the original kernel?
thx 4 help

 

To do this, you need to edit the boot menu file. You can do this by hitting F2 and typing "gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst". It'll ask you for your password and then bring up a text file.

You're making sure it'll give you a choice of what kernel to use. Look for a line that says:

Code:

timeout            0

If the number is zero, change it to something larger than 5. It's the number of seconds the boot menu comes up, and it takes the thing a couple seconds to display and a couple seconds to read. A timout of less than five is too little to react to.

Now look for another line that says something like

Code:

hiddenmenu

If you see this line, put a "#" at the beginning of the line to disable the hidden menu command.

Restart your machine. Shortly after you get the "Acer" bios message, you'll see a list of kernels. Hit the down arrow until the kernel ending in "lpia" is highlighted. Hit return. The machine will now boot up with the original UNR kernel.

If there's a problem and you're original kernel isn't on the list, come back and I'll tell you what to do.

 

I tried it. It looks very nice, however, I had the same problem with that as I had with every other verison of Linux. I cannot get any other LInux to recognize my wifi except Linpus. What's worse is that everyone else seems to have their AAO's wifi working out of the box with UNR and linux4One. Not me.

Anyway, Good luck.

Lance