Ubuntu 8.10

So Tomt, how did the install go. BTW, the slow startup that I mentioned in a previous post seems to have resolved itself. I was at work when I wrote that, and believe it or not, by my bigger laptop also played up there the next day, just wouldn't start properly. No problems at all at home. Just goes to show that work is not only bad for people but also bad for computers.

 

I haven't had chance to do this yet.

My Acer has a very loud hard disk, sort of ticking and clicking.. Amazon have sent a replacement that should arrive today or tomorrow.
Once I get it I will start playing !!

My son seems very happy with his Acer One (it's nice and quiet). Don't think he needs to change his OS yet.

 

Windows to Ubuntu to Linpus to Windows and back again...

I started by following the directions for getting Ubuntu onto my Aspire One 8Gig SSD. I tried it with a bootable SD but finally gave up on the whole usb/sdhc thing and went for an external cdrom drive. Ubuntu seemed to work very well. I even let grub go in the MBR instead of the bootable partition. (big mistake). I got my wireless working and then it suddenly died. No updates. No explanation. It just died. I got pretty frustrated. After a lot of tinkering to try to get my wifi back, I went and got Linpus. Still no wifi. At this point I started to think my wifi hardware was dead and decided to do a Windows restore just to find out if I needed to return my AAO. No way. It wasn't gonna load. It couldn't get past grub in the bootloader or it couldn't recognize the partition.

No way to run command line tools from M$ / Acer lame recovery cd so I went and dug up an Ultimate Boot CD I had burned way back in 2004. I was able to do fdisk /mbr as well as delete the linux partion and create a fat32 partition and then I put Windows back on. Allofasudden my wifi was working again. Darn. Well good news, actually as it meant I didn't have to return my AAO. :roll:

So now I had to decide. Go through loading Ubuntu and possibly have the wifi puke on me again or dual boot. I opted for dual boot. This time I ran the ubuntu installer from usb stick right inside windows. I told it to install within windows. It asked for 5 gig but Acer had wasted a lot of space on chaff like Office 2007 trial, MS Works, McAffee and the like. After a lot of deletion, including some asian fonts, I got to almost 5 gig free and the install proceeded. It was very slow and the machine went to sleep in the middle of the install. What idiot thinks a machine on ac power needs to go to standby? I fixed that silly setting and let the install run again. At last I had dual boot windows and ubuntu. I even got the wifi and acerfand working but I still wasn't satisfied because if I wasn't sitting there to hit a key, I would get XP (yuck). So I modified boot.ini to make ubuntu the default OS. I have 500 meg free in windows and 1.2 gig free under ubuntu. All running happily sharing a single 8 gig fat32 partition. If I'd used ntfs, I could have had windows selectively compress useless chaff like the i386 directory but I bet ubuntu wouldn't be happy booting from a disk image stored as a file on ntfs.

In my trials and tribulations getting Linux up and running on the AAO (Ubuntu then Linpus then back to Ubuntu), I must say it's not exactly easy. Some genius in the Linux community decided to deprecate the drivers we need for the wireless chipset on the AAO. There is nothing quite as useless as a netbook that can't speak wifi. Just before I lost my wifi before, I had Ubuntu looking a lot like OSX. For now, I won't bother. I'm just ecstatic not to have to deal with Windows. If you want my vote on which Linux works best, I'd have to say Ubuntu. I had hoped Linpus would work "out of the box" but alas the live cd didn't work very well and even after switching to the advanced GUI, I was having too much trouble finding things. I thought about trying ubuntu netbook remix. Perhaps if I had a hard drive based model, I would consider more tinkering but with so little internal storage, I don't have the luxury. I'll take my 8.10 ubuntu sans updates and consider myself lucky to have Linux up and running at all on the AAO. Perhaps in another 6 months when the AAO specific drivers are more standard I might try another round of tinkering but for now I'll stand with what I've got.

One thing that annoys me is the inability to suspend/resume. Heck even my windows boxes can do that (without the risk of wiping the contents of any mounted sdhc). I'm posting this in case somebody out there is struggling with Ubuntu or wondering about that middle option on the live cd "run inside windows". Yes it does work and you don't have to dig for your windows restore cd's if something goes wrong.

I hope the AAO/Ubuntu driver situation gets sorted out soon. I'd really like it if an install from a Live CD worked 100% out of the box without tweaks and risks. A machine without an optical drive can be a very strong motivation to avoid any risks. For a minute there, I wondered if I'd ever get a fully working OS back on my AAO.

 

I've had Ubuntu 8.10 running on my Aspire One(AOA150-1049) running Ubuntu 8.10 for almost a month, with no problems at all. It was quite easy to install, took about 20min. I left my XP recovery partition in place in case for some reason I ever wanted Windoze again(unlikely), but other than that, switched it completely over to Ubuntu 8.10. I'm not a Linux novice by any stretch, but I had little trouble getting my wifi working, installing various programs I use, etc. I think one time, the wifi module didn't load when I started up, but a simple restart of X (control alt backspace), and after I logged in again, Wifi was working fine.

Only possible difference I could think of between your install and mine (assuming both are 8.10), is I use wicd for my network manager, as opposed to the default nm. I don't think this would be your issue, unless for some reason nm-applet was not loading correctly.

http://wicd.sourceforge.net/

Hope that helps

 

Re: Ubuntu 8.10 wireless problems solved?

I'm pretty sure I have a robust work-a-round for the very annoying problem that the Acer sometimes looses it wireless connection. It's mentioned somewhere else on this forum: disconnect your power + battery for some seconds, replug everything, boot and very big chance wireless is back again.

It seems that the Acer stores some information in RAM that needs to be reset.

(110Aw, 8G Samsung SSD, 1,5G RAM, Ubuntu 8.10)

 

Dude, get the facts. The current ath5k driver included in the official kernel works with the AA1. It is not deprecated. The Ubuntu people have decided not to include it with their distro, but have gone with the madwifi drivers, which are not installed by default.

 

Ok

Installed ubuntu from a LiveCD USB key and it seems to be dual booting OK with Linpus. (well Linpus is on the grub menu.. not tried it yet )

just doing the updates.. How do I install the updated kernel from here:
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=7560

It's deb.. do I just double click and install it ??
Anything else I will need to do ?

Thanks

 

You only need to download the linux-image, 'normal' people don't need the linux-headers.
I used the terminal instruction also mentioned in the above thread to install the linux-image (first go to the location where you downloaded the linux-image file):

Code:

sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture linux-image-2.6.28-rc8-custom-aa1_2.6.28-rc8-custom-aa1-10.00.Custom_i386.deb

Really fast boot of less than 45 seconds now, connected to internet!

(110Aw, 8G Samsung SSD, 1,5G RAM, Ubuntu 8.10, Sickboy's kernel)

 

Thanks

I've installed it and it seems fine. But NO Wifi.

Just booed back to Linpus and no Wifi.
Any ideas ?

 

Hmm.. just powered of waited and restarted.

Now wifi is working in Linpus and Ubuntu.
Strange, I'll keep an eye on it for a few days.

Shame there is now way to get the wireless LED to work !!

 

Ok, figured out why this thing takes so long to load at work. It's looking for the wireless network! In the Gnome desktop, it loads everything else and then alerts you that wireless networks are available. That doesn't seem to be an option with LXDE, unless someone else knows how to do it.

Anyway, still love Ubuntu on my AAO, easy to setup and, so far, rock solid.

 

Everything is looking pretty good using sickboys kernel.

What I did notice was after install Ubuntu 8.10 the wireless failed to work. I updated Ubuntu and it still wouldn't work.
Installed Sickboys kernel.. still nothing.

When I booted back into Linpus the wireless was still off.. Once I had re enabled it in Linpus (using the slider switch) it then worked fine in Linpus and Ubuntu.

It did the exact same thing when I installed Ubuntu on to my son's Acer.. !!

 

Installed stock 8.10 from the ISO (using USB drive).
Booted and connected an ethernet cable.
Went to speedtest.net. Download = ~16000kb/sec, upload = ~3500kb/sec. Pretty good for my ISP.
Started Update Manager - it froze on me and I had to force it to close.
Started Update Manager, downloaded and installed all 220 updates. Download was pretty fast.
Rebooted.
Went to speedtest.net. Download = ~700kb/sec, upload = ~3000kb/sec.

I went through this twice with a fresh partition, format and install each time. Grabbing the latest updates seems to kill the download speed of a *wired* network connection.

Any suggestions, other than Canonical pushing broken updates like Microsoft do? That would be depressing...

Anyone else seeing this?

Andy

 

Re: Ubuntu 8.10 why a new kernel is needed?

I bought an aspire one (120GB HD, 1GB RAM). I installed ubuntu 8.10 following the instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne. I have an important question: why people say after installation and updating we have to install a new kernel? And why this is not written in the page of ubuntu forum? To me it seems works right yet. Please if you can answer... I need to understand.

Thank you so' much in advance

 

Re: Ubuntu 8.10 why a new kernel is needed?

You don't have to install a new kernel. However, the stock Ubuntu kernel is not optimized for the AA1. The kernels offered by sickboy, figvam, and others boot faster, take up less memory on your hard drive, and eliminate less-used and unused modules

 

Re: Ubuntu 8.10 why a new kernel is needed?

I have the same version as you and I use the stock kernel. I did 2 things to make more hardware work: compile madwifi myself (ath5k didn't work for me) and added a tweak for both cardreaders to be hotpluggable for (at least SD). Both tweaks can be found on the help pages.

Most probably I will try to compile my own kernel without a lot of stuff starting from sickboys config, because my girlfriend almost has the same hardware in her laptop and I wouldn't mind to make that one also a little bit faster to boot up.