2008-12-06T20:53:00.000-08:00

So I got this ASUS EEE 900 and liked it very much.
After a little while, though, I got tired of the standard installation and decided to install ubuntu on it to more in line with my other machines and to allow easy installation of software with synaptic.

Here are the steps I took to get the machine working for me:

1: I got the ubuntu-eee distribution on a memory stick and booted from it as described in the EEE Ubuntu site.

Booting is achieved by pressing ESC when the computer starts. Initially, the memory stick didn't appear on the boot list, so I simply used another.

2: To get the Wireless LAN and the Webcam going, I found that one must enable them in the bios. Press F2 at boot time and go to 'advanced'. Then enable them.

3: The default partition editor did not use the 16GB disk. Consequently, I ran out of space pretty quickly. It is easy to enable the second disk, but I found that is better to partition things at install time. See next point.

4: I couldn't get the thing to hibernate and it turned out that the reason for this was that the default swap space was too small. I reinstalled ubuntu and selected manual partitioning to fix this. Here is what I did:

I used all of the 4GB disk for the ubuntu system and created a large swap area at the beginning of the 16GB disk leaving the rest for the /home area.

Partition Filesystem Mountpoint Size
--------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/sda1 ext3 / ~4GB
/dev/sdb1 linux-swap 1200MB
/dev/sdb2 ext3 /home ~15GB
--------------------------------------------------------------

With this partition, the system can hibernate and there is plenty of space for the /home area.

5: To get skype going I needed to enable the webcam in the bios (see #2) and then select the right microphone as described by golovan (bottom of thread):

Right click on speaker icon
> "open volume control"
> "Edit - Preferences"
> check/enable "input source" (and "Front mic" if it's not enabled) and close that window
> go to tab "options"
> choose "Front mic"
> go to tab "Playback" and verify that the faders for "Front mic" is set correctly and not muted.

6: One of the reasons for me to install Ubuntu was to be able to compile and run the ANUGA hydrodynamic model: The dependencies I installed using Synaptic for this are as follows

* Subversion as I work directly with ANUGA revision control system - if you don't then this will be unnecessary
* With ANUGA downloaded I then needed to compile it using the script compile_all.py as described in the ANUGA installation manual. The gcc compiler comes with Ubuntu, but to compile ANUGA you also need the packages python-dev and build-essential
* With ANUGA compiled, running it requires setting the environment variable PYTHONPATH point to the appropriate area. In my installation I added the line export PYTHONPATH=~/sandpit/anuga/anuga_core/source to the ~/.bashrc file.
The following three extra packages were necessary to run the test suite: python-numeric-ext (python2.5 and python-numeric were already part of the standard installation), python-scientific and python-profiler.
* Finally, I installed python-psyco as an optional package to speed up ANUGA
* I also added the package emacs since it is my preferred editor.
* Running the validation example for the Okushiri island tsunami took 45min which is 3 times slower than one node on our 64 bit Opteron Beowulf system. Not bad ASUS, not bad at all!

Ubuntu EEE installation