Yesterday I bought an Asus EeePC 1005HA netbook and a Globe Tattoo wireless broadband dongle for my portable computing needs (my laptop was too bulky and there aren’t enough WiFi hotspots in the metro for my iPod Touch).
Being the geek that I am, I immediately converted it into a WinXP + Ubuntu dual boot machine. For this, I simply followed the steps at:
This post will just cover the various nuances surrounding the installation process.
BitTorrent link for Netbook Remix
Recent PLDT line work on my street has borked my net connection preventing me from direct downloading the netbook remix of Ubuntu 9.04. Unfortunately, there are no direct links to the torrent of the netbook remix.
With a bit of searching, I found the torrent here listed along with the other releases.
Partitioning
Unlike the walkthrough above, I did a dual boot of the netbook. In order to do that, I simply deleted the partition for drive D using Disk Management under Computer Management (run compmgmt.msc).
Since I did not delete the EFI partition, I only created the /, /home, /boot, and swap partitions, with the first 3 formatted in ext4. I also didn’t need to do his final step — I just re-enabled EFI with no problems.
DON’T UPDATE YOUR PACKAGES YET!!!
After installing and setting up the networking, the Update Manager will prompt you to update some packages. DO NOT UPDATE THEM YET because there are some problems with the scrollkeeper xml files. Run the following command first to correct scrollkeeper’s database:
sudo scrollkeeper-rebuilddb -v
Disabling your Touchpad while Typing
The installation walkthrough only discusses how to allow other applications to access the touchpad but it doesn’t exactly specify how to disable the touchpad while typing (which can be annoying).
Sure 1005HA has buttons to disable the touchpad but the better option would be to use syndaemon.
