Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Tuesday 23 June 2009, 9:57 AM
Ubuntu Netbook Remix - An Acid Test
It seems to be one of the original 701 models, the label on the bottom says "Eee PC 4G". It has very small screen (something like 7"), an equally small (Swiss German) keyboard, and a touchpad with NO buttons (!). It was loaded with a rather dated version of Linux, in German, some sort of Debian or Debian derivative, I didn't take the time to try to identify exactly what version it was. All of this might sound routine to those who have experience with the ASUS Eee PC, but this was the first one that I had ever actually worked on.
I decided to reload Linux from scratch, for several reasons - primarily because I couldn't get it to connect, perhaps because it didn't have WPA2 encryption, and I thought that if I was going to have to go to the trouble to update such an old Linux, I might as well reload it with something much newer anyway; also, the owner is not a native German speaker, and would prefer to have the system in English anyway; also, and not least, I had been looking for an opportunity to try UNR on a very average computer user, and both she and the netbook fit the bill.
I initially booted it using UNR on a USB stick, and it came up beautifully. The excitement and satisfaction on her face when she saw how much nicer it looked (and that it was in English) made the effort really worthwhile. After confirming that all the important bits worked properly, I went ahead and installed from the USB drive to the built-in 4GB SSD. As we had no interest in preserving the existing operating system, and I wanted to keep things as simple as possible for her, I simply let it overwrite the entire disk with the new UNR installation. It created a 3.5GB ext3 root partition, and used the remaining bit of the disk for swap. Everything went smoothly, and it was installed and running in well under an hour.
The "Acid Test" part came about because I did all of this on Thursday evening, and I was leaving for the weekend on Friday morning. So she was going to be on her own with it for the critical first few days. I don't like to do that sort of thing, but in this case I didn't have much choice, and she had a desktop system to fall back to in case it didn't work, so I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.
When I returned Sunday evening, she said that she had been using it very happily. Startup and connection to the web via my WiFi had worked just fine, and general web browsing had been good. The only significant problem she had was that she wanted to watch some videos in Firefox, and I had not installed the Adobe Flash Plugin. What she told me was that when she tried to watch videos, it said a bunch of stuff that she didn't understand and which she found quite intimidating, so she didn't go any further on that. That confirms my skepticism about those who say Ubuntu (and others) "make it easy" to install Flash (and other packages) when necessary - I have always thought that many, or most, ordinary users would be afraid to try, even it if looked trivial to us "experts", and would most likely then retreat to Windows and say Linux was "too complicated" or didn't have everything they needed. I wish there was a "Mint Netbook Remix"... sigh.
Anyway, I installed the flash plugin packages, and of course then her videos played in Firefox just fine. She said that the sound was a bit odd - well, no surprise, considering the Mickey-Mouse speakers built into the Eee PC. I gave her a headset to plug into the audio jacks, and that solved that problem. (Hint: in this case, I avoid using a USB headset, because I don't want to confuse the Linux audio configuration even more.) I also gave her a USB mouse, so that she didn't have to fight with tapping on the touchpad.
So, now she has been using it for a couple more days, and she is as happy as a clam. She had no problem understanding and using the UNR desktop (which I still find unpleasant), so I suppose that means they have done a reasonable job of creating something for ordinary users, not experienced Linux administrators. I consider it to be a rather old, under-powered and limited capacity system, but she thinks it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, and could hardly be happier with it. I think that shows that what ordinary users are interested in is solutions, not the absolute latest, flashiest, fastest hardware.
She has now brought it back and asked me to install Skype on it. Again, despite my personal reservations (objections) about Skype, it is what it is and she makes good use of it to communicate with her friends and family in the U.S., so I have now installed that. The text and audio functions seem to work, but the video doesn't work yet - I suspect that the drivers for the built-in camera aren't loaded yet. If anyone has experience with this old Eee PC and can offer some tips on that, I would appreciate it. I will return it to her this evening, and I will advise her to use the free communications for Skype, but NOT to risk one cent of her money with them.
So, all things considered I would say UNR passed this initial Acid Test with flying colors. I'm sure that I will hear plenty more from her about it, and I will be watching to see how she gets along with it.
jw 23/6/2009
PreviousComments on this post
Thank you for the detailed and encouraging post. My wife has an eee PC with the original distribution, with which she has not been completely happy (where's the repository of endless applications?!?). We plan to take a shot loading a targeted Ubuntu-based distro (http://www.eeebuntu.org/) in a week or two. Sounds like it is, in fact, a good way to go.
Thanks for reading and commenting. I would say that it is a very good way to go, and gives you (or your wife) the best chance of getting the most out of the Eee PC. While the original distribution was quite good for its time, I think it is important to remember that it really was a trailblazer, and there has been a lot of research and a lot of learning since then, so newer versions are likely to be considerably better.
While I have not yet tried the EeeUbuntu distribution, I would remind you that one of the very nice things about UNR (and the Ubuntu base distribution) is the ability to boot from a USB stick, so you can at least get a good idea of whether it is going to boot and run on your system before you take the leap of wiping the disk and reinstalling from scratch.
Good luck.
jw
excellent post jw!
I've been holding back on forcing the wife over to UNR just yet, but have been rebooting her netbook from USB stick on several occasions, just so she can get used to it. being rather un-techie, but used to Windows for a long time, I think that, even though she likes UNR, a permanent move is a step too far for her just now.
PLEASE keep us posted on this Acid Test!!! It would be very encouraging to hear how things progress!
I couldn't comment on the Eee PC but my camera works on NBR right out of the box.
It may be too much to ask of a first generation Eee, but why not install a full mint on a net book with the usuall 1gb of ram and 160gb HD? I'm sure it would be as happy as Larry.
Hi Roger, thanks for the comment. Why not Mint? Several reasons:
- The screen is so small that I'm afraid the standard Mint desktop and especially the menus would be difficult to use. I'm planning to write tomorrow about some of the observations I have on usability which will talk about this.
- I knew that I was loading that machine for a novice, and I assume there are people working on the development of UNR who are much smarter and more experienced than I, so I thought it best to give the interface they had developed a chance. If I had been loading it for myself, Mint would have been one of the first of the many distributions that I loaded.
- As I said in the blog, I have been looking for a chance to try UNR on an ordinary/novice user. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to do something good and useful, and to learn something from it at the same time.
I recalled reading that you had said your camera worked on UNR, and I think Moley wrote the same, so I was surprised that it wasn't working. I haven't had a chance to investigate that any further yet, because oddly enough the owner of the netbook actually wants to use it, rather than let me play with it all the time...
More to come.
jw
Try looking in the BIOS. Many of these units shipped with the Camera disabled in the bios. You may also have to select the correct hardware in Skype for the camera to function.
We have 4 701s in the family, 3 8GB and 1 4GB but all running the EEEBUNTU 9.05 distro. Everyone loves it, including my grandkids. Of the 4, 3 of them had the camera off in the BIOS. It worked in Xandros but not in EEEBUNTU.
Nice post, it does work and for the most part the user never knows he isn't on Windows!
Thanks JW and wd4nzx.....
Disabling in the BIOS seems a bit harsh!
It was my trusty old Acer One that the camera worked on.
@wd4nzx - Thanks very much for the excellent tip! I just got the Eee PC back from my neighbor, and in 5 minutes I had the camera working. It was exactly as you said, the camera had been disabled in the BIOS. Once I enabled it, UNR saw it and loaded the right driver. It now works perfectly, both in Cheese and Skype.
Good stuff! Thanks again - from my neighbor as well.
jw
@J.A. Watson.
I took the plunge and installed Linux Mint on my acer one and apart from having to switch to the proprietary "Mad Wi-Fi" driver, every thing works as it should. Mint sits very nicely on the first generation Acer One's screen.
Here are the clinchers for me.
I started with XP on this netbook. It frequently bumped into the atoms hardware limitations.
Next up was UNR. Much quicker this time but jerky playback on the bbc i player and youtube. Not good enough really.
Out of curiosity I put windows 7 on there. Unreliable. Sometimes smooth, sometimes vista like self contemplation. As I have the 512MB model I activated readyboost on a USB stick using another 1 GB and hey presto, It flew along with bells and whistles......hang on it's just locked up for the fourth time. Off you go windows 7. Bye.
And the winner is Mint. Faultless streaming video playback. Reliable web browsing/open office productivity, a friendly fresh and grown up interface. The responsiveness was unexpected and battery life much the same as NBR.
It fits on the small screen in every way. Recommended.
Hi Roger, Thanks for posting this information. It is very useful to me, knowing that Mint works well and looks good on a small screen.
I'm intrigued by your experience with ReadyBoost showing visible improvement under Win7. Have you tried the same thing under Vista, and if so could you tell a difference with/without ReadyBoost? I was never really convinced that the built-in Intel TurboMemory in my S6510 made a significant difference.
jw
Oh my, yes. If you have a computer with only 1gb of ram on board and you apply readyboost under vista then there is a very noticable difference.
It stops much of vista triping up over paving slabs (so to speak).
I wasn't happy about having to use the mad-wifi atheros driver under mint so I re-installed just in case.
Turns out that I'd taken the external CD rom out of the tray too early! This time the wi-fi was instantly on and went on to take me to dells driver website so I could download some drivers for an optimax that I was re-formating.
Just to add....now that I've dug a little deeper with mint, I have the windows exploding shut, falling like leaves, wobbling like jelly, Morphing into light then transparancey and the list goes on.
The screen savers. I don't normally bother with them, but on mint they are stunning! I got taken by surprise.
Now my acer one is performing like a much higher spec laptop. I had to kill drive indexing and adjust for best performance to get XP running at less than a quarter of the speed.
This is all great info Roger, thanks, and I'm glad to hear that you are having such an enjoyable and successful time with Linux Mint. I'm going to give it a closer look on my "nettop" now, because of what you have said. I knew it loaded and worked well, but I had been focusing all of my attention on that machine recently on UNR and Moblin. Time to give Linux Mint a fair shake!
As for ReadyBoost, perhaps it is that fact that I bought my S6510 with 2 GB of memory that kept me from seeing the benefits of the factory installed TurboMemory. As far as I understand it, it should have been doing exactly the same thing as your USB stick.
jw
Yes, in fact there is only a 2-3% difference between the highest spec, highest bandwidth, even memory with heatsinks on them and the bog standard memory that comes with lower priced computers.
I would have thought the "turbo memory" was just a stick of this higher spec memory, but I've not heard of it before.
