Installing Ubuntu 11.10 on the Asus Eee 900

I bought my Asus Eee 900 back in June of 2009, and for the past three years it has been a splendid little machine. For the first few months I used the stock Xandros Linux and was well-satisfied with that operating system. I could use the Firefox browser to do all  of the standard Internet stuff, including watch Youtube videos when I was so inclined. Skype worked well for video conferences. The OpenOffice word processor was just fine and allowed me to print on most standard laser printers. In addition the OS included a plethora of utilities, games, and educational software.

 By October of 2009 I had moved on to dual-booting Xandros and Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core booted and shut down much faster than Xandros. Everything about it ran just a little faster--though I still needed Xandros for Skype and for most printing of files.

More recently, however, I have become mildly dissatisfied with Xandros, Tiny Core, and even Puppy variants like Browserlinux. Each is great in its own way, but none could handle all of my current needs. In particular, none of them could import cycling data from my Garmin Forerunner 305 gps. Second, none of them could access streaming video through my Amazon Prime account. I knew that I could get both of these features to work using Ubuntu Linux on my Acer Aspire laptop, but I wasn’t at all sure if my netbook (which is my preferred computer) could handle the size and cpu requirements of Ubuntu. Nonetheless, I decided to give it a try.

The first task was to free up an 8 GB SDHC card. Then I installed Ubuntu onto that blank card by the easiest method possible. That is, I disconnected the hard drive from my Acer laptop, I used a usb card adapter to insert the SDHC card. And I then booted Ubuntu 11.10 from the CD drive. It was a simple matter to install Ubuntu onto the SDHC card with no chance at all of messing up the (disconnected) hard drive.

Once Ubuntu finished its time-consuming installation, I shut everything down, and inserted the SDHC card into the slot on the right side of my Eee 900. After pushing the power button, I hit the Escape key as soon as the splash screen lit up. That allowed me to scroll down and boot from the SD card instead of the internal SD drive. Bingo! Ubuntu booted perfectly.

It’s true that Ubuntu 11.10 is rather slow to boot from an SDHC card, taking about 100 seconds from the first push of the power button to a fully usable desktop. Fortunately, a full reboot is not normally necessary. After a bit of tweaking, the “suspend” feature works well on the Eee 900 and puts the computer into a low-power state; it “resumes” from “suspend” in a matter of seconds.

Even a fresh installation of a well-established operating system like Ubuntu is still not the same thing as a fully tweaked installation. Here are the most significant changes I have made.

To enable Firefox to display Amazon Prime videos, one must first install (or update) Flash, install the standard video and audio codecs, and install hal (with libhal1).

To install Flash go to http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Select “APT for Ubuntu 10.04+”

To install standard audio and  video codecs, follow the advice on the following web page: http://www.liberiangeek.net/2011/10/first-30-days-with-ubuntu-11-10-oneiric-ocelotday-three/

The key thing here is to open a terminal window and type in the following --

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Finally, to enable Amazon Prime Videos to play--

sudo apt-get install libhal1 hal

There was a bit of trial and error for me in this process--along with several reboots of the computer--but eventually I was able to watch both Youtube and Amazon videos. Unfortunately, the videos would only play well on the smallest viewer option and became laggy in the larger formats. 

The solution to that problem was to install fluxbox desktop and switch entirely to it instead of Ubuntu’s more resource-intensive Unity desktop system. Do this by opening a terminal window and typing in--

sudo apt-get install fluxbox

Fluxbox allows videos to display with no lagging or stuttering--even in full screen mode. All of the standard software packages in Ubuntu seem to work well in fluxbox--except for the Nautilus file manager and the Gnome Screenshot Utility! If you use them, you get shifted back into a partial--and very vexing--Unity desktop that forces a reboot. I handle file management with pcmanfm and midnight commander (mc). Install them with--

sudo apt-get install pcmanfm

sudo apt-get install mc

Screenshots can be taken with Xnview (see below). Software package management also requires adaptation in fluxbox since the Ubuntu Software Center doesn’t show up as an application in fluxbox. However, if one starts pcmanfm and clicks Go>Applications, it is available and operates normally but eats up nearly all the cpu capacity. It is preferable to handle software packages with simple apt-get commands.

To download data from a Garmin gps device, you need to install both garmin-forerunner-tools and Pytrainer. Use a terminal window to type in--

sudo apt-get install garmin-forerunner-tools

sudo apt-get install pytrainer

Pytrainer opens initially into a window that is too large for the screen on the eee 900. Use alt-left-click-and-drag to bring the window down so the header displays. Click to maximize. If everything displays correctly, move the pointer into the header area, right-click, and scroll down the Remember. Tick the boxes for Dimensions. Now Pytrainer should display correctly most of the time.

In addition, I downloaded xnview for linux

http://www.xnview.com/en/downloadunix.html

and installed it in its own directory under Documents by opening a terminal window in the directory where I stored/moved the downloaded file and then typing--

tar -xvpzf XnViewMP-linux.tgz

Run Xnview by using psmanfm to navigate to the directory in which you extracted the files and then double-click on the "xnview.sh" file.

To improve the operation of your touchpad in fluxbox, go to Applications>System>Administration>Gnome Control Center and start the mouse/touchpad application. Tick the boxes for “Disable touchpad while typing” and “Enable mouse clicks with touch pad” and “Two-finger scrolling.” Then fix the problem with double-tap and tap-and-drag by  following the advice on this page: http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2011/10/31/fix-for-touchpad-trouble-in-ubuntu-11-10/

In terminal:

synclient | grep "SingleTapTimeout"

(Checks the default value--180 on my system)

synclient SingleTapTimeout=360

(Sets the speed to a slower rate.)

synclient FastTaps=1

(Reduces delay in registering single taps on screen.)

In /.fluxbox/startup add these lines:

gnome-settings-daemon &

conky &

nm-applet &

exec fluxbox

Gnome-settings-daemon allows suspend and resume to work correctly. Conky monitors various systems with an appropriate .conkyrc file. Nm-applet puts a network manager applet into the taskbar.

The default installation process for Ubuntu 11.10 sets up a swap area of a little more than 800 MB, but in general it is best not to make frequent writes to an SDHC card. To force Ubuntu to reduce its use of the swap area and run more things in memory, you need to change the “swappiness” parameters. Do this by opening a terminal window and typing in --

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

The result will be an integer from 0 to 100 where 0 indicates maximum reluctance to use swap memory and 100 indicates maximum willingness to swap memory. the default is 60. I changed this parameter to 10 by typing in the code--

sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

This change is only temporary and will revert to the default value upon the next reboot, but it allows one to test various settings. Once you have one you like, make it permanent by typing in a terminal window--

gksudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

Search for vm.swappiness and change its value as desired. If vm.swappiness does not exist, add it to the end of the file like so:

vm.swappiness=10

Then save the file and reboot. (From http://modifyubuntu.com/#speed)

I modified /.fluxbox/keys to enable hotkey combinations to start favored programs. Thus, Alt-F1 opens a terminal window, Alt-F2 opens a text editor, Alt-F3 opens Firefox browser, and Alt-F7 opens the file manager. Insert the following text in the "keys" file (opened by a text editor):

# open a terminal

Mod1 F1 :Exec x-terminal-emulator

# open text editor

Mod1 F2 :Exec gedit

# open Firefox

Mod1 F3 :Exec firefox

# start conky

Mod1 F6 :Exec conky

# start file manager

Mod1 F7 :Exec pcmanfm

Skype is readily downloadable from the repositories and works flawlessly. Use

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ $(lsb_release -sc) partner"

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install skype

Run Skype by opening a terminal window and typing in “skype”  (without the quotes)

There are some minor issues with power management that require a bit of additional software. Consult the following web page -- http://www.webupd8.org/2011/10/things-to-tweak-after-installing-ubuntu.html -- on installing jupiter and jupiter-support-eee. I followed this advice and am satisfied for now with the battery.  The relevant terminal commands are --

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/jupiter
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install jupiter

sudo apt-get install jupiter-support-eee 

 Additional help with battery issues is suggested at -- http://askubuntu.com/questions/92794/how-to-change-critically-low-battery-value/92818#92818 -- though I did not implement that fix. Nor have I yet seen a need to try the fix suggested in the following -- http://www.webupd8.org/2011/06/linux-kernel-power-issue-fix.html

These changes take a little time to implement, but they are worth it. I now have a fully functional, quite modern, and reasonably speedy operating system on the Asus Eee 900. This little 2.2 pound computer works rather like an iPad with an attached keyboard.