Ubuntu 8.10 on the AA1: installation/review

November 14, 2008 Ubuntu 8.10 on the AA1: installation/review

Follow up: Since the writing of this post, a couple of new things are worth mentioning. Firstly, the easiest way to get all the hardware working is installing the sickboys’s kernel, bonus is very fast boot time (~15s). Secondly, I posted a follow-up review that adds up to this: ubuntu runs very slow on the AA1.

There is a version of ubuntu 8.10 that installs directly from a pen drive. I say great, let’s give it a spin! (you will need a cable connection to get internet working)

Download usb image here

Instructions to load the image on ubuntu right over here

The wiki has all kinds of tweaks and usefull stuff, so If you want to know what to expect there is the place.

Making a pen drive bootable was basic. Booting from the pen disk is trivial, just hitting F12 and choosing it from the list.

Instead of the normal Ubuntu live cd menu, the usb installer presents a prompt that starts booting automatically if you don’t touch it within 5 seconds. Fine with me.

Ok, the desktop is a surprise. I wasn’t expecting a desktop “optimized” for touchscreens.

Right, the windows are supposed to be always maximized so no window border

It's even stranger in person

Yeah, that firefox bullshit (called MIDbrowser) has definitely got to go.
Although this version of ubuntu is all tweaked to look like that, I think it’ll be no problem to reset it to a normal looking desktop.

Instalation goes ok, if you’re trying this I recommend you do a manual partitioning to reduce the swap to a minimum. I got it down to 50megs this time, just for the sake of it. If you want to do it, here’s how it’s supposed to look.

Ext2 is recommended because of some shit

Note: The mount point of the primary ext2 partition is naturally ” / “. I took this screenshot afterwards so it doesn’t show.

Now that’s it’s installed time to work. Booting up took for fucking ever, like one whole minute. Jesus Christ.

Let’s start by doing the upgrades and updates:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install aptitude
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST this took something like 60 godamn minutes. Pain staking. Consider yourself warned.
Note: if you don’t use aptitude don’t install it, but I highly recommend using aptitude instead of apt-get.

Now according to the wiki all I have to do is deactivate the default wireless driver in system->admnistration ->hardware drivers and install the backports.

sudo aptitude install linux-backports-modules-intrepid

Now let’s take out some useless crap from system>preferences->sessions , namely:

–devilpie (this is the app that keeps every window always maximized)
–update-notifier (I want this pc to work and do it fast, not be up to date with random bullshit)
–CellWriter (this is the on-screen keyboard, fuck that)
–Bluetooth Manager (The netbook doesn’t come with any bluetooh hardware and I don’t use any)
–Check for new hardware drivers (same reason as update notifier)
–Print Queue Applet (I don’t own a printer so screw it)
–GNOME Splash screen (I didn’t see any splash screen so…)
–Remote Desktop (What the fuck)
–Tracker
–Tracker Applet (i use gnome do, fuck tracker)
–User Folders update (Something about folder names. screw it)
–Visual Assistance (no way)

Make the boot use concurrency.

sudo gedit /etc/init.d/rc

And substitute where it says “CONCURRENCY=none” with “CONCURRENCY=shell”. without the quotes obviously. It’s like the second item, no biggy.

And that’s about it.

Reboot, a little prayer and let’s see what works and what’s worth mentioning:

-No need to login by default, I say nice

-Boot time is bit shorter now that there are less programs starting up and it uses concurrency. I’d say 30-40secs until you get a workable desktop. Yeah, basically it takes forever. *sigh*

-If an sd card is already plugged before you boot into the system than it mounts. Hot plugging is not working out of the box. Sucks.

-Wireless does in fact work 🙂

-Headphone detection works! Sound works ok. Don’t know about the internal mic, I dont use it anyway

-RAM after boot is less but close to 250megs. A bit heavy I should say

-Default behavior of nautilus is one click to open files and folders. This sucks, you can change it in preferences in the behavior tab easily. Speaking of which, it has tabbed browsing. Kick ass.

-System beep is enabled by default. How do you make that goddamn thing shut up?

-Installed Firefox3 and uninstalled MIDbrowser in the add/remove thing. You can search for firefox like so

That was easy

Maybe firefox3 is too heavy for this netbook, but I’ll give it a try and if it sucks I’ll just default to firefox2 as usual.

-Installing flash 10 was easy, as always. Video playback works well enough for youtube, not so well for watching daily show on comedycentral.com. This with desktop effects turned off. Maybe some graphics driver tweaking?

-Speaking of which, I got 347 fps running glxgears. This is very bad, my old laptop can spit more than 2000. Will have to look into it later.

-Thunderbird comes installed by default, as you probably noticed from the screenshots. Comes with an option to import a gmail account and it’s integrated in nautilus, I say nice. Evolution sucks so much I don’t even know what to say.

-This sad ubuntu doesn’t come with standard gnome themes and icons. This is just plain silly look:

Developers have a sense of humor, You're just too dumb to get it.

-The whole dark chocolate theme is better than human. Better in a sense that instead of getting old in 10 minutes, it got old in 20. Hello gnome-look.

-Installed skype and webcam was working fine. fuck yeah!

-Tried to make a call and audio doesn’t work. fuck no : -(
EDIT: To get skype working, please refer to this follow-up post

And I think that’s all folks. A final screenshot of how it looks:

So pretty I wants to cry

Since I hate it when people post screenshots and don’t say what they’re using, here. I installed aurora and then aurora_clean. To install aurora you will need to install the package libgtk2.0-dev.The window border is blended, wallpaper is something I found on deviantart, it’s called “This is Halloween” by this guy called loadus. Great piece.

And finally we’re done. This turned out really big. Hope it was helpfull.

Tags: 8.10, AA1, acer, aspire one, how, ibex, install, intrepid, review, to, ubuntu, wireless, work, working

• 2 comments
• Posted under AcerAspireOne, software