Aaron Hollman's Blog

Aspire One

Disclaimer:

The following instructions involve steps that could potentially corrupt and destroy any existing operating systems you may have. Use the following at your own risk. If there are any mistakes or errors in the following instructions, please let me and others know by making a comment. Although, I have endeavored to make certain as much as possible that the following is correct, I am not responsible for any damage to any machine that this is tried on. You have been warned.

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I recently bought an Acer Aspire One netbook PC that came with one fatal flaw, Microsoft Windows Vista installed by default. I had already had enough of dealing the poisoned dessert that Vista has brought to the Operating System Table so I decided right off that I was not going to use it, but I also realized that there might be a time in the future that I am going to need to be able to use Vista so I decided to install Ubuntu Linux 9.04 in addition to Windows Vista.

The first thing I needed to do, before anything else, was to make a backup of the current operating system just incase things went horribly wrong. Thankfully, I have not needed to do a restore from that backup at this time since both OSes appear to be running as well as possible. I used the backup software that came with the computer in Windows Vista. It can be found by going to Start –> All Programs –> Acer –> Acer eRecovery Management.

After the backup was complete, I proceeded to install my copy of Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix from a thumb drive. I am not going to go into the details of this install since it did not take me very long to decide that I was not going to keep it. I will detail the installation of the full version of Ubuntu 9.04.

Installation:

The first thing you need is a copy of Ubuntu 9.04 on CD and a USB CD ROM drive. You can download Ubuntu 9.04 from here: Download Ubuntu | Ubuntu.

1. Plug the CD ROM drive into your netbook’s USB slot.
2. Boot off they CD by pressing F12 (note: You may need to enable this feature in the machine’s BIOS, I did.)
3. Select your language (English) and click Forward
4. Select your time zone from the map (choose area close to where you live in your time zone) and click Forward.
5. Choose your keyboard layout. Based on your time zone location it will recommend one for you and click Forward.
6. Click ‘Specify partitions manually (advanced)’ and click Forward. (The reason for this over the ‘Install side by side…’ option is due to the fact that after I tried that the first time, Ubuntu thought I only needed 2 GB of hard drive space for the installation, this was not the case.)
7. Select the main Windows partition, it will be the larger of the two partitions if this is a new machine. DO NOT CHANGE THE SETTINGS FOR THE SMALLER PARTITION. THIS IS PROBABLY THE RESCUE PARTITION.
8. Adjust the partition size to what you want the size of the new partition to be. This is set in megabytes so adjust accordingly (ex. 80786 is equal to about 80 gigabytes)
9. Leave the other settings the way they are and press OK. Press Continue on the next screen, this will write the changes to disk. This should resize your Windows partition without removing it completely.
10. Click on the free space row on the device table and press the New partition button below.
11. Select the size you want for the root partition. I usually use the following scheme: (49% root, 49% home, 2% swap up to 2GB.)
12. Set the ‘Use as’ as Ext3 (this is the most common file format though Ext4 is becoming more prevalent)
13. Set the mount point to root (/) and press OK.
14. Click on the free space row again and press New partition again.
15. Select the size you want for your home drive, about 49% again.
16. Set the use as as the same thing you set it to for the root partition in step 12.
17. Set the mount point for home (/home) and press OK.
18. Click on the free space row again and press New partition.
19. Leave the size as is and set the ‘Use as’ to swap area.
20. Press OK.
21. Press the Forward button at the bottom right corner of the screen.
22. Fill in the information on the next page (name, login name, password, computer name, etc.) and press Forward.
23. If you wish to migrate documents and settings from your other Windows installation, this is the place to do it. (I have not used this so I can not provide any further information on it.)
24. Press the Forward button.
25. The next page is a summary of what is going to happen. Read it and make sure everything is as you want it to be. When you are certain, click the Install button. This will install Ubuntu 9.04 on the partitions we selected earlier. This will take about 15 minutes to half an hour, maybe longer depending on the speed of your machine.
26. Once it is finished, the CD ROM drive will eject asking you to remove the disk before rebooting. Once this is done the computer will reboot.
27. You will notice after the reboot that there is a new screen before the OS starts up, this is the boot loader screen where you can select which operating system to boot into. Your old Windows installation will probably be the bottom one that says Windows, the first one will be the rescue partition and probably will not boot up at all, this is a good thing since it should not be used except for recovery.
28. Your machine should boot into Ubuntu after a delay provided you have not pressed any keys. If you have, select Ubuntu from the top and press Enter. It will begin to boot into the OS.

For the machine  I installed Ubuntu on (Acer Aspire One model A0751), I needed to make some changes to the graphics to get them to work at full resolution. The instructions (these are for the netbook remix, but work on the full version also) for getting this working can be found here: AspireOne – Community Ubuntu Documentation (IMPORTANT NOTE: UPDATE YOUR OS FIRST BEFORE APPLYING THIS FIX.)

29. I don’t have experience with other models of netbooks, but I would search the Ubuntu forums for any issues that may arise. It is very well maintained and you can usually find the answers you seek there.

Customization:

Customizations are endless with Ubuntu. You can make it look almost exactly like other operating systems such as Windows XP, Windows Vista or even Mac OS X. I myself chose a mix between Ubuntu and Mac OS X. Here is a good guide to get you started: Ubuntu Customization Guide v2 « Tux Enclave.

Final Thoughts:

I still have not found a good Twitter client to use on Ubuntu, but I have not looked very hard yet. I am using Mozilla FireFox for the web browser and Mozilla ThunderBird for a mail client. I am using it for what it was designed for, accessing the internet. As I play around with it more, I may write more about what I am using it for. For now, that is it.

Good luck!

aaron