Here’s how I setup my Jaunty Jackalope install on my Eee PC. It’s strange looking at this screenshot on a 24″ screen on my desktop computer. The Eee’s 8.9″ screen crams a lot of pixels into that tiny space.

I personally like the simplicity of the GNOME interface, and I haven’t tried KDE but I don’t think I need that much eye candy. I know xfce would run better on my Eee (or better still, Openbox) but it’s balancing between functionality and performance.

* * *

Heh, the weekend arrived and after dinner with my cousins (cousin and boyfriend back from Mildura for the weekend), came home and set about setting up Jaunty Jackalope on my Eee.

I have a spare 4GB flash drive sitting around and just downloaded the latest version of Unetbootin, and used that to setup a live CD (or live USB stick in this sense) for Ubuntu. That took a few minutes and I just plugged the USB stick into my Eee and booted into the Ubuntu desktop.

I went straight to the install icon on the desktop and followed the instructions to setup. It’s fairly straightforward and the only thing I configured manually was the partition and file system settings. I have a root directory, a home directory and a boot directory (4GB for the first 2, and 99MB for the boot directory). I wanted to keep Windows on my Eee PC so I just installed Ubuntu on the SD Card sitting on the Eee. I also changed the ext2 file system to the newer ext4 file system (supposedly better performance and allows you to save file sizes of up to 1 exabyte, not that I will ever have such a humongous file).

The installation took about 10-15 minutes, only because the SD card write performance is nothing to write home about. Once the install was done, booted right back into Ubuntu. Startup time has improved significantly. Where it used to take over a minute from the power button to the login screen, now it boots in under 30 seconds (I didn’t count, but it sure feels fast). This alone makes it a viable alternative to boot into Ubuntu as opposed to Windows when I need a quick hop onto the Internet.

Configured wifi, and just changed the default brown theme to the one as per the screenshot above. Resized the fonts so that I get more screen real estate, although many would argue I’d need a magnifying glass to read text so small.

Started up Firefox, installed Foxmarks to get my bookmarks list. Started up Pidgin so I could start chatting with friends. Heh, lots of programs installed out of the box, so it makes the experience quick.

Also made some tweaks to the /etc/fstab file to disable journalling on my Ubuntu install, just to reduce the amount of writing onto the disk to preserve its lifespan. I just follow whatever instructions I glean from the Internet as I don’t know how much of an impact it has and I’m just following it based on other people’s advice.

I also tweaked the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to fix up the boot menu so Windows can start from the GRUB boot menu. The convolution here comes from Windows only being smart enough to start from the MBR of the drive where it resides on and Ubuntu is currently situated on the 3rd drive in the BIOS menu. Didn’t manage to get it to work when I was using 8.10 but after deducing what the lines I was supposed to add meant, I got it working. Basically when you pick Windows from the boot menu, it does a swap of partition IDs so that Windows will think the drive it’s on is the main boot disk.

* * *

This was all done the night before and this morning I wanted to type this post out just to journal my experience setting up Jaunty on my Eee. Decided I’d try it as a multimedia device by copying some MP3s over to my USB disk. Plugged it in and I hit my first wall.

Due to licensing term and conditions of Ubuntu, anything that is not quite open source doesn’t get installed by default. This means all the codecs to decode music and video files. So I startup Firefox to get some solutions. A few command lines later, the system is now slowly updating all the required codecs to play almost everything under the sun.

It’s a minor inconvenience for me, but it would probably make life a bit more difficult for people who just want to enjoy their media and can’t do it immediately (not that it’s very straightforward in Windows as well, but it’s just a one click download for a codec pack and you’re off)

* * *

A few more minutes before my codecs finish downloading and I can probably try to play a music file for the first time.

Mmmm.. smell pancakes. Back to this later!