My eeePC 1000HA mini-laptop has been sitting idle for the longest because I bought it with the intention of doing small linux projects on it, and yet it really has proved to be less than ideal to travel with 2 laptops, all the time taking them out at the x-ray machines, packing them back up as TSA employees shout things like, “take out your laptops, take off your belt, your shoes, take your money out of your wallet and give it to us, etc, etc”. I tried the method below, but it didn’t seem to work. I then tried UNetbootin from windows on a cheap 1GB flash drive.
[tboyes @ sa-nc-apg-36.static.jnpr.net : ~/Downloads]>ls -alh eb4-b1.iso [21:46:07 on 10-07-12 : s001]
-rw-r–r– 1 tboyes tboyes 789M 27 May 03:08 eb4-b1.iso
[tboyes @ sa-nc-apg-36.static.jnpr.net : ~/Downloads]>diskutil list [21:46:10 on 10-07-12 : s001]
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *200.0 GB disk0
1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD 199.7 GB disk0s2
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: CD_partition_scheme *158.1 MB disk1
1: Apple_partition_scheme 137.6 MB disk1s0
2: Apple_partition_map 1.0 KB disk1s0s1
3: Apple_HFS 3MobileBroadband 23.8 MB disk1s0s2
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: *1.0 GB disk2[tboyes @ sa-nc-apg-36.static.jnpr.net : ~/Downloads]>sudo bash [21:46:25 on 10-07-12 : s001]
Password:
[%{%}%n%{%} @ %M : %~]>umount /dev/disk2
umount: /dev/disk2: not currently mounted
[%{%}%n%{%} @ %M : %~]>dd if=eb4-b1.iso of=/dev/disk2<wait>…
1615644+0 records in
1615644+0 records out
827209728 bytes transferred in 307.475770 secs (2690325 bytes/sec)
I then grabbed a 2GB Sandisk Cruiser usb flash drive and began to install the ISO file via UNetbootin. EB4 (Aurora) booted up fine after I defined the USB as the primary boot device inside the BIOS. Ran GParted to partition the hard drive appropriately with an Extended Partition on what was previously the D: drive (~60GB), and then built the logical ext4 fs partition and a 5GB swap logical partition. So far so good. I know there are better ways to make a linux system perform better – ie. swap on the outer cylinders – and having multiple mount points such as /, /usr, /var, /home, etc, etc. But frankly, I just don’t care. It’s a netboot. I don’t care about making it perfect. It’s a tool that I want to use for various things.
Ok, the installation looked like it was working fine, but it failed while installed grub. After closer inspection I think I know why: the software is installed into /dev/sdX, however the grub loader was attempting to write to /dev/hda0. I changed this in the advanced settings and restarted the install. Hopefully this works and I can dual boot this little laptop.
Update: The install worked great and I have a dual-booting working. Wifi works great even to an AD-HOC network that I created from the MBP. Overall I am pleased with the setup and would highly recommend eeebuntu for netbooks and mini-laptops.
