Ubuntu Netbook Remix (for SDHC) on EeePC

The following actions should be carried out on the Windows PC:

• Insert your USB Flash Drive, making note of its drive letter.
• From the DiskImager folder on your PC, click Win32DiskImager.exe
• (1) Browse to the ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img file on your PC.
• (2) Select your USB device from the dropdown.
• (3) Click the Write button to copy the image to your USB Flash Drive.

If all goes well, you should now have a Portable USB Ubuntu 9.04 NetBook Remix that you can run as an alternate Live operating system from the USB Flash Drive or install on your Netbook via the built in Ubuntu Netbook Installer.

Power up your EeePC. When you see the screen above, click [Esc] immediately and you'll be presented with a list of possible boot devices.

From the list of boot devices click on USB: USB DISK 2.0, or whatever your USB device is called, and not the 2 lines starting with HDD, as they are the EeePC Solid-State Disks.

Here you can try out most of the Ubuntu facilities without writing anything to any disks. The system will run from the software stored on your Live USB or computer memory.

When you are happy to actually install Ubuntu on the SDHC memory card, then all you have to do is insert the memory card, making sure it is not automatically mounted, and click the Install icon.

My first language is English (and my second language is probably SAS, but that's another story!), so I've selected English from the list, and clicked Forward.

I live in the same timezone as London, so I've selected London from the list, and clicked Forward.

The keyboard on my EeePC is United Kingdom, so I've selected United Kingdom from the list, and clicked Forward.

When you get to partitioning you can use:

• Guided, which uses the entire SDHC Memory Card for Ubuntu. This seems to work best on low quality devices.
  
• Manual, if you want to be able to plug the same SDHC Memory Card into a computer running Windows and upload files. This allows you to choose how much space to leave formatted as FAT or FAT32, which Windows can still read.
  

Whichever you decide to use, just make sure that there is at least 2.5Gb in the Linux root partition (Mount point of "/"), otherwise the installation will fail.

Now that you've completed the partitioning of the SDHC Memory Card, so that you've got at least 2.5Gb in the Linux root partition (Mount point of "/"), the installation will start.

Reboot your EeePC. When you see the screen above, click [Esc] immediately and you'll be presented with a list of possible boot devices.

From the list of boot devices click on USB: Single Flash Reader, or whatever your memory card reader device is called, and not the 2 lines starting with HDD, as they are the EeePC Solid-State Disks.

Ubuntu 9.04 may not recognize the wireless adapter installed in your netbook, in which case you will have to install it yourself, by using ndiswrapper to load the available Windows device driver. The following instructions apply to the Asus EeePC 901, and may need to be adapted for your own netbook:

1. Open the Package Manager, using System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager, and select the following packages:
      ndiswrapper-common
      ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
   and install them.
   
2. Download the Windows device driver rt2860 from Ralink.
3. Open the Terminal, Applications > Accessories > Terminal. Assuming you downloaded the zip file containing the Windows rt2860 device driver to your Desktop, and then extracted the files to a folder called wireless on your Desktop, you can type the following to go to this folder:
      cd Desktop/wireless
   
4. Load the drivers with ndiswrapper using the following commands in the Terminal:
      sudo ndiswrapper -i rt2860.inf
      sudo ndiswrapper -m
   
5. The Asus EeePC 901 has an Azurewave wireless adapter installed, based on the RaLink rt2860 chipset. Earlier EeePC models have a different adapter, and other netbooks may not use this adapter either, so, if Ubuntu does not recognize the adapter automatically, you will need to find different Windows device drivers for these, and load them in the same way.
   
6. To complete the installation, run the command:
      sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces
   
7. Add the following text in that file and save the file:
        auto lo
        iface lo inet loopback
8. Run the commands:
      sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
      sudo gedit /etc/modules
   
9. Add the following text in that file and save the file:
        ndiswrapper
10. Finally, run the following command:
       sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
    
11. The wireless connectivity should work now.
    
12. However, there is a problem using WPA with Ubuntu, where the PSK (Pre-shared key) is not stored in plain text, but in hexadecimal characters, so you have to enter the key again at every boot. You can fix this by running the command:
       sudo gedit /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
    
13. Add the following text in that file (modify the SSID and PSK in the non-Bold area with yours) and save the file:
         network={
         ssid="YourNetworksName"
         proto=WPA
         key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
         pairwise=TKIP
         group=TKIP
         psk="YourKey"
         }