Install Ubuntu 9.04 on ASUS Eee PC 901

ASUS Eee PC 901  is a netbook based on the Intel Atom processor, with 1 GB of RAM, 20 GB SSD drive, 9 "display that comes with a specially adapted version of Linux. Our way is to install Ubuntu on this device. I already wrote, how to install Ubuntu 8.04 on an Eee PC . Today it’s time to upgrade to version 9.04.

With previous releases, it was necessary to install a special Linux kernel to fully support wireless (and wired, by the way) network and other functions, as well as safe work. In release 9.04, all this already supported “out of the box”, except Using some function keys on the keyboard.

The new system "breathes" on this laptop is much freer than previous releases. Booting from the OS selection menu to the login screen takes 20 seconds (8.10 was 35 seconds). Battery life is estimated at approximately 4.5 hours (approximately the same as in 8.10).

The installation itself is fairly straightforward. We divide it into several steps:

1. If you do not have an external CD drive , you must run the installer from a  USB drive or SD media . The easiest way is to use the utility built into the distribution kit to create a bootable USB disk (Create a USB startup disk). If you do not have Ubuntu installed, and there is no computer on which you can run the Live CD, then you can use the Unetbootin program .
2. To boot from the flash drive, press Esc at boot to open the boot menu. Select USB and press Enter.
3. You can install Ubuntu as usual, but pay particular attention to the disk partitioning phase. The Eee PC has two integrated solid state drives: fast at 4 GB and slightly slower at 16 GB. Select the partition manually and install the mount point of the root partition “/” on the small drive, and mount the home directory “/ home” on the large drive. You can also choose the Ext4 file system to get better performance from  SSDs . Ignore the warning about the absence of a Swap partition - for Eee PC it is recommended not to enable Swap for more careful handling of  SSDs .
4. Boot into a freshly installed system, everything should work fine. If Ubuntu does not pick up Bluetooth or a webcam , check if they are disabled in the BIOS. Install Cheese for a comfortable webcam experience  . If you want to monitor the CPU load, as is done in Xandros, just install the Gnome applet for monitoring resources.

There are lots of articles telling how to speed up SSDs , but with the new Ubuntu 9.04 on ASUS Eee PC 901  there is no need for them - everything works very quickly and smoothly anyway!

The original translation and many other useful materials can be found on the blog “ From Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux ” at www.xp2ubuntu.com .