Ubuntu Netbook Install
Edited Saturday, November 27 2010
This web-page is part of a larger site giving examples of how to install Windows+Ubuntu Linux operating systems 'dual boot' in a computer. Illustrated Dual Boot HomePage
The computer used for this example installation is an ASUS EeePC netbook PC.
It has an 4GB SSD instead of a hard disk drive, and it has a 16GB SD picture card for extra storage capacity.
There is no CD drive, so I will be making a Ubuntu USB Startup Disk in a flash memory stick to use for installing Ubuntu with.
This little PC has a 900 Mhz Intel Celeron CPU, so it's quite powerful for it's size, and it has 2 GB of RAM.
It is one of the original ASUS EeePCs that made netbooks famous and I been running Ubuntu in this one since 23rd September 2008 and it's still going strong. I use it hard, it doesn't do a lot of I/O intensive work, but I often have it running 24/7 since it's so economical on electricty, and quiet. By day I also take it on mapping expeditions in four wheel drives, travelling fast over rough roads. The small size of the EeePC gives me more leg room and it stands up to jarring and shocks that would instanly destroy a spinning hard disk drive.
At night and after working hours it's my skype computer, and runs on standby listening for any of my skype contacts who might want to call me.
The iso file used for this installation was the ubuntu-10.04-beta2-desktop-i386.iso,
| herman@amd-karmic:~$ md5sum ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso d044a2a0c8103fc3e5b7e18b0f7de1c8 ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso |
Checking the integrity of your .iso from a Linux live CD | Checking the integrity of your .iso in Windows
This installation will show you
- how to create a Ubuntu USB 'Startup' Disk, also called a 'USB Persistence Install'
- how to easily create erase block aligned partitions in any flash memory drive or SSD
- how to boot your USB Startup Disk from your netbook's BIOS Boot Menu
- how to install Ubuntu split over two drives, with / (the main operating system files), in the 4 GB SSD drive, and with /home (the user's files), will be in the 16GB SD card.
The advantages
of using the 'Desktop' live & install .iso
|
To make a Ubuntu USB Startup Disk, you will need
- an empty USB flash memory stick, (or one with files in it you don't care about)
- a computer with a Ubuntu operating system installed in it, or at least a computer that can run Ubuntu from a Live CD in the CD/DVD drive.
- An .iso file for a Ubuntu 'Desktop' Live/Install CD, or a CD burnt from a Ubuntu 'Desktop' LiveCD iso file.
You can insert your USB flash memory stick in a USB port any time.
- Make sure you unplug other USB drives, to make sure you won't get confused and format the wrong one and lose any of your data.
Links to other websites for more info on Startup Disk Creator
Ubuntu's Live USB Disk Creator - Phoronix
InstallationFromUSBStick - Ubuntu Community Docs
LiveUsbPendrivePersistent - Ubuntu Wiki
USB Startup Disk Creator for installing any Ubuntu Linux OS Tutorial - YouTube - OZGUI
In this screencap the focus of my attention is in the lower window of Startup Disk Creator.
1. Before I can make a USB Startup Disk, I will need to re-format my entire USB stick.
(i) There is an empty space at the start of the USB flash memory stick, it's 1 GB, there is plenty of room there and it had an earlier (testing) version of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx in it, so it must be large enough.
Stangely, and much to my annoyance, if I try to select that, Startup Disk Creator will tell me 'There is not enough space for this image', which is clearly incorrect, but nevertheless, it will refuse to use the available space.
(ii) If I try to select the 15 GB partition, Startup Disk Creator will pop up a dialog asking me 'Are you sure you want to erase the entire disk?', which agravates me even more, because I don't really think it needs an entire 16GB sized disk just for a 700 MB CD image.
So, be prepared to sacrifice your entire USB flash memory device, even though Startup Disk Creator shows you a list of partitions, as if to imply you can choose one partition, in reality there is no choice but to reformat the entire disk.
This is somewhat of a nuisance to me because the partition labelled 'POST-INSTALL' contains a lot of goodies like nice desktop backgrounds, videos about open source software and how to use Ubuntu and all kinds of things helpful to new users. I have a script for copying those into new installations after the install is over. They'll all have to go.
I have a backup of them, and I can re-partition the thumbdrive later on and copy them back in again.
My main point is, don't bother trying to make a USB Startup Disk if there are files already in the stick that you want to keep. I don't think the program is capable of installing in a disk with more than one partition, even though it seems to imply that it can. Maybe a future version of Startup Disk Creator will be more capable.
I selected the entire disk, and clicked 'erase disk'.
By the way, make sure you only have one USB drive plugged in too, USB Startup Disc Creator can wipe out a lot of data by accidentally formatting other USB storages devices.
TIP: Click on the third button from the left on the top edge of the 'Make Startup Disk' window to expand the Window to take up the whole desktop so you can see what you're doing better.
2. In the top half of the panel there is a list of .iso files it has automatically detected in my computer, in the 'Downloads' direcory.
I also have a Ubuntu CD in the CD-ROM drive, as you can see by the icon over in the top left of my desktop. That comes upas /dev/sr0 in USB Startup Disk Creator. The Startup Disk Creator will allow me to use the Live CD for making a USB Startup Disk from, or I can choose any of the .iso files, without even bothering to burn them to a CD.
I have some .iso files for the Ubuntu 'Alternate Installation' CD, those are no good for making a bootable USB we can install from, or at least they couldn't be used for installing with the last time I tried. The installation will start, but it will error out and red-screen when it gets to 'searching for CD-ROM drive', or something like that.
I have an iso file for the amd64 bit Ubuntu 'Desktop' Live/Install CD, I could make a USB Startup Disk with that and it would boot and install Ubuntu in a PC with a dual core processor, (or quad core, or six core probably), but my netbook only has a single core processor, so I can't use the Ubuntu Desktop amd64 .iso.
I can choose either the CD in the CD/DVD drive, or the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 'Lucid Lynx' i386 .iso file.
On this occasion, I will choose the .iso file.
This screencap shows the Startup Disk Creator,
3. Near the bottom of the panel, there's a slider for telling Startup Disk Creator how much space you want to have reserved for the persistent storage area of the disk, where you can save files and settings.
USB flash memory sticks are always better to install Ubuntu with than Live CDs, even when the computer does have a working CD/DVD drive. Dust or fingerprints on an optical disk or dust on the lense on optical drives can cause a lot of installation problems, and having the installer in a virtual CD in a USB drive.
USB drives are a lot faster to read from than optical disks as well.
In this screencap Startup DIsk Creator is making my Ubuntu USB Startup DIsk.
Comparison between USB Startup Disk and Ubuntu Installed in a USB
USB Startup Disk contains the same operating system as the Ubuntu Live CD, it boots with syslinux and contains the Ubuntu installer. Usually these are installed in a FAT32 file system in the USB drive.
The good thing about the USB Startup DIsk or 'persistent' kind of USB installations are that they
- can be used to install Ubuntu with
- produce hardly any wear on the flash memory, it should last forever
Ubuntu Installed in a USB
When Ubuntu is installed in a USB flash memory drive in the same way we would install Ubuntu in a hard disk, it boots with GRUB2 and runs in an ext4 file system.
A full Ubuntu installation booting with GRUB2 would make a better support disk for Ubuntu.
The reason for that its because if you ever have boot loader problems, all you need to do is boot GRUB2 in the USB Ubuntu installation and run update-grub, it will scan the computer and add all operating systems to its boot menu. Then you should be able to reboot and choose whichever operating system you want.
So, a proper Ubuntu operating system in a USB is useful because it
- contains GRUB2
- good quality flash memory should last for a long time
All done.
Now we can reboot.
TIP: If you have Windows in your netbook and you plan to dual boot, I believe it's a good idea to run CHKDSK /R on your Windows file system to make sure it's in good order before attempting to resize with any partition editor.
Since a netbook has no CD drive, you will need a copy of the appropriate Windows 'Installation Disk' in a USB flash memory stick.
I have tried out a utility called 'WinToFlash' and found it to be very suitable. The only modification I had to make was to copy the file autochk.exe from the \$WIN_NT$.~LS folder into the \$WIN_NT$.~BT\i386 folder so the CHKDSK command can find autochk, and after that CHKDSK /R works.
Booting the Live USB
Okay,
so we're going to boot the Ubuntu Live USB now.This photo shows my EeePC with the USB Startup Disk plugged into a USB port, and I have a BIOS boot menu up in the screen.
To make my EeePC, (or most computers) boot from a USB drive instad of the first hard disk drive, (or SSD), in most computers it is possible to bring up a BIOS boot menu.
Here's a link about how to boot from a BIOS boot menu, How I boot from my BIOS.
When the Ubuntu Live USB has booted, you'll see the Ubuntu Live USB desktop, and if your have Ubuntu Lucid Lynx it will look something like the screencap on the left.
You can run Ubuntu from here without making any changes to your computer. I have another web page about that, - Live CD Page.
This web page is about how to make changes to your computer.
The next job will be to open GParted and work on the partitions in the EeePC.
This screencap shows where to find GParted partition editor in case everyone doesn't already know.
I need to make a new partition in my EeePC's Solid State Drive to install Ubuntu in.
In order to do that, I will need to delete that partition that's aleady there, (of course), which was my Karmic Koala installation.
I could have upgraded from Karmic to Lucid instead of re-installing, but I prefer a nice clean re-install, and anyway, I wanted to make this how-to.
So, I deleted Karmic Koala.
I don't know what those other two partitions are supposed to be at the end of the disk there, but I'll just leave those alone in case deleting them will cause some kind of problems. One is labelled 'BIOS', and if it's what I think it is then my EeePC might not work anymore if I delete it. (LOL).
Now we're creating a new partition with flash memory erase block alignment.
The way to do that using GParted is to
- remove the tick from the 'Round to cylinders' checkbox
- type a 1 in the 'Free space preceding (MiB) spinbox , or click on the up arrow
There's a way to change the disk geometry in the MBR using an fdisk command, listed in this blog by Ted Ts'o, Aligning filesystems to an SSD’s erase block size - and you can do things that way if you want to, fdisk -H 224 -S 56 /dev/sda. If you continue reading all the way to the bottom of the 100 reader's responses though, you'll see that the main reason for doing that is to make things easier if we're going to have more than one partition in the disk. (Unless I'm reading it wrong).
In the installation I'm illustrating here, we're going to have only one partition in the first disk, and one partition in the second disk. So we can simply use GParted, so even a Linux newby should be able to manage.
This screencap shows the tick mark is removed from the 'Round to cylinders' checkbox, the 'Free space preceding had been set to 1 MiB.
Most flash memory uses NAND and that has 4k pages and 512k erase blocks.
There might be some flash memory using 256k erase blocks or larger erse blocks like 1025k.
By making our partition start at 1 MiB, we may waste a wee bit of precious disk space, but our partition will be starting in sector 2048, which is a multiple of any of those numbers I just mentioned, so it should work for everyone.
I selected to create the new partition as a primary partition, although it's not all that important, you can use a logical partition for Ubuntu just as well.
I set the file system type to ext4, because that's the most advanced file system and it is the best one to use for any flash memory drives.
I also set the file system label as 'root'.
It's a good idea to set file system labels, but it's optional, you can skip it if you want.
This screencap shows that the first sector of the partition GParted has created for me starts in sector number 2048, so I have the proper file system alignment for the erase blocks in the SSD.
Now I'm cicking over in the right-hand corner in GParted for the drop-down menu so I can select some other disk to work on.
It's easy to tell my 4GB SSD main drive because it's the only drive I have that's that size.
I can tell my 16 GB camera card is /dev/sdc because the Startup Disk has a FAT32 file system, and it shows up as FAT32 in GParted, so I will open the third disk in this list, /dev/sdc.
I don't really recommend using a camera card for an operating system's /home directory, but since I only have a 4GB main drive I think it's better than squeezing everything onto the main SSD.
The camera card will probably wear out someday, because I don't think camera cards are sophisticated enough to feature 'wear levelling', like thumb drives and SSDs mostly do.
For the ease of use, I'm prepared to accept the fact that the camera card isn't going to last forever.
I have deleted any partition that may have existed in my SD camera flsh memory card and I'm creating a new partition there, which will be formatted with the ext4 file system.
Once again, I have removed the tick from the 'Round to cylinders' checkbox and set a '1' in the 'Free space preceding' spinbox.
This image shows I have correct partition alignment for flash memory in the 16GB SD camera card, which I'm going to use for my separate /home partition.
I have now closed GParted, and this is the Ubuntu Live USB Starter Disk's Desktop.
Starting the Ubuntu Installer
When you are ready to install Ubuntu, you may double-click on the 'Install Ubuntu' icon or else right-click on it and select 'Open' from the right-click menu.
ubuntu languages.png (above) - credit to Elabra Sanchez - (image under creative commons licence).
Ubuntu features language support for more languages than any other operating system.
Ubuntu language support link: Translations/ReleaseLanguages/9.10 - Ubuntu Wiki
English is set as the default language. Just click the 'Forward' button if English is your prefered language.
If you want to run the installer in a different language than English, you may use your mouse to select the language you want to use and click the 'Forward' button.
Step 2 of 7
The Lucid Lynx Live CD is pretty good at guessing what region of the world we may happen to be in.Just check to make sure it has guessed correctly.
The important thing is to make sure the installer knows which time zone we're in.
For me it's 'Brisbane', but the Ubuntu installer guessed 'Sydney Australia', so I had to click on the map where Brisbane is to correct it.
Another way of correcting it would be to use the drop-down lists under the map.
Step 3 of 7
Most of us use a US English type of keyboard, even in Australia.
If you have a laptop and you're not sure, you probably have a standard US type of keyboard, at least for the purposes of installing Ubuntu.
If you do have a special type of keyboard, you will probably know about it and you should take the time to scroll through these lists, you'll probably find it here somewhere.
I always just click 'Forward' for this one.
Step 4 of 7 - Prepare disk space
For this installation we will be doing something special, splitting our installation over two different disks. and the only way we can do that is by partitioning manually, (advanced).
Step 5 of 8 - Prepare disk space
In this screen I'm selecting the 3979 MB file system as the one I want to do something with, so I have clicked on it to select it.
Then I hit the 'Change' button.
The file system should be set to ext4, even though I have already formatted the partition with GParted, It doesn't matter if I format it again really, but there' s no need to, so I didn't click on the 'format the partition' box.
The most important thing here is to set the mount point as / ('root' - for the operating system files).
After everything's set I can click okay and close the 'edit partition' dialog.
Next I need to set up the other partition, the one in the 16 GB SD camera card, which will be my /home partition.
As you can see, I have highlighted that and clicked 'change'.
For the /home partition, I used the same settings as for /, and I have set the file system as ext4, not chosen to reformat it, set the mount point as /home, and typed the label 'home'.
Now I'm finished with designation of partitions and I can carry on with the rest of the installation.
I'm choosing to ignore this warning message because I'm planning on creating a swap file for Ubuntu later on, after the installation has finished.
I'm also ignoring this warning because I know I have already re-formatted these partitionsusing GParted.
Step 6 of 8 - Who are you?
This panel asks me some easy questions.
I always make sure I choose a good secure password.
Here is a link to an easy way to choose a secure password that's easy to remember but hard to crack, password tip.
Since this installation installed GRUB to MBR in the second hard disk, instead of the first hard disk, I will need to do something special to get my new Ubuntu operating system to boot.
If I have another Linux operating system with GRUB2 in it, I could boot into that and run 'sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg' and use the other operating system's GRUB to boot my new Lucid Lynx installation with.
Otherwise I might use GRUB from a CD or floppy disc, or some other kind of boot disc.
Another method that works for most, (but not all) computers is boot from the BIOS boot menu, the following link explains how to do that, How I boot from my BIOS , (by pressing a special key at the right time while the computer is booting up).
This time I will allow my computer will boot up normally so that it will boot into my new Ubuntu Lucid Lynx installation.
This is my login screen.
This is a screencap of my new Ubuntu desktop.
It's a good idea to open up our repositories and get an update, install the software we want, and start configuring, personalizing and customizing our Ubuntu installations.
Here's a link to a page with some information to get you started, Post-install Page.
Settings and Tweaking
1. Change the IO Scheduler (Recommended for SSDs but optional, and not for hard disk drives)
The command for opening your /etc/default/grub file is shown on the below
| gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub |
Below you can see where in the file you should paste the words "elevator=noop", or "elevator=deadline".
Save and close the file.
| # If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update # /boot/grub/grub.cfg GRUB_DEFAULT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="elevator=deadline " # Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only) #GRUB_TERMINAL=console |
You may run 'sudo update-grub', or 'sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg', whichever you prefre, either command will update your /boot/grub/grub.cfg file with the new changes.
| sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg |
If your netbook has a Solid State Disk, it might be a good idea to edit GRUB with the boot option "elevator=noop", or "elevator=deadline", so the option will be passed on to the Linux kernel to use the noop or the deadline IO scheduler for reading and writing to the flash memory drives.
Noop scheduler - wikipedia.
Deadline scheduler - wikipedia.
The default IO scheduler for Ubuntu is CFQ, and the job of an IO scheduler is to organise hard disk reads and writes so they will be grouped according to where they need to go to or come from on the hard disk.
It saves a lot of time if the little read/write heads can be pivoted to one area and do some work while reads and writes to some other area are queued up in memory until it's time for the read/write heads to be pivoted to another area and do some work. That's better than snapping the little pivot arms from one spot to another like crazy just for each individual read or write.
The IO scheduler is great for hard disk drives, but SSD drives and other kinds of flash memory drives don't have any read/write heads to need to the data organised for, they work a completely different way.
That means the operating system can work a little bit faster when it's in an SSD or any kind of flash memory without the fancy CFQ IO scheduler, (sorry CFQ), the deadline or the noop IO scheduler are all that will be needed and the operating system will be free to work faster.
| sudo apt-get install swapspace |
Dynamic Swap Space Manager saves a lot of wasted disk space by creating a swap files for you on demand.
Most of the time we don't need to use very much swap areas these days with modern machines with plenty of RAM. It's only really needed to make the system happy and for hibernating. Dynamic Swap Space Manager.
Open your /etc/sysctl.conf with the gedit text editor,
| gksudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf |
Add the line 'vm.swappiness=10' to the end of the file,
| vm.swappiness=10 |
Save and close the file.
Swap FAQ - Ubuntu Community Docs]
Linux Performance tuning - vm.swappiness - unixfoo.blogspot.com
What Is the Linux Kernel Parameter vm.swappiness? - Linux Open Source Blog
Solid state drives are faster than hard disks, but they're not as fast as the computer's RAM modules.
It's generally better to tell your operating system to prefer to use the faster RAM memory in your computer, and allow it to use the swap file, but only when it really needs to.
We can easily do that by setting a swappiness value in our /etc/sysctl.conf files.
Some web page authors recommend setting swappiness to 0, but I think that's a bit radical and it resulted in slowing down my system when I tried that. The default value is 60 and the maximum is 100.
After a few experiments, I found that a swappiness value of 10 seemed to work best for my computer. You may want to spend a little time running your own experiments, but I think 10 will work okay for most of us.
As a secondary consideration, using the swap area less saves wear on the flash memory.
| sudo blkid |
| sudo tune2fs -E stripe_width=128 /dev/sda1 |
| sudo tune2fs -E stripe_width=128 /dev/sdc1 |
What we haven't done yet is tell our ext4 file system. We can easily do that with the tune2fs command.
These two commands on the left should fix that.
Before using these commands, check first to see if your ext4 partitions are /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdc1, yours might be different.
| sudo apt-get install localepurge |
If you're at all cramped for disk space and you're only going to use one language, you can install and run localepurge to strip out all files that are only needed for other languages.
This will save you a heap of drive space and will run automatically in future every time you install software with foreign languages included, preventing future alien occupation of your drive space.
| sudo apt-get clean |
This can reclaim some of your used disk space.
Some people like to keep them and include them in a backup because it can save bandwidth to use them again when re-installing or installing another other system of the same distro, same release and architecture.
They get out of date (superceded) quickly and mostly they can just be downloaded again if you have a normal internet connection so we don't have to keep them if disk space is at a premium.