Here I go again.
A friend had recently decided that he wanted a new laptop/netbook. After some research, he decided on a netbook, and we went over to Nehru Place yesterday to actually buy it. He was interested in installing Linux on it (of course!), and was a little bit worried about that. This was to be my first close-up encounter with a netbook, so I volunteered to take care of the Linux issue for him. This post, like the last one, is to document this learning experience.
My friend had decided (with substantial prodding from me) on the black ASUS Eee PC 1005PE. Unfortunately, if the shopkeepers at Nehru Place were to be believed, that model is not yet available in India. The model that was available was 1005HA, but the only option had a horrible color combination (white overall, but the boundary of the screen was black---yuck!) and a cheap-feeling keyboard. This was a 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD for ~Rs 17k, but we decided to forego it.
Luckily, a completely different ASUS model caught our eye: the N10J. It's not part of the Eee series, rather, it's marketed as a business-oriented " Ultraportable subnotebook", even though it looked like a netbook to us; a 1.6GHz processor, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 10.2" screen. It had some useless (to us) fluff like a fingerprint reader and a HDMI output, but it's main distinguishing feature appears to be an extra high-performance Nvidia graphics card. The N10J is part of the N10 series, which also has other several other members, confusingly named N10E, N10C, N10H, N10J, etc. We didn't know all of this then, of course, but some good background is available at http://n10.wikia.com/wiki/Overview.
Anyway, this post is about installing Linux on the N10J, so let me get to that without further ado. We already had a Ubuntu Netbook Remix (Karmic Koala) bootable USB stick all prepared, so we started off trying to install from it. In hindsight, we should have just used plain Ubuntu. Also, it turns out this was just a couple of days before the Lucid Lynx release, and had I known that, I would have used the LL release candidate. But I don't keep myself up to date on Ubuntu (which, incidentally, is an ancient African word meaning "I can't configure Debian"), so I didn't know. We also briefly considered Debian, but there were some reports of wireless problems with it; as this was not my machine, I decided not to risk it.
The first non-trivial step was to get the N10J to boot up from USB. We were forewarned that this might be an issue, and not surprisingly, changing the boot sequence to have "External devices" before "Hard disk" did not do the trick. By the way, the N10J comes preconfigured to not show any bootup messages, so you need to know the magic key to enter the BIOS, which in this case was F2.
Once we enabled bootup messages, there was some mention of pressing F9(?) for PBOOT(?) options. Doing so gave us the option of choosing the boot device: the regular SATA hard disk, or the Kingston USB drive we had plugged in. We chose the latter, and soon we had a live Ubuntu session running. Wireless seemed to work. The desktop menu (a special feature of Netbook Remix) seemed very sluggish. We assumed that this was due to the default "nv" driver for the Nvidia card, and that installing the proprietary Nvidia driver would solve the issue. Ubuntu even offered to do that for us, but of course we didn't do it in the live session.
Things seemed to be OK, so we went ahead and installed Ubuntu. Helpfully, the disk was already partitioned into 11GB (Vista recovery) + 30BG (Vista) + 100GB (DATA), and we simply deleted the 100GB partition using gparted and chose the "largest contiguous free space" to install Ubuntu. Installation went smoothly. However, boot time seemed very slow, the desktop menu was still sluggish, and suspend/resume didn't work (i.e., suspend worked fine, but then needed a hart reboot to resume). This time, Ubuntu did not offer to install the proprietary Nvidia driver, and trying to do it manually (System->Admin->Hardware drivers) did not work either.
Leaving aside the Nvidia issue for the moment, we next tried to update the package database, in order to install new software. First we had to choose a mirror. We selected the "India" mirror, and tried updating the list of available packages. This step finished very fast, but then it turned out that this was so because nothing was actually found (all attempts were listed as "Failed" in the 'Details' section). As we had nothing else to guide our choice, we next tried the "Choose Best Server" option, which apparently pings all the known mirrors to make a decision. It chose https://ubuntuarchive.hnsdc.com, which of course turned out to be the same as the India mirror. After a lot of trial and error spanning several hours, we eventually settled on a US mirror. Upgrading to the latest versions happened in a reasonable amount of time, and we were also able to install new packages such as emacs, latex, and KDE4.
By this time, I had realized that all the vague talk about "switchable graphics" meant that the choice between the high-performance Nvidia card and the regular Intel card was to be made by flipping a physical switch on the left of the machine, and then rebooting. We switched to Intel and rebooted, and all our sluggishness and resume problems vanished; even 3D acceleration seemed to work. For now, we are just sticking to the Intel card, as setting up and maintaining the switchable graphics seemed a little painful.
We are happy with the results so far.
P.S.: There were reports of the webcam output being upside down. We tested this using cheese (which came with Ubuntu), and everything seemed to work fine, and we were happy. Then we tried the webcam on Skype, and the video came up upside down. Go figure!
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