Test Drive: Ubuntu 12.04 Beta1 (Live)

Ubuntu upgrade season is coming and, even if I changed my EEEPC installation to Linux Mint, I’m still curious on how the new Ubuntu release behaves. So, as the new Beta1 release of Ubuntu 12.04 has been released, I couldn’t help not to prepare a bootable USB stick and give it a look at least by running it live.

First impressions: Unity improved

Here is how Ubuntu 12.04 looks like on the EEEPC.

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Linux Mint (on the EEEPC): fixing some post-installation issues

The installation (upgrade) of Linux Mint 12 on my EEEPC left the system with some little problem to be solved together with many applications that had to be reinstalled. Not all of these problems are Mint-specific since one, at least, hat its solution reported on a Ubuntu forum. And I’m not also sure if these problems appears after upgrading from Ubuntu to Mint 12 or after a fresh installation too. By the way all have been solved with a couple of shell commands. I spent more time looking for solutions than executing them, so I hope it might be useful to have them all in the same page.

Missing Windows boot option

The first thing I noticed once I rebooted the EEEPC just after installing Linux Mint was that the Windows boot opting was missing from the Grub boot menu. After a brief looking for it in the ‘net I did find on Mint forum a couple of commands to solve it:

sudo os-prober

sudo update-grub

Errors “404” while updating

The first time I tried to update software sources I received a lot of “404” file not found errors all regarding lines like this

deb http://it.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lisa main restricted

after looking up on the ‘net again I found on Linux Mint forum a post that suggested manually removing such lines form the sources file list. I so backed up the original sources file

sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.back

I removed all “Ubuntu – Lisa” lines, then I updated with

sudo apt-get update

Missing word spelling in Libre Office

As soon I started writing my post about Mint installation I noticed that all I was writing had the wrong spelling red-underline marks, all but the few technical words I added to Libre Office custom dictionary. After a brief search on the ‘net I discovered that the problem was because of some missing dependency in Libre Office package. I then tried, as suggested, by installing “aspell” spelling utility first

sudo apt-get install aspell aspell-it aspell-en 

since nothing happened I tried also installing “hunspell” utility

sudo apt-get install hunspell hunspell-en-us

but nothing happened too. At last I discovered that, in order to see the spelling working, I had also to delete (or rename) the existing Libre Office configuration folder in my home directory.

mv .libreoffice/ .libreoffice_old

I eventually restarted Libre Office and the spelling was working again.

Fixing touch-pad drag-and-drop

The last problem I noticed in my newly installed Linux Mint was that dragging windows using the EEEPC touch-pad, with the usual double-tap-and-drag gesture, was almost impossible. The feature had not been disabled but the time required between the double-tap and the start of the dragging action was too short to be comfortable. The problem isn’t Mint-specific but depends on a change in touch-pad default configuration in latest Ubuntu releases. By the way this can be easily fixed, as reported on this Launchpad page, with the synclient command.

synclient SingleTapTimeout=360

synclient FastTaps=1

or in a more definitive way by editing the “51-synaptics-quirks.conf” file placed in “/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/”

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/51-synaptics-quirks.conf

and adding this text at the end

Section “InputClass”

Identifier “touchpad catchall”

Driver “synaptics”

MatchIsTouchpad “on”

MatchDevicePath “/dev/input/event*”

Option “SHMConfig” “on”

Option “TapButton1″ “1″

Option “TapButton2″ “2″

Option “TapButton3″ “3″

Option “VertTwoFingerScroll” “1″

Option “TapAndDragGesture” “1″

Option “SingleTapTimeout” “320″

Option “FastTaps” “1″

EndSection

Mint me too!

Upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to Mint 12

At last I decided to upgrade my EEEPC 900! The Ubuntu installation I was still using on it (10.04 LTS Netbook edition) was getting old so, after many live testing, and some “Test Drive” post I settled for installing Linux Mint 12 “Lisa”.

Why Mint?

If you read my post about Linux Mint test you’ll have certainly noticed that it impressed me quite well. I mostly liked the Mint approach to user interface both open to innovation and respectful of old users. But what eventually led me towards a Gnome3 based distribution has been discovering, thanks mainly to Linux Mint, how this desktop environment can be expanded. I discovered, in fact that Gnome3 can be expanded using Javascript programming. Many extension are being developed and can be downloaded and installed from a Gnome3 page. Plenty of documentation and examples are available. Gnome3 guys didn’t give of flexibility that had been Gnome2 characteristic, they just left it well hidden.

Installation

I prepared the installation, like usual, by writing a bootable SD card with Ubuntu’s start-up disk tool. I then booted the EEEPC and started the installation program.

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Recovering photos from a damaged SD Card (again)

It happened again! I suppose it’s because of some hardware problem but my old Sempron 2400, every now and then, makes unreadable a SD card while I’m reading it. This time the damage had been particularly nasty since the recovery method I usually apply (using foremost command) only recovered a handful of of files before stopping because of a “write error”. I so tried another recovery program: Photorec.

Installation and recovery

Photorec is part of the Testdisk disk recovery package it can be installed form Ubuntu’s software centre or with apt-get command

sudo apt-get install testdisk

once installed Photorec can be executed by command line

sudo photorec

Photorec has a simple but effective character interface with a wizard-like organization: at first I’ve been asked for the device to recover

then the partition type, I selected “Intel”

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Backing up the EEEPC with SystemRescueCd

I’m going to upgrade my EEEPC Linux installation, at last. Before doing any big operating system change It’s a good practice to make a full backup of the system partition. Just in case something goes wrong and you want back your old working system. Dedicated Linux distributions are the ideal solution for partition backup and recovery since they let you easily recover even from a non-starting system situation. Last time I backed up my system partition, when I switched from Xandros to EEEBuntu I used Clonezilla. This time I decided to use a more flexible distribution: SystemRescueCd.

Installation

Like its name may suggest SystemRescueCd is a small Linux distribution specifically designed for disk recovery tasks, and it’s provided with some invaluable (life saving) tools like GParted or Partimage. I downloaded SystemRescueCd ISO image from its download page then prepared a bootable USB disk following the site how-to.

First I mounted the ISO image

sudo mount -o loop,exec ./SystemRescueCd-x86-2.4.0.iso /tmp/sysrescd/

then I started the USB installation script from the mounted ISO image

cd /tmp/sysrescd/
sudo ./usb_inst.sh

a simple but effective interface shows-up there I selected the USB disk device and let the installation start.

It may happen that the Installation interface shows your device with a 0MB disk size and then exits with an error message when you try to install. This can be easily solved (thanks to this forum post) by manually unmounting your device using the console command.

umount /dev/sdd1

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