My name is Massimo, I live in Italy but my heart resides in the Philippines since 1997.
I.ph free blogging service is about to shut down, they tought of locking blogs for new posts so I can't even properly inform you with a new post. I reserved the musante.i.ph domain to DotPH until when (if) that service will be activated my new blog will be here:
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
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.
