Installing Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on Dell Mini 9

I’m only going to talk about reinventing the wheel here, as the internet is already a vast and wonderful wasteland of [mis]information. And, these guys do a pretty good job of describing the install process, as well as how to fix the audio post-install. However, they make one n00b move.. maybe it’s more of a chicken-egg thing, but, they tell you to use ubuntu’s usb-creator tool to build your bootable usb flash drive. Which you’ll need if you don’t have a usb optical drive. Here’s the thing, you need to do it FROM ubuntu, which you probably don’t have installed.. Anywayz, unetbootin will solve that problem for you, nicely.

Moving on, since I threw 2GB of ram in my mini, I really did my own thing with the hard drive partitioning. I’m kind of a connection junkie, as you’ll see in one of my following posts.. I opted for the 4GB SSD, which is currently 50% used. So I configured it with only one partition, mounted as /, without any swap partitions, using all 4GB. That’s right, no hibernate for me.

I must say, I’m amazed at how smoothly the Compiz eye-candy flows around this tiny screen. Check out Forlong’s Blog for a great walkthrough on setting it up. I’m absolutely enamored by the 3D Desktop Cube and Wobbly Windows. And you can emulate all of OS X’s flashy features too. Though I will say, the settings manager app could use some clarification.. It’s pretty much a trial and error guessing game. And after you maximize the window and click on something, you’ll need to unmaximize by right clicking on the window’s taskbar button, or alt-right-clicking somewheres on the screen and unmaximizing. PITA. I should probably look into Dell’s mini-ubuntu work around.

A couple other modifications:

In an effort to speed things up a little, and delay the inevitable death of the SSD by 1 day, I edited fstab to contain the following:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=0755 0 0
tmpfs /var/log/apt tmpfs defaults,noatime 0 0

Yes, I have no permanent logs. Watch this: :’(

As far as Firefox goees, I like is the Full Screen plug-in, I also modified about:config to push all the caching to RAM also. Imagine that.

I tried netbook remix for about 5 minutes, and unless you have never heard of ubuntu, the linux distro most easily adopted by windows converts, there’s really no point to installing it.

Well, that’s all I feel like blathering on about at the moment, so, I hope you enjoyed your stay. Stay tuned for more boring ramblings.