Monday, November 09, 2009

Karmic installed on EeePC 901 -- looks good but using legacy Grub

Yes, I clean installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my EeePC 901 today. Of course, I didn't format the /home partition that I inherited from 9.04. Additionally, in keeping with the (supposed) requirements of SSDs, I stayed with ext2 for both / and /home with no swap.
Installation went without problem using a Unetbootin-generated usb install key. Note that when I installed to my MacBook using an install CD, I had to use the command

ubiquity --no-migration-assistant

to get the install to go beyond 89%. But the usb key went straight through without this.
However, I installed the Grub2 bootloader to the / partition rather than to the mbr because I intended to boot Karmic from Linux Mint (which has Grub 0.97).
So, when thre install finished, from the live usb-key, I setup the Linux Mint grub in the mbr and added a stanza to /boot/grub/menu.lst so that I could boot Karmic.
After booting to Karmic, I used this guide to remove Grub2 and install legacy Grub to Karmic which then allowed me to set up everything to boot from the Ubuntu Grub.
So far everything looks good although I'm not at all seeing the fast boots reported when Karmic is installed on an SSD (which is what I have on the EeePC 901). However, I still need to install ubuntu-boot which helped quite a lot with the boot speed of Karmic on the MacBook.

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