Installing Ubuntu 9.04 on the ASUS Eee PC 901

ASUS Eee PC 901 is a netbook based on the Intel Atom processor, with 1 GB of RAM, 20 GB SSD storage, 9 "display, which comes with a specially adapted version of Linux. Our way is to install Ubuntu on this device. I already wrote how to install Ubuntu 8.04 on an Eee PC . Today it's time to upgrade to version 9.04.

With previous releases, it was necessary to install a special Linux kernel to fully support the wireless (and wired, by the way) network and other functions, as well as safe operation. In release 9.04, all this is already supported out of the box, with the exception of some functional buttons on the keyboard.

The new system "breathes" on this laptop is much freer than previous releases. Loading from the OS selection menu to the login screen takes 20 seconds (at 8.10 it was 35 seconds). Battery life is estimated at about 4.5 hours (about the same as at 8.10).
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Directly installation is quite straightforward. We divide it into several steps:

1. If you do not have an external CD drive , you must run the installer from a USB disk or SD card . The easiest way is to use the utility built into the distribution to create a bootable USB disk (Create a USB startup disk). If you do not have Ubuntu installed, and there is no computer on which you can run the Live CD, then you can use the Unetbootin program.
2. To boot from the “flash drive”, press Esc at boot to open the boot menu. Select USB and press Enter.
3. You can install Ubuntu as usual, but pay special attention to the disk partitioning step. The Eee PC has two built-in solid-state drives: a fast 4 GB and a bit slower 16 GB. Select the partitioning manually and set the mount point of the root partition “/” to a small disk and the mount point of the home directories “/ home” to a large disk. You can also select the Ext4 file system for better performance from SSDs . Ignore the warning about the lack of a Swap partition - for Eee PCs, it is recommended not to enable Swap for more careful handling of SSD drives .
4. Boot into a freshly installed system, everything should work fine. If Ubuntu does not pick up Bluetooth or a webcam , check to see if they are disabled in the BIOS. Install Cheese for a comfortable webcam experience. If you want to monitor CPU utilization, as is done in Xandros, just install the Gnome applet to monitor resources.

There are a lot of articles telling how to speed up SSD-drives , but with the new Ubuntu 9.04 on the ASUS Eee PC 901 there is no need for them - everything works very quickly and smoothly anyway!

You can find the original translation and many other useful materials in the blog “ From Windows XP to Ubuntu Linux ” at: www.xp2ubuntu.com .