Earlier versions of the ‘generic’ linux kernel that shipped with Ubuntu had PAE (Physical Address Extension) enabled by default. This meant that on 32-bit installations, you had access to greater that 3 Gb of RAM. This seems to not be the case with the default Lucid (10.04) kernel – it’s not PAE enabled. I’m not sure exactly when the change was made (it could have also been the case with 9.10), but I noticed that after upgrading to Lucid, my 32-bit installation was only seeing ~3 Gb or RAM, when previously I had access to the full 4 Gb installed.

You can tell how much RAM is accessible by in a terminal typing:

free -m

For 4 Gb of RAM, the ‘total’ mem should be something like 4003.

To fix this, simply install the PAE-enabled kernel:

sudo apt-get install linux-generic-pae

This kernel should automatically become your default in GRUB. All going well, after a reboot, you should be able to type ‘free -m’ again and see that you are using 4 Gb of RAM.

I can’t lay claim to figuring this out myself, all credit goes to the guide at Dedoimedo.com, “DirectX in VirtualBox 3.0.0 – Pure joy is here”.

In a nutshell:

• Install a Windows guest under Virtualbox, as you normally would.
• Shutdown the virtual machine, and under Settings – Display, click the checkbox to turn on 3D acceleration. I also pushed the slider up to 128 Mb of video memory.
• Reboot the Windows guest into Safe Mode, by pressing F8 during bootup.
• Install the Virtualbox Guest Additions while in Safe Mode. Ensure you select the optional component “Direct3D Support” during the installation.
• Reboot the Windows guest. You should now have 3D acceleration for programs that use DirectX …

The “Safe Mode” trick was the key part I was missing when I first tried – the Guest Additions installer seems to give no indication that the Direct3d component will silently fail if it is not installed under “Safe Mode”.

One extra issue I experienced, in my case when running Unity3D, was that the mouse was ultra-sensitive, to the point of being unusable, when used in a window displaying 3D graphics. In VMware, this can be fixed by setting Preferences – Input – Optimized Mouse for Games – Always. Presently, I do not know how to fix this issue in Virtualbox.

I know, I know, this post might seem a little dated already, considering the release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) is imminent. My fault .. I sort of … um .. just forgot to press publish about four months ago …

I’ve previously documented my experiences with installing Ubuntu 7.10, and then an upgrade to 8.04, on my Dell Vostro 1500 notebook computer. Now … a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.04. Here’s the lowdown.

What works, executive summary:

3D graphics (Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT) – yes (just turn on the proprietary driver in Administration->Hardware Drivers for better 3D performance)

Sound output (Intel 82801H HDA controller, ICH8 chipset) - yes (no config required)

Sound input (mic, line-in) -untested

Wired network -yes

Wireless network -yes – (including painless Ad-Hoc wireless connections !)

Firewire (IEEE1394) -yes, probably (well, actually untested in 9.04 but I assume it still works, with the text file config documented in previous posts)

SD card slot -yes

Integrated webcam (optional) -yes (works with “Cheese” in Gnome)

Touchpad pointing device -yes

External VGA (D-bus) video port – yes (just toggle with Fn-F8)

PCI Express slot -untested

Sound in – untested.

(unless explicitly stated, all the stuff with a ‘yes’ “just-worked”, without any need for text file editing or commandline kungfu)

The first version of Ubuntu I installed on the Dell Vostro 1500 was Ubuntu 7.10, back in late 2007 when this model was a brand spanking new on Dells product list. My experience with 7.10 was okay, but several configuration tweaks were required to get everything working properly. How things have changed in two years ! In Ubuntu 9.04, no sound config was required for audio playback. The Network Manager in 9.04 now supports Wireless Ad-Hoc mode without any commandline magic. The Nvidia proprietary graphics drivers can be enabled with two clicks of the mouse. Attaching an external screen works without a hitch. Ubuntu even prompts you to use the NVIDIA native screen resolution app, which will detect both screens. Both Suspend and Hibernate seem to be working without issue.

What can I say. Best. Ubuntu. Ever.

Well, good news … it looks like the hard disk ACPI bug has been fixed, and will make it’s way into the Ubuntu 9.04, 8.10 and 8.04 repositories soon.

Hooray happyday .. no more monkeypatching !

Run gconf-editor (Alt-F2, type gconf-editor, Press “Run”) and navigate the tree to find /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop. Set the value to false (uncheck the checkbox), and your Desktop icons should disappear.

You can still access any files on the Desktop using the file manager (eg, under the “Places” menu), but they will no longer obscure the view of your snazzy desktop background.

(Via Tombuntu’s Ubuntu “Intrepid Ibex” 8.10 upgrade notes)

What follows is not a HOWTO, but rather a set of links and notes on some things I tweaked. It’s mostly for my own personal reference, but if it helps someone else out, all the better. The Ubuntu Eee distro has already done most of the heavy customization required for smooth operation on an Eee PC … but I had fun doing a little tweaking of my own anyhow.

Some links

A nice quick overview on setting up Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Eee PC, with links to some key sites: http://yergler.net/blog/2008/07/13/ubuntu-netbook-remix-on-the-eee-pc/

Install these repositories, use the “hack” tips: http://array.org/ubuntu/index.html

Tips for improving battery life.

Some ways to optimize boot speed (it’s not going to beat the Xandros distro it shipped with, but at least some speed improvement is better than nothing).

“Official” Ubuntu Docs for installing stock Ubuntu on an Eee PC (not really required if you are using Ubuntu-Eee, but there are some good post-install tweaks here)

EeeUser Wiki: Getting Ubuntu 8.04 to work perfectly (again, if you are using Ubuntu-Eee, most of these tweaks are already applied by the distro).

Note on setting up sqaushfs/unionfs on /usr .. nice idea which I haven’t tried yet.

Tweaks I made (or didn’t)

These are mostly drawn from the links above.

Root partition line (/dev/sda1) in /etc/fstab has the options defaults,noatime,errors=remount-ro
and made /var/log, /var/tmp and /tmp as tmpfs ramdisks.

DON’T add “commit=15″ to the /dev/sda1 line in /etc/fstab .. this causes Xorg to fail at startup (don’t know why).

Did array.org Hack #13: $ gconftool-2 –type bool –set /apps/compiz/plugins/move/allscreens/options/constrain_y 0

Changed CONCURRENCY in /etc/init.d/rc to CONCURRENCY=shell

Added force-hpet to the #defoptions= line in /boot/grub/menu.lst (as per one of the guides above)

Also added stuff to /etc/modules (as per one of the guides above), including uvcvideo … Added echo “1″ > /proc/acpi/asus/camera to /etc/rc.local to make sure webcam is enabled. Also, make sure that /etc/rc.local is executable … it seemed not to be in Ubuntu-Eee 8.04, which meant it wasn’t actually being run at startup ?.
All the right stuff in /etc/sysctl.conf came “for free” with ubuntu-eee …

Setup hibernate, as per: http://ubuntu-eee.com/index.php5?title=Fix:_hibernate … I also copied the /usr/lib/pm-utils/defaults to /etc/pm/config.d/config (prior to making the modifications to correct the path to s2disk). Ended up creating a symlink /usr/sbin/s2disk (for s2disk) and /usr/sbin/s2ram and /usr/sbin/s2both (both linking to s2both), to solve per Bug #207002 and Bug #246053. To be honest, I think I messed things up a little. I can hibernate / sleep using sudo s2disk / s2ram from the commandline, but at some point I lost hibernate from the Gnome shutdown dialog. Oh well … mostly works.

Applied selected parts of the Riceeey script. Again, many of these tweaks are already applied in Ubuntu-eee … I ran the gconftool-2 commands to enable suspend upon lid close, created  /etc/modprobe.d/snd-hda-intel and installed the eee-osd packages (eee-osd must have since become deprecated, as it was uninstalled by apt in an update a few days ago ??).

I installed the Ubuntu 8.04 version of CNR (Click-n-run), which then allowed me to install software from the official Asus Eee CNR site. There is probably no advantage to doing this over simply using the regular Add/Remove programs in Ubuntu, but I thought I’d give it a try anyhow, just in case there was some special Eee optimized stuff available.

Added the Medibuntu repository … installed Adobe Acrobat Reader (not that there is anything wrong with the default Evince Document Viewer … but I read a lot of PDFs, and Acrobat Reader is still the gold standard. If I need the diskspace, it will get uninstalled, because I can live without it on my Eee).

I also installed the Vimperator Firefox extension, so I could operate Firefox better in fullscreen mode (F11) with the keyboard only, and avoid messing with the tiny touchpad and slightly tough ‘clicky’ mouse buttons when browsing. It helps to make the best use of a little screen too.

Summary

This is not a review … but I just had to say something. It’s cute, light and almost completely silent (the tiny fan is only slightly audible in a silent room, and it’s not on all the time). It works well enough for me to use my Eee PC for light web browsing, note taking, reading PDFs of journal articles and ebooks. You get used to the smaller than standard keyboard very quickly. I wouldn’t want it to be my only computer, but if it was, I would mostly cope if I didn’t want to play games and didn’t need to use it for 8 hours a day. Battery life is ~ 3 – 3.5 hours. Hopefully the next version of Ubuntu Eee (or even Netbook Remix) will iron out all the minor issues, and if I ever need to reinstall I won’t need to tweak much at all.

(Photo above “Online Manga on Asus Eee PC” by Steve Keys, 2008, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

I upgraded it to Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) a few months ago. These are my experiences, and a summary of what didn’t work under 7.10, but does under 8.04.

Painless, non-eventful

I used the standard System – Administration – Update Manager to do the upgrade. I chugged away, downloaded the new 8.04 packages and started upgrading. During the upgrade, I allowed the updater to replace my hand-modified /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base sound config file, since I figured that the improved version with 8.04 would be better than mine (read on … it was a good choice). The upgrade took around an hour or so to complete (from memory) … I did some reading by the computer while it worked, keeping an eye on it to answer the usual questions about replacing config files throughout the upgrade process. After it finished, I rebooted for good measure. Success  !

Hardware – improved support, some old tweaks

The integrated microphone now works when using the HDA Intel (Alsa mixer) device (detailed settings: using the volume control applet, under the Options tab I have the Digital Input Source set to Digital Mic 1. Obviously I also made sure that nothing is muted or turned down in the Recording tab as well).

I find that the sound device isn’t detect using the -rt (realtime, premption) series of kernels, but using the standard -generic series it works just fine (I’m currently using linux-image-2.6.24-19-generic).

Integrated webcam still works nicely with programs like Cheese, Ekiga and Skype. It’s doesn’t seem to work with some older programs that assume the camera device is at /dev/video, such as gqcam … (I guess that’s more of a symptom of these programs getting out of sync with a modern Ubuntu system … the point is that the camera is detected and works …).

The config changes required to prevent the Hitachi hard disk from making the scary head parking clicking sound (associated with a power saving bug) are still required. I kept the line “hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda” in /etc/rc.local (and in a file /etc/acpi/resume.d/99-stop-hitachi-madness.sh to deal with hibernate//resume) to prevent this.

Closing comments

I wrote this post then sort of forgot to publish it ( ), so it’s been sitting around unseen for ~ 3 months or more. I’m happy to say that my Vostro 1500 has been running smoothly with this setup; there aren’t any other serious tweaks that I can think of. Of course, Intrepid 8.10 is now out …. eventually I’ll probably updgrade to it, but I’m in no real hurry. Hardy 8.04 is a “long term support” (LTS) release, meaning Canonical will ensure it gets updates for 3 years. I’m working on the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” principle with this machine, and since that has worked out nicely, I think I’ll keep following it

To install this you need to:

• Copy and paste the script above into a file ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/iso-mounter (ie using the gedit Text Editor)
• Set the permissions of iso-mounter to executable (chmod +x iso-mounter using the commandline, or right-click Properties using the Nautilus file manager).

To test it out, find an ISO image file using the file manager (or if you don’t have one, download one, like the latest Ubuntu alpha testing image, intrepid-desktop-i386.iso). Right click on the file icon … you should see Scripts in the popup context menu. Roll over Scripts and you will see iso-mounter .. click on it, enter your password when prompted (mounting requires root privilages), and then look in /media … there will now be a directory (like /media/intrepid-desktop-i386.iso) which is a read-only view of your iso file. You can click on the iso-mounter context menu a second time to unmount the iso.

Enjoy !

The easiest way I found was this Greasemonkey script which turns off autocomplete for all sites. You can change the site list to only include http*://*.del.icio.us/* if you want.

:e scp://username@someremotehost/./path/to/file

where username is your username on the remote server, someremote host is the hostname or ip of the server and /./path/to/file is just that … the path to the file on the remove server. Everytime you save with :w, the changes get transfered.

When used in combination with ssh-keys to avoid typing your password every time, this can make editing remote files really quick and easy.