{"id":260,"date":"2009-02-10T22:50:06","date_gmt":"2009-02-11T02:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/?p=260"},"modified":"2009-02-11T15:06:18","modified_gmt":"2009-02-11T19:06:18","slug":"eeebuntu-on-aspire-one-sd-card-booting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/eeebuntu-on-aspire-one-sd-card-booting\/","title":{"rendered":"EEEBuntu on Aspire One SD Card Booting"},"content":{"rendered":"

One draw back the Aspire One has is that BIOS lacks an option to boot directly to the SD slots. I was disappointed when I saw this, as other UMPCs such as the EEE PC allow this. I really think Acer should update the BIOS to allow this, but as yet it remains unsupported. There are however workarounds. I had been planning on trying to use grub to chain load an OS install on the SD drive as was doing some research on this.<\/p>\n

I then came across this great article here<\/a> about installing EEEBuntu on the Acer Aspire One, specifically installing it onto an SD card.<\/p>\n

Gary Rennie did a great on on the original article describing step by step how to make the initrd and giving an excellent review of EEEBuntu, I definitely recommend looking at his post for the overall procedure.<\/p>\n

I had not previously heard of EEEbuntu and it certainly looked interesting, however the article’s method had one major draw back: It directs you to first install EEEBuntu onto the internal 8GB drive, then using it build a new initrd to use which contains the drivers allowing booting to the SD card, then actually installing it again onto the SD card.<\/p>\n

I wanted to keep my existing install (Linpus at the time, now Solaris) on the 8GB drive and thought installing the same OS onto both the internal drive and an SD card was superfluous. I am sure a lot of users would prefer not to have to erase their existing installs in order to install EEEBuntu as an intermediary step.<\/p>\n

To work around this I downloaded the EEEBuntu .iso and then installed it as a virtual machine using Virtualbox<\/a> from Sun Microsystems. (I did this on my desktop system, not the Aspire One.) This was the first time I had used Virtualbox and I was quite impressed with it, though please note you do have to compile the kernel module for it to work (see the install documentation). It was very easy to set up and in a few minutes I had a fully running EEEBuntu Virtual Machine.<\/p>\n

It then literally took minutes to create the new initrd with the drivers built in for the SD card. I then simply copied the new initrd and EEEBuntu kernel over to my \/boot directory on the Aspire One. I then modified grub, adding an entry that would load them and point to the SD card. I used the UUID of the SD card to specify the root argument in the grub entry, for example:<\/p>\n

title SD-Card EEEbuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-8-eeepc SDHC CARD
\nuuid 736f6f5a-28c8-4848-9b97-04342ca875b2
\nkernel \/boot\/vmlinuz-2.6.27-8-eeepc root=UUID=03399adb-ac83-4f13-a0be-5defe86c9506 ro clocksource=hpet
\ninitrd \/boot\/initrd.img-2.6.27-8-eeepc
\nquiet <\/span><\/p>\n

Your UUID will obviously be different, and can be discovered by running:<\/p>\n

Callandor:\/ # ls -lha \/dev\/disk\/by-uuid\/<\/p>\n

Once the above was done I installed EEEBuntu by attaching a CD drive with a USD converter. the installer sees the SD card and you can partition it as you like and install directly to it. It will not however be bootable without using the modified initrd as described above.<\/p>\n

If you have set everything up right you will boot the kernel and initrd from your \/boot directory on your internal drive, and once the kernel loads it will find the root directory on the SD card, and booting will continue.<\/p>\n

I found the performance to be quite acceptable using a 16GB Patriot class 6 SDHC card. Although slightly less snappy than running from the SSD drive, it is certainly quite usable.<\/p>\n

I found EEEBuntu to work near flawlessly on the Aspire One. Networking, sound, OSD controls, etc. all worked perfectly. Suspend mode does not however work and I’ll investigate this and post the solution.<\/p>\n

You can now use the same methods above to install other OSes on multiple SD cards, or if you have a 16GB or larger card perhaps several on the same card.<\/p>\n

I am currently running Solaris 10 Developers Edition on the 8GB SDD with EEEBuntu on the SD card and am extremely happy with this set up.<\/p>\n

Gary Rennie did a great on on the original article describing step by step how to make the initrd and giving an excellent review of EEEBuntu, I definitely recommend looking at his post for the overall procedure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One draw back the Aspire One has is that BIOS lacks an option to boot directly to the SD slots. I was disappointed when I saw this, as other UMPCs such as the EEE PC allow this. I really think Acer should update the BIOS to allow this, but as yet it remains unsupported. There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","category-netbooks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":262,"href":"https:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions\/262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timelordz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}