Sugar on the Asus Eee 701

Dave Bauer dave at solutiongrove.com
Tue Oct 27 08:11:51 EDT 2009


On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 1:54 AM, Tabitha Roder <tabitha at hrdnz.com> wrote:
> Copy of my blog post on the experience of installing Sugar on Asus Eee 701
>
> Sugar on the Eee
>
> I wanted to put Sugar on an Asus Eee 701 for my niece. Thanks to Trademe I
> could pick one up at a reasonable price.  For those that know me well, yes I
> had some help with setting up Sugar and yes I had some help with writing
> this post.
>
> SOAS Strawberry runs well on the Eee, but you can't really install it. There
> are various guides, which basically consist of
>

First, the most interesting and handy thing about a netbook, is the
ease of booting off removeable media. Many of my friends use SD cards
to try out different OS.

That said, you can do a full install from SOAS using the
zyx-liveinstaller. You can download it
http://filteredperception.org/smiley/projects/zyx-liveinstaller/ and
install it with rpm and then run it. It will install to any disk,
either the built in SSD or a removable USB or SD card.

This is just one option, of course.

Dave

> Install anaconda
> Run liveinst
> Fight with partitioning (hint, don't choose automatic, choose custom, delete
> everything and make an ext3 partition)
> Fix the resulting broken redhat installation with no graphical interface by
> installing the entire KDE stack and messing with inittab (note, you'll need
> a wired ethernet connection, or epic iwconfig fu)
> Install sugar
>
> The first work around was just to dd the SOAS usb image directly onto the
> Eee's drive. This was good, the Eee boots quickly and starts sugar by
> default, however our USB image was only 1GB so we couldn't use the rest of
> the disk, and the journal complained that it was full, even when it wasn't.
> I think the journal problem was probably to do with the tricks the live
> image performs to boot of read only media, since we did a byte-for-byte copy
> of the live image, these are all still present when booting from the Eee's
> drive.
>
> I'm told a future version of SOAS may support installation to the hard disk.
>
> The current solution is the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Sugar from alsroot's
> PPA. I used the Karmic Koala Beta and updated to the latest packages. This
> wasn't entirely plain sailing, Sugar's web browse activity didn't work until
> I did apt-get build-dep python-hulahop, see this bug. This has made the Eee
> a really nice platform, you can alt tab between Sugar and your other apps
> but not the netbook remix menu thing, so you can't start new non-sugar apps
> without quitting Sugar. The only real problem is the Eee 701's low res
> screen - not all activities are designed to shrink this far, Scratch being
> the most missed example as it is my nieces favourite.
>
> The things you do (or your helper does) to please a nine year old. Big
> thanks to said helper for giving up about 10 hours more than I thought we
> needed.
>
> Sharing the experience, I hope that this helps the developers see where the
> issues were and that next time I try this (I have another Eee ready) that it
> is easy to see improvements - I can wait a while ;-)
>
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>



-- 
Dave Bauer
dave at solutiongrove.com
http://www.solutiongrove.com



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