Installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix (on an Acer Aspire One)

The other day, I wanted to upgrade my netbook (an older Acer Aspire One model) to the latest Ubuntu version but for some reason the built-in system upgrade did not work. I didn’t bother investigating this issue and decided to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix from scratch and to share the required steps here.

These days, it is a piece of cake to install Ubuntu but there are always some additional steps needed to get a “complete” system. For me, a complete system includes support for non-free media formats and software which is not open source like Skype – and Ubuntu does not provide those out of the box. Also, as my netbook is an Acer Aspire One with a solid state drive (SSD) I had to do some extra configuration in order to reduce the fan noise, to increase the SSD’s lifespan and to improve the system’s performance by reducing writes to the SSD. Early SSDs have a worse performance and a lower lifespan compared to traditional hard disks but they are very light, produce little noise and generate almost no heat which makes them a great choice for netbooks used as secondary machines.

These are the steps:

Download the Ubuntu Netbook Remix disk image
Configure a bootable USB thumb drive using the disk image.
Boot Ubuntu from USB drive
Play with the live image and install Ubuntu
Install non-free media formats
Install non open source software (Skype, Google Earth)
Optional: extra tweaking for SSD drives
Optional: reduce fan noise on Acer Aspire One

To install Ubuntu Netbook Remix following these steps took me about 2 hours. The additional optional steps for SSDs took me another hour.

1. Download the Ubuntu Netbook Remix disk image
Download the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix as disk image (.iso file) from http://www.ubuntu.com to your hard drive.

2. Configure a bootable USB thumb drive using the disk image.
If you downloaded the disk image to a Linux machine, a bootable USB device can be created as follows.

The utility: usb-creator. If not allready present on your system, it can be installed with
sudo aptitude install usb-creator
Run usb-creator
On the top pane, you will have to click “other”, locate and select the .iso image
Plug the (to be formatted!) USB thumb drive into the computer, it should show up in the bottom pane.
You will probably have to click format, make sure you have the right device!

You can find a howto outlining the configuration of a bootable USB thumb drive (including steps for non-Linux systems) here.

3. Boot Ubuntu from USB drive
Plug in the USB drive into your netbook and (re)start it. In order to select the USB drive to boot from, during the boot process you might need to press F12 or another hotkey depending on your netbook model.

4. Play with the live image and install Ubuntu
At first, you can play and experiment with the live image and if you want to install it, click the appropriate icon on the desktop. I chose to use the entire disk and except from setting my time zone I selected the suggested default options. Once the installation is done, reboot the machine and unplug the USB drive. Enjoy your freshly installed Ubuntu (and configure your wireless connection)!

5. Install non-free media formats
Some media formats like Flash and Apple’s Quicktime are not supported by Ubuntu out-of-the-box. To enable your netbook to play media clips of those formats, an the Medibuntu software repository needs to be added to your Ubuntu installation. Add the Medibuntu repository as described here.

Once this has been done, Ubuntu will find the appropriate software packages to install whenever they are needed to play media clips. So, for example, to playback movie trailers hosted on Apple’s website navigate to http://www.apple.com/trailers, choose any trailer and try to play it in the browser. You will be asked to search for a suitable plugin and click “Search” to confirm the dialog. Ubuntu’s package manager will then list the software packages to install and hence press “Install” to add them to your system. The package manager will take care of the rest. Note that after this additional packages might need to be installed following the same procedure.

To install Adobe’s Flash player, I browsed to the video online platform vimeo where Firefox notified me that additional plug-ins are required to display the content of this site (obviously). So I clicked on the notification in Firefox to enter the dialog and chose Adobe’s Flash player to be installed.

In case you need Java, then this site gives you the notification in Firefox to install a Java plug-in for Firefox (I used Sun’s Java runtime).

6. Install non open source software (Skype, Google Earth)
To install Skype and Google earth, you have to open a terminal and execute this command (they also come with the Medibuntu repository):

sudo aptitude install skype googleearth

I also recommend installing the media player VLC as it plays most of the existing media formats:

sudo aptitude install vlc

7. Optional: extra tweaking for SSD drives
I found some tricks to improve performance of the SSD drive here (both in the article and its comments, tips copied to here and slightly modified).

Add the elevator=noop kernel boot parameter to disable the elevator scheduler. This scheduler is used to read and write data from the hard disk sequentially. Since an SSD is not a conventional hard disk, disabling the elevator scheduler significantly improves the read and write performance of your SSD. Edit the file /etc/default/grub

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Change the line that starts with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=... and put elevator=noop in the quotes. Once you have saved it, run

sudo update-grub

to apply the changes.

Next, set the file system mount option to noatime. To do this, edit the /etc/fstab file

sudo nano /etc/fstab

and change the line containing ext4 such that it looks something like this:

/dev/sda1 / ext4 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1

Adding the noatime option eliminates the need for the system to make writes to the file system for files which are simply being read — or in other words, this means faster file access and less disk wear.

Some more SSD tweaks are taken from this blog post (tips copied to here and slightly modified):

Improve Firefox speed by disabling its disk cache. Just go to about:config and set the browser.cache.disk.enable preference to false.

Another improvement was to remove logging on the SSD. For this purpose /var/log and /tmp have to be mounted as temporary filesystems. To achieve this, edit /etc/fstab and add the following lines:

Don’t forget the trailing line at the end. Note that some programs might complain about the lack of folders so they have to be created. To rebuild the rest of the directory structure inside /var/log on each reboot, add these lines to /etc/rc.local above the “exit 0” line:

Finally, you might not need all preconfigured startup applications. Go to System → Startup Applications to disable those not needed.

8. Optional: reduce fan noise on Acer Aspire One
The Acer Aspire One has a known issue where the fan would always be enabled and can cause an annoying sound. I found some information about this issue here (tips copied to here and slightly modified):

Fan Control module is now part of the kernel, but is not enabled by default. To enable it for the running session type in a terminal:

sudo echo -n 'enabled' > /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/mode

To automatically enable it at boot, create the file

/etc/modprobe.d/acerhdf.conf

and add this line to it:

options acerhdf kernelmode=1

That’s it!
I hope you will enjoy your fresh Ubuntu Netbook Remix install as much as I do.