Green elaboration

Linux Mint

Linux Mint


I wanted to elaborate a little on putting Linux Mint on my Acer Aspire One. For starters, my AAO is the 8gb flash drive model. No HDD in there baby!

First I removed all the SSD cards from the AAO. Didn’t want to accidentally overwrite any data I may be saving there you know.

I downloaded the Linux Mint 7 (Gloria) main addition iso and, using unetbootin, put it on a usb thumb drive.

I booted the thumb drive in my AAO by pressing F12 on boot and choosing the USB drive.

Once the Linux Mint live environment was running, I clicked on the install icon on the desktop and followed the prompts.

The only real diversion I made from just pressing “accept” the whole time through was the partitioning scheme. I chose advanced there and made sure that the install was using 100% of my AAO’s drive as root “/” and with an ext2 filesystem. There is no sense in using a journaling filesystem on an AAO without an HDD in it. It just wears it out faster.

The installer reminded me that I was about to install without a swap space and I told it I knew that and it was ok.

The rest was a piece of cake and I just followed along until it told me I could reboot the machine and pull out my installer media.

After reboot I was presented with a fully working system. I could instantly connect to my wireless network and I was immediately able to play mp3 and avi media files from my personal collection without having to mess around and look for codecs, etc..

From this point, I made just a quick couple changes and tweaks I think are necessary for a non hdd AAO:

in /etc/fstab:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0

in /etc/fstab:
Change the "realtime" to "noatime"

in /boot/grub/menu.lst:
add "elevator=noop" to the end of your kernel line and to the "defoptions" line as well.

And that was it! A quick reboot later and the AAO is happy as a clam.

2 Comments

  • greggh says:

    The main developer of Linux Mint is a little loopy. His inclination is to not have users of the distro based on their political views. Pretty much antithetical to the spirit of free software.

    http://www.thelinuxlink.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4029

    http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2346637,00.asp

    “I’m only going to ask for one thing here. If you do not agree I kindly ask you not to use Linux Mint and not to donate money to it.”

    “I don’t want any money or help coming from Israel or people who support the action of their current government.”

  • linc says:

    Heh! Yeah, I saw that. My take on that is that’s his opinion. Opinions are like assholes – everyone has one and they all stink.

    Seriously, though, he cannot speak for all the contributers to the project who have done some seriously good work there, not to mention all the Israeli contributed projects which are integral not only to Mint, but Linux as a whole.

    Sure seems to be a shame, though, that people try and further alienate Linux with that kind of rhetoric.

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