LincolnBlogs

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.