Ubuntu and f8sv-a1

Yes, I went ahead and bought one. Couldn't be happier

I ran Vista for a total of one hour. That is enough time for the first boot and to uninstall Norton and Office, which seem to be the only real bloatware on here; I thought it was worse when I was originally greeted by about 6 different windows and notifications.
After that, I was attacked by a parade of warnings preaching doom because I had no virus scanner. At that point, I lost all respect for Vista, found my Ubuntu 7.10 install CD and have not looked back. Mind you, it's only been 30 minutes. (I'm typing this in a full install, by the way).
I have not upgraded my RAM yet, either.

This computer is great. Only thing I am not yet content with is the small size of the arrow keys, but I am sure I'll get used to it.

Why am I so pleased with Ubuntu?

Wireless works better. Yes, for the first time ever, Linux is giving better wireless than Windows. NetworkManager in Ubuntu is giving this connection 4 bars, and I am here wirelessly right now. Windows (from the exact same position) connected, but the web browser flat out refused to work; the signal was not strong enough. Oh, and yes, wireless works out of the box. For that matter, everything I have tried so far is working! Have not yet tried any ports other than USB, but I optimistically assume they work.

A few notes:

-Press Esc in the startup screen to choose the CD drive to boot from.

-Use Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) or later. 7.04 is reported to not work. I used the 64-bit installer. Have not tried the 32-bit one...

-Starting the regular way does not seem very cooperative. It got to running init scripts for gdm, but then just hung, and the CD stopped spinning. Still shut down cooperatively as soon as I pressed the power button, which is happy. Instead, start in Safe Graphics mode. It seems to find the correct screen resolution, so you won't be missing too much.

-USplash does not work. If you see a black screen, do not panic; it is probably still going.

-That problem with USplash means you will not see the message to pull out the CD and press Enter when shutting down the live CD. When the tray pops open, pull the disk out, push the tray back in and press Enter. The system will then be restarted.

-The CD occasionally stops spinning in the Live CD; you will hear an eerie silence as neither the hard drive or optical drive are doing anything. Not a problem; don't panic.

-The Live CD boots slowly. Don't worry; actual startup time in the real install is shockingly fast. Around 10 seconds for me on first boot, thus defeating the need for a boot splash at all. Faster than some PDAs! (Oh, and faster than Windows). This is still a 5400 RPM drive, which only makes me wonder how beautiful it would be with 7200!

-It's a good idea to have an independent /home partition. By doing that, you can much more quickly defrag the commonly accessed system data in the / partition. This is easy if you choose to manually partition the drives; just set the mount point of one to be /home, and another to be /! (Smaller partition for root; 4 or 5 GB works well. I have just learned the hard way that 2.5 is a bit too close to the wire). However, for some reason, Asus' Recovery partition is a Primary partition, and we are limited to 4 primary partitions. Just be sure to make /home a Logical partition and you'll be fine. (And no worries; the installer will let you know if you haven't).

-The drivers for graphics are Restricted drivers, not on the live cd. You will need an Internet connection to get them. Just open up Restricted Drivers Manager and all should be clear. Desktop Effects will make Windows Vista more jealous than it already is

-On the topic of partitions, Asus kindly gave us a Data partition. That one is easy to delete and put Ubuntu in without having to resize anything, if you are impatient like me.

-Make sure Windows shuts down cleanly unless you want to start it and exit it again. I foolishly did not do so, and as a result Ubuntu has less of the hard drive than it because the partitioner refused to resize the Windows data partition (due to it being locked, thanks to an unclean shutdown). On the bright side, in the event of a hard drive crash, Windows now has higher chance of being incinerated.

-Webcam works out of the box! Camorama isn't finding the video device, but Cheese is quite successfully. I have not tested with any others yet.

 

Critically important:

Do Not; ever, EVER, resize Vista's partition via Ubuntu 7.10's installer. For reasons beyond any logical understanding, Vista's NTFS cannot be resized via its partitioner. Yes, it results in a broken Windows install (laughably broken; it tries to boot, throws a BSOD then resets itself before said BSOD can be read; repeat forever).

On a lighter note, I suggest turning off usplash by replacing the splash argument in /boot/grub/menu.lst with nosplash. That way you will see a lot of text flying by, but at least it will be clear when and why booting fails, and you can see what's going on instead of just a long period of blackness.

Edit:
Sorry about the double post. That was clueless of me.

 

Nice, I have a C90 and had Vista for about 2 monthes and was satisfied, I always want to tr a Linux but hesitant because of all the in-compatibility issues with programs and stuff that I heard about, so I installed ubuntu Gutsy....WoW is all I can say. After I installed for and played for a bit I removed my vista partition (backing it up to my server for safe keepings) Ubuntu recognized everything on here and installed it automatically. and I can add rep to the wireless bit, Its always high and it fixed the problem of whenever I went on the battery it wouldnt work. It barely uses any ram and has way better effects then vista for sure, the cube for example. Also, all of my games work with it too, all I needed was wine and Cedega and they worked flawlessly and smoother IMO. But yeah, didnt mean to Hi-jack but I suggest everyone, especially laptop owners to at least try the live cd, or better yet partition like 5 gb just to try it. Yes its different then Windows, and yes its different from mac, but I feel like I have way more control with whats going on in the comp. Plus a little side note, It comes with a billion programs that you can download and install if you like, like a email manager, a whole office suite, a great IM client, Bittorent client and way more. But yeah, at least give it a shot.

 

Good review on the nice new machine and Ubuntu, Picklesworth.

How's your audio working?

 

Audio was worryingly choppy on the live CD, but seems happy in the full installation. It's not unusual for that to happen, but it's always a little disconcerting. Haven't really pushed it yet, though, so the jury is still out.
Recording with the built in microphone goes poorly; very quiet... almost inaudible.
Haven't tried with Vista yet, since the frail thing is too sensitive to being resized and has thus decided to never boot again.

I had asked in another thread how the optical drive is. While it isn't a Wii-quality slot loader, it also is not bad. The actual tray feels reasonably sturdy, being a solid structure instead of a bunch of thin toothpicks. Rather wobbly, however, and I find it worrying that the lense is actually attached to the tray, thus exposed to the elements whenever I open the drive. Better than nothing, anyway!

 

Glad to hear it's working pretty well for you. Ubuntu and audio in my desktop don't seem to enjoy life together. LOL Luckily, it's just a very cheap eMachines machine (damn, that sounds dumb!), so I don't really care. I probably need to install/update drivers. Usually, it's only used to surf the Net anyway.

 

Resurrecting the thread... I know, but I just got the B1 flavour of the same laptop and this was my first time with Vista and I dislike it... a lot, a pointless xp makeover.

Anyway, back to Ubuntu, want to go with Gutsy. Yours is the first success story I read about getting it on F8SV. So, Picklesworth, what about other components... not so critical but still, any experience?
- What about fingerprint reader?
- What about express card slot (I may get external hd)?
- What about battery life... read on Ubuntu site that Hardy is supposedly fixing the issue with "dynticks for amd64" for better battery life?

I have to check the partition structure then... C: D: Recovery: right? All three primary? Did you just end up resizing D:? (I know you tried C: and didn't work out well).

Asus ships the recovery-dvd. Does that work in combination with the recovery partition or it can be stand alone in case I decide to revamp the partitions completely. Not sure I want to keep Vista installed at all.

Thanks a bunch!

 

IR port is dead at the moment. Curiously, it does not seem to be in Hardware Information...

The fingerprint sensor, on the other hand, is listed in Hardware Information. However, I have not really played with it -- no idea if it even works. One obvious reason for that is Linux presently lacks a solid desktop-ready biometric security system. There are a few in the works, though.

I have not tested the express card slot since I have no express cards to try in there.

Webcam seems to have stopped working in Ubuntu for some reason. Don't rely on it.

Battery life for me goes to around 2 hours with WiFi on and Compiz on full blast (including a fancy alpha blur effect), screen at very low brightness. Windows seems to be beating it, and unfortunately Ubuntu does not seem to cope well with turning off the WiFi hardware. Hardy will remedy this situation, it seems. For one thing, many applications will (finally!) think to change their behaviours when on battery.

The microphone is still being really quiet, but it does work. I blame ALSA and the horrifyingly confusing audio preferences, and am now waiting happily for Hardy, which will have a very cool new audio system.

As for partitioning scheme, I wiped out the recovery partition (when I reinstalled Windows for the third time from the recovery CD). Windows got one partition around 50 GB, Ubuntu has the remainder split between "/" (root partition, primary and around 20 GB) and "/home" (logical, occupying the remaining space).

Yes, the recovery partition is just an easier / faster way to do exactly what the CD does.

Not a fan of the media center LED, which seems to be triggered by hardware yet needs to be turned off by software...

As for other things that do work: I've noticed that something, somewhere, does a pretty good job of emulating a multi-touch track pad. Not perfect, but a tap with two fingers makes a middle click while a tap with three makes a right click.

 

All right. Thanks Pw. It's good to know that recovery dvd can be used alone, recovery partition not required.... because I had a different impression after reading some forum posts. Makes me much more comfortable to reconfigure partitions.

I don't really use fpr or ir. Maybe I should try out the Hardy Alpha3...

Those are all good tips, will come in handy for sure. Thx.

 

Ah, what do you know, Alpha 4 is out today.

 

Ok, I have Hardy.A4 (64bit) installed... gave me a little run-around with grub but all's well now. You were right about blank screen. Basically I ran Live Session and then ran full installation from within the Live Session. Works well that way.

Trouble with grub was that I wanted to keep Vista (oh well)... and have Linux completely contained in the Extended partition (D: drive in Vista). The thing is grub didn't want to install in the boot sector of root partition for some reason and I didn't want to override Vista's boot-loader in MBR. So I finally had it working when I created a separate partition for boot.... ending up with 4 logical partitions in the extended partition... sda5=/boot (100MB) sda6=swap (4GB) sda7=/ (8GB) sda8=/home (95GB) .

Great instruction on how to use Vista's boot-loader to boot Linux can be found here:
http://port25.technet.com/archive/2...th-BitLocker-Protection-with-TPM-Support.aspx

I have one program blowing up... jockey-gtk. Wireless works fine (obviously) . Double tap on the pad doesn't work. Battery seems to be holding quite well. Going to test some more of this. Need to put the dev env now. Happy so far.

 

I'm going to re-resurrect the thread again in hopes that we can get more guys who may be interested in trying out linux but were afraid to do so (like me!). Maybe make this an official Asus + ubuntu thread in the asus forums. I'm downloading 64bit gutsy and will give it a try on my b1 once im done.

I was a bit afraid to try an install of ubuntu due to a few reasons regarding school. I'm in a class that requires the use of visual studio and from what I read, there's no alternative on linux for it. I'm also using some developmental tools (ant, junit, etc) that requires setting up environmental variables and I would hate to have to reset the env var if the installation failed and killed my vista as I'm too uncomfortable to try and pick up software development with ubuntu at this point in the semester. Ty much to picklesworth and ziimen for posting their results and how to get there. Its making us newbie ubuntu guys that much less afraid.

BTW, I'm gonna take a wild guess that Picklesworth = Mr. Picklesworth

 

Ok, I'm on my third attempt at redoing the ubuntu install. For some reason, I can't update the video driver without it not messing up my start up. I know you said that splash doesn't work but for some reason, I can't even get to the login screen with splash disabled. I've tried numerous suggestions found on google and the ubuntu forums to fix it but have been unsuccessful.

pw, just wondering what you meant with the quoted text above. So you installed the restricted driver or use envy to install the latest nvidia driver? I had no luck with either one, nothing but black screen.

Also rebooted to recovery mode and used envy to uinstall the driver it installed and its now stuck with a black screen.

 

Any suggestion on how big should your partition be for Ubuntu. Im planning to have a dual OS on my ASUS laptop. (Vista/Ubuntu) Vista to be the primary OS as most of my program are only compatible with Windows.

 

You should go over to the linux forum, and also, this thread has dust on it.