barns.blog

With the imminent arrival of my Acer Aspire One A110, I have been preparing myself for setting it up to my satisfaction. The A110 comes with Linpus Linux Lite, which isn’t really a product for power users. However, the debate is what, if anything, is better, and what will the A110 run.

I am told that Ubuntu Netbook Remix works well on the A110 and that it has a fairly decent user interface. With this in mind, I set myself to obtaining a copy. Just under 1GB later, I had the USB image and wanted to try it out. Problem is, VMware Workstation can’t boot from USB devices and I was too lazy to make a USB device anyway. With a little help from Google, and http://shadow-file.blogspot.com/2009/08/ubuntu-netbook-remix-in-vmware.html, I set about turning the USB image into an ISO. This is fairly easy and is detailed below.

Firstly, the USB .img file is just a file system dump, so it can be mounted fairly easily:

# mount -o loop -t vfat ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.img \
/some/mount/point/

Then, it was a simple case of copying and editing the files. The image is almost suitable for CD, except that it needs isolinux rather than syslinux. This I knew from installing Ubuntu server on a machine without a CD drive last year, then I was going the other way. So:

$ mv syslinux isolinux
$ mv isolinux/syslinux.cfg isolinux/isolinux.cfg

Simple as can be. The final stage is just bundling it all up into a CD image:

$ mkisofs -o ubuntu-9.04-netbook-remix-i386.iso -r -J -l \
-V "Ubuntu-Netbook-Remix 9.04 i386" -b isolinux/isolinux.bin \
-c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 \
-boot-info-table /path/to/unr/files/

And we are done. UNR itself worked fairly well under Workstation and has a good user interface. I am definitely planning on installing it onto my netbook when it arrives!