Friday, May 04, 2012

Adventures in Linux / Customizing a Netbook

I may have mentioned I bought a netbook a few weeks ago. It may have slipped my mind to record the fact. But either way, I've had a new toy to play with.
The annoying thing with Windows on a netbook, though, is that it feels like only part of the display is on view.
So I asked a guy at work about Linux and he recommended Mint. I happily bumbled home and looked it up.
Mint's big selling point is it's multimedia capabilities. Aha! I thought, that'll do me.
So I downloaded the ISO onto a USB stick - several times. It appears that 1GB sticks don't hold 1GB of data, so I had to use a 16GB stick I had. Of course, Linux users being more precise, the ISO is actually 1024MB in size, and it won't fit on a USB with 997MB free. My bad.
I tested the system by booting it from the USB and I liked it, so decided to install it. And that's where I came unstuck. The system is supposed to install a dual-boot menu, so that on start-up you get the choice between using Linux or Windows. But the menu didn't kick in. So I reloaded it and tried again. Same thing.
Eventually I had to delete three installations of Linux Mint! And it still wasn't booting as expected.
Then I checked the MD5 value, to ensure the downloaded software wasn't corrupted. No problems there. So I tried again. Went through some serious problem-solving steps and ended up deleting and reinstalling the bootloader - that was a bit worrying since if the procedure had not worked, I would have borked the netbook.
But all this effort was to no avail. I just could not get the boot menu to install from the USB.
So I decided to change my line of attack. I used mint4win to install Linux inside Windows. It took some time; I had to download a virtual drive piece of software, and download a cut-down version of Mint. But it installed as smooth as butter; I then clicked on the 'upgrade to DVD Version' and voila - the full version installed. And the boot menu appeared as desired - so I now have Mint on my netbook! Hurrah.
TTFN.

Posted via email from Rob Thorley's Posterous Site

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