Source: eee.ricey.co.uk

Thursday 24th April 2008 saw the release of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) 8.04 (and friends). So it was time to get it on my Eee. I had tried to get the Beta to install with little success - I thought getting Hardy onto the Eee would be a nightmare!

To my surprise, however, after a little research and the experience of installing Gutsy, Hardy is now fully running on my Eee. Everything works including overclocking.

The drivers and tweaks are a little different than Gutsy but the initial install was almost identical.

Installing Hardy was a breeze, the only real change in the installer is the disk partitioning part. The 'manual edit' looks the same but it's use is a little different - but easy to follow.

To that end I will refer you back to the article I wrote on installing Gutsy (Episode 1) to get you to a running native install. Once you've done that come back here for the fun bits!

(One thing I have noticed whilst writing this article and testing with my Eee, sometimes the LiveUSB takes forever to boot, it appears to crash! Just wait and it should come up eventually. See the notes I made at the end about boot times.)

So, in Hardy many things work out the box - but what doesn't? I hear you ask!

1. Wireless - the Atheros Drivers required still aren't included in the ubuntu driver package
2. Hotkeys - are still a bit flakey - this is the fault of the ACPI system not being supported
3. Overclocking - needs to be setup
4. Sound - needs tweaking
5. Shutdown - it doesn't properly

Therefore the above have to be setup plus getting a better OSD and tweaking gnome a little.

Thanks to the efforts of many people over at EeeUser.com and at x20n.de Life has been made rather simpler. Both sites include instructions and scripts to semi-automate the configuration process. I have taken their advice and scripts and compiled my own little version, one that I know works for me and will for you - Hopefully!

Before we can move on you need to make sure you have a working Internet connection! Best done by plugging your Eee, with an ethernet cable, straight into your router. This is mainly because we need packages from the Internet and the wireless card is the last thing we are going to configure!

So once you're on the net go to your Home Directory and create a temporary folder, give it a name something like EeeInstall - it doesn't really matter but remember what you called it!

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