Project Tablet: Installing Ubuntu
Step Two: Ubuntu Desktop on USB
I’m usually a server person: I like to know my install is free of “desktop toys” before installing a minimal gnome plus whatever I want. However, this time I needed an install that would boot directly into a desktop environment once it had finished, so I could ditch the USB keyboard and start using the stylus and a onscreen keyboard.
Getting an Ubuntu Desktop ISO onto a bootable USB stick was as easy as grabbing UNetbootin and running it. I decided to go with a 6GB partition for Ubuntu, resizing the existing XP Tablet Edition to 14GB (just in case I still wanted it later – it would be easy enough to wipe and reformat it to ext3 later if I wanted it for Ubuntu)
Everything installed perfectly, was then just a matter of a few stylus taps to get an onscreen keyboard via System>Preferences>Assistive Technologies
There was a bit of graphics corruption on some text, which I’m hoping will disappear once I install the updates from the internet.
Step Three: Networking
The good news: Ubuntu picked up both the onboard ethernet and wifi natively.
The bad news: Try as I might, I couldn’t get the wifi to connect. It could see my network, but just rejected every combination of the WEP key I could come up with.
As with the graphics corruption, I’m not going to worry about this until I’ve installed all the latest updates – which I’m now doing via the onboard ethernet.
To-Do:
- Get wifi working
- Fix graphics corruption
- Strip out unwanted crap
- Install word processor, web browser, and email
- Look into handwriting recognition possibilities
- Configure remote VNC connection to server
- Configure NFS to my server’s media archive
- Configure Freevo to play my media archive
- Configure the TV capture card on my server, and set up live streaming to the tablet with some means of remote control to change channels!
