HP Mini 1000 - Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04 Lucid

[Readers note: this post was written back in May 2011 so some of the materials may not be the most up to date (e.g. I think Ubuntu has merged the netbook remix and desktop into one single edition). It is presented purely for reference purposes.  ]

Cutting a long story short, I purchased a HP mini 1000 back in 2009 and it has been basically collecting dust since. (I thought the netbook itself looks great, and I still do).

So, in the interest of making the netbook useful, I went ahead to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix having confirmed my netbook is one of the supported models.

Ubuntu’s netbook edition is available under the “alternative-download” page. (Click “alternative-download” tab on the main download page). The latest netbook edition is still 10.04 (which is used on my netbook). It seems like from then onwards, Ubuntu offers only either server or desktop edition.

As a side note, since the HP netbook has no DVD rom, I used the Universal USB Installer to create the USB install thumb drive for this installation.

The actual installation is rather straight forward so I have skipped the details, whereas tweaking the system is actually the “fun” part, but thankfully there is a wiki Ubuntu page dedicated to this topic. 

For those who couldn't be bothered reading this, there are three fixes for HP mini 1000: 

1). the wireless connection doesn't work unless the wireline is plugged in when system starts up (use GUI System->Administration->Hardware Drivers and install the "restricted driver"), 

2).Ethernet port (amend  the options "acpi_os_name=Linux" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in the /etc/default/grub file and then do an "update-grub"). and 

3).Setting Firefox's browser cache to point to a RAM disk to avoid killing the solid state drive with constant read/write (Open firefox, in the URL type about:config. Promise you'd be careful, and then set the parameter "browser.cache.disk.parent_directory" with the value "/dev/shm/firefox") .

So here with a screen shot of the web browser on Ubuntu running on HP mini 1000... 

P.S. Not shown on the screen is the wireless status actually has an exclamation mark as if it isn't connected, although the internet connection works perfectly fine.