Stage One...

Been a little busy with some other stuff, but I finally managed to sit down with the machine after doing a basic install. Here's what I did:

Using another laptop running Xubuntu, I used UNetBootin to make a bootable USB thumbdrive with the Karmic 9.10 Ubuntu Minimal ISO. UNetBootin is available from the Universe repositories. If you don't have them enabled, you can do so in Synaptic: Settings --> Repositories. You'll find the Universe and other checkboxes on the first tab. Check 'em, close the Settings dialog and click the Reload button. You know what to do from there.

Use the ISO option in UNetBootin to hunt down the .ISO file on your hard drive. Don't try to pick the proper distribution from the dropdown list -- it's not there, and really, the .ISO option is the best way to be sure.

Once the USB thumbdrive was ready, I plugged it into the tablet, started the TC1100 and went into its BIOS by clicking the jogbutton during the bootup screen. To work in the BIOS settings, you'll need a keyboard -- if you don't have the regular keyboard, I believe a USB keyboard will work.

In the BIOS Advanced tab, I selected Boot Options, then Hard Drive. Moved the thumbdrive up above the built-in drive (Now a Hitachi 7200RPM!), hit F10 to save settings and let it reboot from the thumbdrive. You could do all this from the docking station, using a burned CD-ROM, but that's a little wasteful, and requires the docking station. Which I have, so I could, but I didn't, and I wouldn't, and it's faster, cheaper and more fun this way. Anyhow.

I'm not going to describe the entire install process. Find a tutorial somewhere if you've never done it. The install from Ubuntu Minimal is all done in a terminal-type screen, not graphical although there are menus and checkboxes (use your arrow and tab keys to navigate, and the spacebar to set/unset checkboxes), and it has a LOT of choices and a lot of screens -- but you end up with a super-selective install. The installer recognized both network cards: the ethernet card AND the wireless card. I like to install with an ethernet cable attached, just in case, so I chose that when the installer asked. I also chose the option to create a user account - a root-only install is going to be unnecessarily more difficult to set up.

BTW -- the most complicated part is always the partitioning. I used a 10GB partition for the / (root), a 3GB partition for swap and the remainder for /home. Fairly big root, could have gone down to as low as 3GB, but now I don't have to worry. And it's always a good idea to have home on a separate partition -- if you need to reinstall, you don't have to redo all your settings and folders. 2GB is my future RAM memory (still waiting for the 1GB chip) so my swap is big enough, but not double. It'll let me hibernate the machine if I want to.

In terms of speed, it's probably best to put the swap on the first partition, the root on the second and use the third partition for home. This is because a hard drive accesses the beginning of the drive faster than the end. This partition setup would give memory the fastest part of the drive, and the OS files the second fastest, followed by your data partition.

Once you've gone through all the installer's questions, it downloads only the packages you need for a basic command-line setup. I then logged in as myself, and changed the root password in case I ever need to login as root. This change is easy to do, much simpler than setting up a new user as an administrator.

Ubuntu defaults to an obscured root account password and requires the super-user to use the sudo command. Change it to something you can use as follows:

1. sudo su
2. passwd

enter new password twice
you're done

Now, while I was still in the root account and didn't need to type sudo before everything, I did the first, most important install:

apt-get --no-install-recommends install xorg xfce4 slim synaptic gdebi jockey-gtk wicd ktsuss xscreensaver xarchiver rar unrar

which didn't work, because slim is not in the 9.10 repository. Slim is a really nice, very small login manager (Slim Log In Manager, a non-recursive acronym) that replaces GDM. GDM seems to drag in half of Gnome, so we don't want to add it to a super-light install. Slim has been restored to the Lucid 10.10 distribution, but out of the gate, we cannot add it. DEBs are available, and I'll install it later.

So instead I had to run this:

apt-get --no-install-recommends install xorg xfce4 xdm synaptic gdebi jockey-gtk wicd ktsuss xscreensaver xarchiver rar unrar

xdm is an old-school login manager. It's pretty ugly, but it gets the job done for now, and I haven't had to install any Gnome or KDE files.

What are the other files? Let's see...

xorg is the graphical environment, also known as X. No xorg, no gui. Utterly necessary.

xfce4 is the Desktop Environment that I prefer to use. It's an interlocking set of programs that work well together. If you were to just install a complete Xubuntu, you would get a lot of Gnome dependencies. You still get some, nonetheless. You could install LXDE, or KDE or Gnome, but I'd only respect you if you installed LXDE -- and I don't think it's quite ready for use; later this year maybe. In the future, I'm going to try GPE for a more PDA-like experience.

synaptic is the GUI front-end for apt-get. Lets us install other programs later. Not strictly necessary, but damn useful.

gdebi is a dpkg GUI front-end, but let's us install .DEB files that aren't in a repository, that are sitting on our hard drive after a download or a compilation. Also damn useful, for installing things like slim.

jockey-gtk is yet another installer/front-end -- but this is specifically for non-open-source drivers. A really simple way to get the proper nVidia drivers, et al. Not strictly necessary, but easy-to-use and can be uninstalled afterward.

wicd is a lightweight replacement for network-mangler -- oops, sorry -- for network-manager. It has very few dependencies, none on Gnome, and I've always used it over the Gnome nm app.

ktsuss is a gksu replacement for graphical sudo. Gnome-free. Using this may require editing all our menu-entries; possibly this can be done in a script. xfce4 may have dragged gksu in -- I haven't checked yet.

xscreensaver is the screensaver daemon. Will need some further configuration. For some reason, the Gnome team has really messed with the xscreensaver daemon and forked it for their gnome-screensaver package. Xubuntu pulls in gnome-screensaver, which in turn depends on about a billion Gnome packages. We will not so depend, plus we'll get more flexibility and more screensavers. I did not yet install xscreensaver-gl-extra and xscreensaver-gl but I will.

xarchiver, rar and unrar: unzipping/archiving program. Maybe not necessary right at this point, but it will shortly become necessary -- and while file-roller is an excellent archiver, it is very Gnome dependent. Just getting it out of the way here first, so I don't forget. rar and unrar enable the RAR format to be read/created by xarchiver. There are other archiving formats that can be enabled from Synaptic later.

These seem to be pretty basic and let us use the GUI for further enhancing the installation, but, even though I added --no-install-recommends I somehow got Open Office installed. Must be a clear dependency of Xfce. I'll leave it for now, but I didn't want it.

Once the command-line install was done, I typed startx and boom! the XDM login manager asked for my username/password and launched the Xfce desktop.

Let me say, having rebooted since that moment: boot-up is super, super-fast. No cruft, just speed. I haven't added any startup applications yet, but I only use a few so I don't expect to add significantly to the time.

Out of the box, this install recognized the pen/digitizer and the wireless card. I was on the net via WICD in about 20 seconds. This morning I tested it all out some, and set up Xfce the way I like it. There are still a bunch of configuration and installation steps to go through, but I'm feeling good. I'll start breaking things down by hardware and software tweaks with the next blog update.

m a r