Linux Netbook Notes

Him Her

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A recent project involved a company-wide system refresh which yielded numerous desktops, laptops and net-books that were destined for recycling. Most of the desktops were long past their sell-by date as were many of the laptops. The net-books, on the other hand, presented an opportunity as they can be quite handy little tools for a variety of purposes. Not least because often have wi-fi, ethernet, two or more USB ports, monitor and SD sockets.

The first problem was that many were installed with Windows 7 Starter which, once all the updates had been applied, were quite slow. Even a recovery to factory settings did little to remove this issue so alternative solutions were sought.

Those systems that had internal hard disks, as opposed to SSD, were found to support Linux and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS was chosen. Mainly because I am very familiar with it. Other distributions would probably work just as well.

Those with SSD may not have sufficient space for the full-blown Ubuntu as it requires some 8.4Gb but Xubuntu is at the same level of development and only requires 5Gb. Xubuntu is a ‘lite’ version which requires less memory too.

On some systems I experienced problems booting from SSD after the installation that I had to address using Boot-Repair. A boot-able USB key can be created but I just installed it on an external USB hard drive that had Ubuntu on it. To install use the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

Usage is fairly straightforward but documentation can be found here:

Confidentialite- France

Following the use of Boot-Repair it is best to run the following:

sudo update grub

Which checks and repairs any damaged references.

Some net-books, such as the Dell Mini range, have Broadcom Wireless cards built in and the standard Ubuntu drivers either don’t see the hardware or fail to connect to wireless. Correct this by checking your hardware type and removing the kernel drivers using:

lspci -nn -d 14e4: (will reveal if the affected Broadcom hardware is installed)

sudo apt-get purge bcmwl-kernel-source (remove old kernel support)

sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter firmware-b43-installer (install required drivers)

I now have a few useful and extremely portable tools. Light and reasonable battery life.

Makes tested include: Acer, Asus, Dell Mini, Packard Bell and Zoostorm
 
good work :)

Build yourself a FOG server, capture an image off one of those badboys and try rolling it out to other similar machines, given that the config is intact on the destination machine it should make it a breeze using your image on any target machine you want to do it to in the future :)
 
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