Tutorials
From AleutiaWiki
For a number of our customers, the E2 represents their first computer. Spreadsheet, Word Processing, and Presentation software remains the key reason many buy our low power computer.
We're looking to recruit experts in OpenOffice Write, Calc, and Impress whose actions we could record and who could narrate a series of tutorials that would be viewable for students, allowing for immediate gain.
Getting into BIOS
The E2 by default has a fairly short setup screen. If you want to adjust setup parameters, hit "Del" as soon you start seeing the American Megatrends boot text. That should drop you into a setup screen within a few seconds.
- F11 will let you choose which device to boot from.
- changing the default boot behavior to enable memory testing will slow down the initial screen a bit, making it more convenient to enter setup or other keys.
Installing IDE Hard Drive (or Solid State Drive) in E2
The E2 can accommodate an internal 2.5" IDE hard drive or 2.5" IDE Solid State Drive, allowing you to greatly increase the storage without affecting its small size. Power consumption typically jumps, but only by 2-3 Watts.
To do this you'll need a mini IDE cable and hard drive mounting screws. Contact me by email (michael at aleutia.com) if you need these and we can supply for £5, plus shipping (£6 total in the UK).
Installing Ubuntu on Sandisk Extreme III card
Installing Ubuntu 8.04.1 is straightforward.
- Hook up a CD or DVD reader with the CD/DVD.
- Boot with a CompactFlash card of 4GB or more ( I used 16GB) installed but with the setup set to boot from the CD/DVD.
- Proceed with a normal installation, setting it to clear the entire "disk". Check that it is trying to partition the CF card by comparing the size it reports with anything else hanging on your system.
- Should take about 45 minutes to an hour. Reboot and remove the CD/DVD drive.
Note that some cards and key drives can be problematic, and others can be slow. With 2GB and under cards I don't think the basic Ubuntu will install.
Installing Ubuntu on a USB drive
The normal Ubuntu installation from CD works on some USB drives. On others it will drop into a command line GRUB screen on booting. This appears to be related to disk geometry specification and detection, but no direct fix has yet been developed.
Since for these drives GRUB can't be used, a different boot loader is needed; EXTLINUX or LILO.
The 8.04 Xubuntu will sometimes notice that GRUB isn't going to work, and offer to use LILO instead. However with 8.04 on the E2 this too has failed, perhaps due to disk name confusion (sda versus sdb).
The path forward is therefore to do a complete but non-working installation from CD/DVD, and then repair it from a liveCD to use EXTLINUX.
A way which has worked is:
- install Ubuntu/Xubuntu from a DVD. If it fails to reboot, then
- boot from the Ubuntu/Xubuntu LiveCD
- run "sudo apt-get install syslinux" in a terminal to get the syslinux package, which includes EXTLINUX. You will need to be online to do this.
- follow the directions on the web (more details soon) on how to replace GRUB with extlinux; basically write a simple extlinux.conf file and run a few commands.
- ensure that the "bootable" flag is set on the USB device partition that you will be using. This has only been tested with the device partition being the first.
- recheck by using "fdisk -lu /dev/sda" or similar. There should be a "*" in the boot column on the booting partition.
- recheck that you copied the master boot record as part of the syslinux installation, that every character of the syslinux.conf file is correct, especially filenames
- then reboot, using del or f11 on the BIOS screen to ensure that booting takes place from the USB drive.
- you should see a normal boot sequence. If you see nothing but a blinking cursor, extlinux is not happy; it couldn't find a bootable kernel, the spelling was wrong, etc. Debugging boot problems is slow and can be exasperating.
The above documentation is a bit terse. As time permits it needs to be revised.
Installing new Ubuntu packages
There are a lot of Ubuntu software packages available for the E2, and they are easy to install. Make sure you are connected to the internet, and then type
sudo apt-get packagename
Normally this will give you a short dialog telling you how much space it will need. Sometimes it will give you an error.
An error may be because your apt list is out of date. Use
sudo apt-get update
Another reason may be that you are not connected to the internet. Try
ping www.mit.edu
and if that doesn't work, fix that first.
Setting up SSH on Aleutia
sudo apt-get openssh-server
This will download and install and start the sshd server. After that you can ssh from another computer. Done. If there are any problems, see the tutorial above about installing packages.
If you don't know your ip address, try
/sbin/ifconfig -a
This will give you networking information; you should be able to find you ip address (e.g. 192.168.0.10) by reading through it. For those who are just starting with networking, note that to access this from over the internet you will probably need to open up your DSL line or other connection. This is known as punching a hole in your firewall.
Assuming that openssh-server has been installed, and your system is online and the ip address has been found (e.g. 192.168.0.10) and you are on the same local network or have arranged to make that accessible, then from another Linux or Mac OS X system you could type (in a terminal window)
ssh aleutia@192.168.0.10
If you are in a Windows environment, Google the ssh client "putty.exe" and download that. It is easy to run, and doesn't need installation per se. Therefore you can grab a copy and use it even in many Internet cafes.
Setting up VNC on Aleutia
VNC is a convenient way to see and manipulate your entire screen on another system. It is bandwidth intensive, and so works best over local connections. To start the VNC server, try:
sudo apt-get install x11vnc vnc-java x11vnc -storepasswd #suggest using 123456 as password x11vnc -forever -usepw -httpdir /usr/share/vnc-java -httpport 5800
You can then access the E2 remotely. A good client for Mac OS computers is Chicken of the VNC. With the IP address of your E2 in hand, it should be straightforward.
Running a disk test
bonnie++[1] is used to get disk performance numbers for a first order comparison. Please run the command
sudo apt-get install bonnie++
This will download and install the bonnie++ test. Run it without any options, as a user (not root), in a writeable directory (e.g. /home/aleutia):
bonnie++
For best results run it in a directory with 1-2GB free. Please then publish the results here, or mail them to Aleutia for publication. Note that bonnie++ returns results in K, e.g. 26564K. This is hard to read, so divide by 1000 and get a rough MB, e.g. 26.564MB.
| System | Disk | Sequential char output | block output | rewrite | Sequential char input | block input | Random Seeks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| E2 | LaCie USB2.0 "Lego" 500GB drive | 4.108MB/sec | 26.564MB/sec | 12.621MB/sec | 3.412 MB/sec | 24.818MB/sec | 127/sec |
| E2 | Sandisk Extreme III 16GB | 4.077MB/sec | 10.527MB/sec | 5.050MB.sec | 4.328MB/sec | 15.101MB/sec | 551/sec |
| E2 | Sandisk Extreme IV 8GB | 3.679MB/sec | 16.249 MB/sec | 11.470MB/sec | 4.215MB/sec | 28.144MB/sec | 924.7/sec |
| E2 | Adata 40X 8GB | 3.557MB/sec | 3.871 MB/sec | 3.738MB/sec | 3.466MB/sec | 14.818MB/sec | 256.0/sec |
| E2 | integral 4GB | 2.210MB/sec | 2.333MB/sec | 1.688MB/sec | 2.693MB/sec | 6.630MB/sec | 87.8/sec |
| E2 | Freecom USB2.0 160GB | 4.023MB/sec | 23.503MB/sec | 11.692MB/sec | 4.397MB/sec | 25.414MB/sec | 107.3/sec |
| E2 | Western Digital IDE 80GB (5400RPM) | 3.727MB/sec | 26.665MB/sec | 12.789MB/sec | 4.159MB/sec | 28.515MB/sec | 130.1/sec |
| F5 | Seagate Momentus SATA 80GB (7200RPM) | 5.531MB/sec | 27.038MB/sec | 21.671MB/sec | 8.409MB/sec | 57.298MB/sec | 101.7/sec |
Formatting and working with CompactFlash cards
The CompactFlash card as a whole will be a Linux device; e.g. /dev/sda or /dev/sdb. Usually but not always filesystems will be in a partition on this device, e.g. /dev/sda1 for the first partition on the /dev/sda device. You want to be xtremely sure that you have the device correct before initializing or formatting it; otherwise you can easily wipe out your system card/disk. If you are running from a different system, e.g. a liveCD, and you can access the files on your CompactFlash card, then type
df
and look for the device in the bottom lines. You are looking for something like
/dev/sdb2 3172904 3070868 940860 69% /media/disk2
which would mean you are currently accessing it as /media/disk2, the filesystem is on partition /dev/sdb2, and the CompactFlash device by implication is /dev/sdb. To zero it out, erasing all partitions and giving you a defined starting point, try
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb cbs=1M
This will take a while. It may seem overly cautious to zero out your card, but some cards can be flaky. To see the partition structure use:
fdisk -l /dev/sdb
To modify or create new partitions from the command line use
fdisk /dev/sdb
You will normally want to create one large partition (say 3.5GB on a 4GB card) for Ubuntu, and a second 500MB or so swap partition. The root partition (the 3.5GB one in this example) should be toggled to "bootable" in fdisk or checked bootable in gparted. Basic fdisk commands are n for new partition, w to write it out, m for menu. or use gparted from the Ubuntu drop down menus.
