Installation
The first problem you might realise is that your netbook has no CD/DVD drive to install from. For this part of the process you will undoubtedly need, a USB thumb drive and another machine (or use the WinXP system currently running on the MSI Wind).
You need to get a program called UNetbootin, install it and then run the software, connect your USB thumb drive and select the Linux Distrobution and version that you want to install.
In my case it was
- OS Type: Fedora
- OS Version: 10_NetInstall
My thumbdrive was only 512MB so I opted for the NetInstall, this simply means that the installer will download the packages off the net and install them to your FC operating system. It is not the fastest way to install, but it sure works. Now the first time I did this I made the mistake of using UNetbootin’s advise of using the fedora.redhat.com install image, however for better speed (and possibly no bandwidth usage at your ISP) try to see if your ISP hosts a FC10 install image and packages. Most ISP’s do and you will find it downloads a lot quicker and does not go towards your monthly bandwidth usage, depending on the packages you select this can be upwards of 5GB!
Now the UNetbootin software will download the NetInstall image onto your USB drive. They tell you to clear out your USB drive and make you assume that it will be reformatted, however I realised that it is not the case, it simply adds the installation kernel to your USB drive.
So once you’ve done that, remove the USB drive and put it in your MSI Wind and boot up the netbook…
You may need to press F11 for bootup options incase it doesn’t start booting up the Linux installer. Now at some stage in the installer you will be asked for the installation medium, this is either CD/DVD, Network, or URL. You will be using the URL option. UNetbootin gave you a URL earlier to use for the installation medium, however as I said it’s better to check if your ISP has the installation images. If they don’t, then at least try to find an ISP close to your location or country that has it. You can find the more known list of FC10 mirros here.
A little confusing thing here is that you can ommit the /images/install.img from your URL as FC10 installer picks this up on its own, putting it in will give you an error saying <install-URL>/images/install.img/images/install.img was not found… So for an example if you are using BigPond, use:
http://ga14.files.bigpond.com:4040/fedora/linux/releases/10/Fedora/i386/os/
On to package selection, I advise you stick with the standard default and customise later, I got all giddy and started selecting and customising my packages, this not only made installation slower as it had to fetch a lot more packages, but the installation actually failed when it was unable to fetch a certain package and I had to start over. So take my advise and go for default, once your netbook is set up you have all the time to sit and play around with package management.
Next > Next > Next etc. You know how it goes…
I’m working on a similar project win a MSI U100, instead installing CentOS. I was able to get a successful (bootable) installation but had a problem that the NIC was marginal. Sometimes requiring several cold boots to work properly. I’m installing from a USB DVD drive instead of a usb thumb drive
Have you had any problem with the builtin network card?
If by NIC you mean the ethernet and not wireless, then no that worked out of the box. Check what version of NetworkManger you have. As for the wireless card, see above, it worked after adding the rpmfusion repo’s and installing the ralink driver. You may have a different version, I have:
kmod-rt2860.i686 1.8.0.0-3.fc10.3
good guide, however for the wireless part the “./ncdiag” and “./installNC.sh” are outdated stupid scripts and a bit confusing for beginners as they require you to pass the correct parameters to install the ncsvc. Alternatively you can do this as your final step:
cd ~/.juniper_networks/network_connect/
sudo install -m 6711 -o root ../tmp/ncsvc ncsvc
Regards
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Joannah
http://linuxmemory.net
Hey,
I had mine working without any of this for a while. It was done just using firefox. Then, my profile got corrupted and I had to create a new profile. Ever since, it hasn’t worked. I can’t figure out why.
I used to open up firefox, and then go to the network connect site, and it’d ask me for root password. I entered it, and it worked fine. I may have remembered playing around with allowing javascript to allow window resizing or something like that.
I get:
Insufficiant number of parameters
./installNC.sh
for ./installNC.sh
I also get:
install: cannot stat `../tmp/ncsvc’: No such file or directory
when I try sudo install -m 6711 -o root ../tmp/ncsvc ncsvc
Where is the tmp supposed to be? What’s it trying to access and where?
Any ideas on how to just get it working normally with firefox? I’m going to keep trying over the next couple of days and will post up on here if I find something
ps. I’m using Kubuntu
@Keerthi
Sorry for the awefully late reply. It seems that you do not actually need to run the install at all. Just making sure your Linux install is not using OpenJDK and has the latest J2SE is enough, the browser can do the rest.