Installing Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on an Eee PC 702 8G

Check out the Eee hardware FAQ for facts and information concerning the hardware.

1. Insert bootable CD into drive
2. Turn on Eee PC
3. When you see the grey startup screen, quickly press the ESC key a few times, and you'll get a dialog box allowing you to select your CDROM to boot from (in addition to the SSD and your SD card or USB flash drive if installed).
4. The Eee PC will then boot to your Live Ubuntu CD. Trackpad, mouse, keyboard, sound all work. It may have trouble recognizing the battery: I had it plugged into the AC Adapter and Ubuntu gave a warning message saying something like “There may be a problem with the battery, it is listed with only 1% left”
5. Begin the install- you will notice that all of the install windows drop below the screen. Windows can be moved around beyond the bounds of the screen by holding the Alt key and the left mouse button down, then moving the mouse.
6. When finished, remove CD and reboot
7. You now have Ubuntu installed

Let the system do an update, there are lots of packages and it takes a while.

The Ubuntu script pack is still very useful for the Kubuntu install. I ran init, acpi, wifi, sound, x11 and modules.

An effort is underway to make a Kubuntu specific script pack.

So now what do we have? Brightness and Wifi toggle work (though wifi itself does not yet). Sound is working but not tied to the Mixer properly.

Now to tweak the system for the screen size, add apps, codecs and plugins so it all just hums along.

Right click on the speaker in the tray and 'Select master channel…' ann set it to Front

In the mixer go to settings→Configure Global Shortcuts and mapp volume up/down & mute to your function keys (thanks to the scripts they are recognized).

A real big thing, for me at least, on the Eee has been running multiple desktops and using the keyboard shortcuts to move between them. In this way I open different apps on differnet desktops, some in fullscreen, and then bounce around as needed.

System Settings→Keyboard & Mouse is where it is all done

All these screen captures come from a great little KDE utility called KSnapshot. I mapped the Fn-Prt Sc key to the app.

All those system updates load modules that the provided module in the sriptpack doesn't work with. Until we can get a Kubuntu specific scriptpack I followed these instructions from the Ubuntu wiki page. I extracted the tar.gz file to my SD card since I may need again in the future. This pretty painless as spelled out here though.

These are updated directions using the pre-patched tarball provided by madwifi in this madwifi ticket. This way the patching is already done for you.

sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget 'http://snapshots.madwifi.org/special/madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz'
tar zxvf madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007.tar.gz
cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007
make clean
make
sudo make install
sudo reboot

The default setting in Dolphn are a little big and until we can produce a TweakKDE script here is how to tighten stuff up.

In Dolphin go to Settings→Configure Dolphin→View modes. I pulled down the size of the icons & preview and reduced the font to 8 in both as well. I also set Grid Spacing to small as well.

Kaffeine and Amarok are excellent players, both capable of using the Xine backend. So you'll want to install the xine-plugin for browser support and of course kubuntu-restricted-extras

sudo apt-get install xine-plugin
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-restricted-extras

And then visit the Medibuntu page for DVD playback and Win32 codecs.

Kubuntu comes pre-loaded with the excellent Kopete multi-protocol chat client. It can test your camera and actually use it with chat services that support video.

Yahoo needs the Jasper libraries for the camera to work

 sudo apt-get install libjasper1 libjasper-runtime

amarok does not come with visualizations pre-installed

  sudo apt-get install libvisual-0.4-0 libvisual-0.4-plugins

I have a LCD TV that has a VGA input with 1024×768 support so here is what I did to get it going. Be sure and save a backup of your xorg.conf so that if things go wrong you can boot into recover mode and restore a working copy.

Update xorg.conf:

Section "Screen"
  Identifier    "Default Screen"
  Device        "Intel Corporation Mobile 915GM/GMS/910GML Express Graphics Controller"
  Monitor        "Generic Monitor"
  DefaultDepth    24
     SubSection "Display"
       Depth     24
       Modes    "800x600"
       Virtual  2048 2048
      EndSubSection
     SubSection "Display"
       Depth     24
       Modes    "1024x768"
       Virtual  2048 2048
      EndSubSection
EndSection

Turn on extended desktop:

xrandr --output VGA --right-of LVDS --mode 1024x768

Turn off:

xrandr --output VGA --off

See this wiki page

To make the eeepc suspend when the lid is closed.

 sudo nano -w /etc/acpi/events/lidbtn

And change the line that says :

 action=/etc/acpi/lid.sh

To :

 action=/etc/acpi/sleep.sh

You will have to reboot before this takes effect.