Installing eeeXubuntu on an SD card

Follow the instructions on the eeeXubuntu Installation page of the Wiki to create a bootable CD or, preferably for the eeePC, a bootable USB Pen Drive containing the eeeXubuntu Live CD.

It is worthwhile removing or reducing in size any partitions from your SD card before we carry on to make room for the ext3 and swap partitions that we will create during the installation process.

* In the live CD / live USB drive environment, open a terminal and type:

df -h 

/dev/sda is the first disk, /dev/sdb the second and so on Use the info that's displayed to work out which of these disks is your SD card. (The number after each one represents the partition number on that disk, starting with 0).

• Double click on the Install option on the desktop
• Use the Alt key in conjunction with the mouse to drag the Installation dialog on the screen so you can see the Cancel / Back / Forward buttons
• Select the relevant installation options for your OS until you reach the “Prepare Disk Space” screen
• Select the Manual option. The SD card should be mounted as /dev/sdb (although this could be different depending on your hardware, see pre-installation section above)
• Create two partitions on the SD card

 A Primary ext3 partition with a mount point of /
 A Swap partition

• Continue the installation procedure

• Ensure that the boot loader is installed to your SD card. To do this:-
  • At the last installation phase, click the [Advanced] button to get the 'Advanced Options' dialog box and change '(hd0)' to '(hd1)'
  • NB: If your SD card is mounted as /dev/sdc, you should specify '(hd2)' instead.
  • Note: My SD card was mounted as /dev/sdd, so I specified (hd3), but grub installation didn't work. I didn't want to install again, so I installed grub manually like this: “chroot /target/; grub-install /dev/sdd”. Then I created a /target/boot/grub/menu.lst file by myself. It appears that /dev/sdd was actually (hd1) for me. I advice you to directly enter ”/dev/sdX” in the installer — vincent.fretin 2008/03/09 19:00
  • Update: Actually, just enter “sdb” without the quotes in the installer – Ryan 2008/06/07

• First time, I broken up MBR on ssd installed win2k3. :) And I had to restore it by 'fixmbr /device/harddisk0' while installation medium booting(usb hard).

• After install, when you reboot the machine, hold down the Esc key when you see the initial gray screen, and select 'USB:USB2.0 CardReader' as a boot device.
• You should be presented with a 'grub' menu with Xubuntu as the top option. Highlight the top option, hit 'e' and then edit the reference to (hd1,0) or (hd2,0) to (hd0,0). Then press 'b' to boot. eeeXubuntu should then boot happily.

• From a terminal, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to permanently change the boot menu entries for Xubuntu to (hd0,0):

sudo cp /boot/grub/menu.lst menu.bak
sudo mousepad /boot/grub/menu.lst

Look for this section in the file, and edit the third line to specify that the default grub root device is (hd0,0):

## default grub root device
## e.g. groot=(hd0,0)
# groot (hd0,0)

Next, change each of the Ubuntu menu options to boot from (hd0,0) - i.e. look for sections similar to that below and change the lines starting with the word 'root'

title Ubuntu 7.10, kernel 2.622...etc.
root (hd0,0)

Change the Xandros entries, too, if necessary, to (hd1,0):

title Normal boot
root (hd1,0)

• Reboot, and check that the new boot menu works.
• If all works okay, go into the BIOS settings and tell the EeePC to boot from your SD card first.
• Edit this page as appropriate!

Some useful info about grub here

To hide the internal SSD when running from SD card one must create a hal policy

sudo mousepad /etc/hal/fdi/policy/hide_media.fdi

with the following content

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <!-- -*- SGML -*- --> 
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="@info.parent:storage.model" string="SILICONMOTION SM">    
	<merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
    </match>
  </device>

  <device>
    <match key="@info.parent:storage.model" string="CardReader SD0">    
	<merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
    </match>
  </device>

</deviceinfo>

Restart hal or reboot your system to (re)load the new policy

sudo invoke-rc.d hal restart