Here’s what it looked like once downloaded and launched: To do this, I used UNetbootin, a universal boot installer that made the process quite straightforward, thankfully. I decided running a Windows app to make the USB thumb drive a bootable device. The order is Removable Dev., then HDD:PM-ST9160827AS (the hard drive), then ATAPI CD-ROM (which is a bit odd as the device doesn’t have a CD drive. Within the BIOS you need to go to “Boot” then choose “Boot Device Priority” and find out that, well, there’s nothing you can change.
Some random Google searches later and I found that “F2” was the secret “get to the BIOS” key. I tried again with the Delete key held down. I rebooted the computer and pressed Esc to be able to select from bootable devices, but, well, it didn’t work. The question, though, is will the Asus Netbook actually see it as a bootable device? Time to find out. Rather than burn a CDROM, which wouldn’t work very well given that the Asus EeePC, like all Netbook computers, has no CD drive, I decided instead that I’d drop it onto an 8GB Corsair USB thumb drive.Ĭopied in under a minute – a lot faster than burning a disk! Ironically, the first time I downloaded the ISO image it was corrupted, so I downloaded it a second time, from the same place, and finally had something I could view: That was a good move: it took about an hour to grab the 668MB ISO (disk image) of Ubuntu 8.10 standard desktop for i386. You can find the Ubuntu torrent links and more at (I’m using the Mac OS X based Transmission program to download the torrent here, but you could also use BitTorrent to accomplish the same if you’re running in Windows): I just chose the regular desktop version to make things easy.Īfter an hour, however, I got impatient and decided to use the far faster BitTorrent network, which essentially opens up a dozen or more parallel download channels.
Pick the version you want and click “Begin Download”. Okay, now step one is to download the Ubuntu Linux install CD, which you can find at : Never rely on just battery power when you’re messing with operating system level tasks, just in case it were to die part way through the process. Ready to get started? Step zero is to plug your Netbok in. Ultimately, though, I did succeed in creating a hard-drive based Asus Eee PC netbook (I used the 1000H with a 160GB hard drive) that can boot into either the original Windows XP operating system or into Ubuntu 8.10 Linux.
It’s complex and when I did it, at least, I had a couple of false starts and went down a couple of incorrect paths along the way. You can definitely do this with success, but it’s not for the faint of heart and I would recommend you allocate a few hours for this process.