Edubuntu

2012 March 8 at 16:58 » Tagged as :bootstrap, cups, edubuntu, grub, ubuntu,

I have an Acer Aspire One netbook, or should I say I had one? The kids lifed it a while back. I decided that they could keep it and to install Edubuntu on it.

The netbook originally shipped with Windows 7 starter but the first thing I did was install Fedora on it - neither of which is really suitable for kids to learn about computers. So all that they do with the netbook is watch Youtube videos (they are not allowed to watch TV) or play games. Hopefully Edubuntu will put that right.

I have lost count of the number of different distros that I have tried or the number of times I have installed/upgraded Fedora (or it's predecessors). So I wasn't going to waste time to find out if there is anything better than Edubuntu and I didn't expect it to be a smooth installation. It wasn't.

Downloading the minimal ISO and choosing to do a network installation wasn't probably the smartest decision. It froze at downloading package number 531 and stayed stuck for quite a while. Eventually apt-get had to be killed. The installer then aborted the install process. Thankfully the Ubuntu installers are less cussed than their Fedora counterparts. It takes you back to the previous step instead of rebooting. However these two steps were repeated twice more until I decided to try another set of packages.

Trouble wasn't over after the installation completed. GRUB was messed up. I've yet to see a linux install where GRUB didn't get messed up. The usual thing to do is to boot up in rescue mode and edit the grub.conf file (if needed) and then run grub-install. But the fat lady wasn't singing even then. The wireless network refused to start up. Yes, this is the same wifi device that was used by the installer to download the packages. If the installer which has the bear minimum about of code can make use of the WiFi device why not NetworkManager ?

There were some issues with the Wifi when Fedora was first installed on this netbook but I had neglected to blog about the solution at the time, so now it's a case of reinventing the wheel or looking for a helpfull blog post from someone who is more considerate than I am.

I gathered that the problem maybe with the driver and followed the instructions at http://arch0njw.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/acer-aspireone-d255-wireless-network-and-kubuntu/ to update the same. Still the network icon in the topbar didn't allow me to connect to any wifi network or show me the wifi networks available. However I could manually start up the wlan0 interface, so that's a start. Turns out the next step is really simple, you need to edit /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and set the manged=false to managed=true