Some of you may know I bought myself an EeePC 701 the other day. If you didn’t know that you do now. I love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. Got it?
I had a choice of the XP or Linux version, I grabbed a black Linux one and messed about with it in the car on the way home ( I wasn’t driving ). It had a built in webcam and microphone, both good quality, handy as I want to stay in touch online with my folks back home. No wires trailing around all over the place. I gave the default Xandros install a try for about an hour, but it wasn’t for me. I even tried switching off the Simple Mode to get to a full KDE desktop but again, it wasn’t for me. Mostly because I don’t really like KDE.
Anyway I wanted to fire Ubuntu 8.04 on to it, because, well, I did. From reading a few installation tips it seemed like this would be quite hard, with some hardware not working straight away, like the webcam, wireless and the microphone. Lot’s of these scare stories didn’t come to pass at all. Here’s the steps I took, it was pretty easy. This list is an amalgamation of many different instructions, this combination I found to be the easiest for me, however I make no guarantee that it will work for anyone else! So be careful.
- Download Ubuntu 8.04 Live CD. (Link)
- Download Unetbootin (Link)
- Insert USB Stick
- Use Unetbootin to create a bootable 8.04 USB Stick (Instructions)
- Boot EeePC into USB Stick
- Install 8.04 (I used one big EXT2 partition with no swap)
- Restart (Hopefully into Ubuntu!)
- Go Online with Ethernet card (Wireless won’t work yet)
- Go to http://eee.ricey.co.uk/ and download his great script.
- Make it executable (Right click on icon, Permissions, Allow Executing File as Program)
- Run it in the terminal and let it do it’s thing.
- Voila
That’s all I did and I have a great working Ubuntu EeePC!
There are still a few things you may want to do like enabling CPU scaling to help it stay cool. There are a whole heap on online instruction manuals to help you, many in more detail than this. I just found that this worked well for me. Good Luck.
More Help :
Netpatia (Ubuntu on a USB Stick, Ubuntu EEE Pc Hardware Support)
Hi,
I did the exact same as you did to install Ubuntu on my EeePC701, but the webcam still doesn’t work with Ekiga, Cheese or VLC.
How did you manage to get it working?
Thanks from Argentina!
Martín.
Hey Martin,
If you’ve done all that and it’s still not working the only other thing I can think of is to check your BIOS settings.
When you first turn on your Eee PC, press F2. Then go to “Advanced”, then “Onboard Devices Configuration” and make sure “Onboard Camera” is enabled.
Hope this helps you!
Phil
Hi Phil!
Great news! I followed you advice on the BIOS settings and indeed, for some odd reason, the Ubuntu installation disabled my webcam….
Anyway, I’ve just tested it, and its working perfectly!!!
Thank you very much for your time!
Best regards from the South of the World!
Martín.
Thanks for this, just used your method to overwrite the specialised Ubuntu Eee. Hardly anything worked on that though – this is much simpler and just about everything works!
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