A friend of mine was complaining that his Asus Eee 1015BX is running too slow with Windows 7 Starter that came pre-installed with the laptop. It's no wonder that Windows is slow, because the laptop has only 1GB of memory. As a great (Ubuntu) Linux evangelist, I wanted to help the poor guy and give him a chance to test Ubuntu without any risks.
Because Ubuntu would probably be too heavy for such low end hardware, I thought that Xubuntu would serve better. I didn't want to change anything on the laptop. I just wanted to offer the Ubuntu experience without any risks. I decided that the best way to achieve this would be to install Xubuntu on USB disk.
To install Xubuntu on USB disk, you need installation media. Well, this laptop has only two USB ports (of course also LAN), so I cannot use DVD as in my previous installations. First problem was to create Xubuntu installation media. For some reason Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator doesn't allow user to create bootable USB stick from Xubuntu ISO image. Luckily there's an alternative, UNetbootin, which worked perfectly.
Next step was to run the installation software. You cannot set Eee's BIOS to boot from USB, but you can hit escape key during start-up to change booting options. After I got Eee to boot from USB, I inserted another USB stick, which would serve as the installation target media.
I'm not going through the details step-by-step, because installer is quite easy to use. I created /, /boot and /home partitions and no swap. It's important to notice that you shouldn't use USB stick to store a swap partition. Firstly, swap on USB is slow and secondly, it will - according to internet discussions - destroy your USB stick after some time. Installation took a lot of time, almost an hour. It would never take that long on a hard drive.
After the installation, there's some things you can do to optimise the speed of the system and the lifetime of the USB drive. Here's what I did.
Edit /etc/fstab. Add noatime flag to / and /home to avoid updating access times on files. This should speed things up and help to avoid extra wearing of the USB stick. Here's an example.
# / was on /dev/sdb5 during installation
UUID=ae7eb15f-a65b-4e2b-a008-20a2b41ce72a / ext4 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /boot was on /dev/sdb1 during installation
UUID=190d4960-d773-451f-bbb3-b1a8bd39238b /boot ext4 defaults 0 2
# /home was on /dev/sdb6 during installation
UUID=2fb3fc52-6155-4fdf-89f5-d991bca484fc /home ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
Disable mlocate so that it won't re-index the whole disk every day.
sudo chmod -x /etc/cron.daily/mlocate
Disable journaling from / and /home (you need to do these in single user mode or by starting Linux from some other media like the USB stick containing installation media, because the partitions cannot be mounted during the operation). By disabling journaling, you may end up with corrupted file system if the system crashes. On the other hand, you reduce the number of writes on the USB drive which should make things faster and prolong the lifetime of USB drive.
sudo tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdb5
sudo tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdb6
By the way, you can also prepare the drives already beforehand and format the partitions for ext4 without journaling with the following command. I did this after my first installation attempt, because I hoped it would speed up the slow installation process (I'm not sure did it help).
sudo mke2fs -t ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/sdb6
After editing the file system parameters, it's a good idea to check that the file system is ok (-f for forcing the check)
sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdb5
sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdb6
Here's what I learned from all of this. Xubuntu is much much faster than Windows 7 on the Asus Eee. That was no surprise. All the hardware worked properly. After installing the proprietary AMD display drivers, battery consumption went down and battery life is at least as good as on Windows. Although it takes some time to install Xubuntu from USB to USB, it's a very good way to make a test drive with Xubuntu. You don't risk anything and user can always go back to Windows without any extra hassle.
Although Xubuntu worked well, my USB stick didn't. I bought a tiny Kingston 32GB Datatraveller Micro to serve as installation target media. The Datatraveller Micro is so small that you can carry it attached to the laptop all the time. Unfortunately, it's also slow making Xubuntu work very slowly during disk intensive operations. I compared the write speed of Datatraveller Micro to Datatraveller 100 on USB 2 port. Datatraveller Micro's write speed was only 6MB/s whereas Datatraveller 100's write speed was 22MB/s. Although the physical dimensions of Datatraveller Micro are perfect for running laptop Linux from it, the speed of the drive makes it questionable for this purpose.
This story may have a happy ending, because it seems that Ubuntu is getting yet another happy user in the very near future (after I install Xubuntu on Eee's hard drive)!
