Installation of MeeGo on notebook

Revision as of 05:50, 5 March 2011

This page lists down installation steps followed for Toshiba Satellite U305-S5077, Dell Latitude E6400, Wipro WNB7PBC4830R. The systems had Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows installed prior to MeeGo installation (MeeGo was installed as 3rd OS)

General MeeGo installation steps can be found in http://meego.com/downloads/releases/1.1/meego-v1.1-netbooks. This page focusses on some troubleshooting steps for installing MeeGo on laptops and assumes that the reader is familiar with general MeeGo installation steps illustrated in http://meego.com/downloads/releases/1.1/meego-v1.1-netbooks.

Creating the installation medium

1. Download the live image from http://meego.com/downloads/releases/netbook or http://repo.meego.com. It could be a stable release or a development release.
2. If burning to a USB stick, byte copy the image to the USB stick. Linux users, you can use 'dd' for this. Windows users, download and use Win32DiskImager program for this.
3. Some laptops do not recognize this image burned on a USB stick as a USB drive during boot. The reason is that some BIOSes have a size above which a USB disk is not recognized as a USB disk. Usually it is 500MB, but in some cases it is higher. One specific case is the Wipro BC4830R model laptop with Intel i3 processor. In this case, the laptop recognizes the disk as a floppy disk and cannot boot using the USB disk.
4. To overcome the issue in step 3, write the downloaded image to a DVD. Linux users can use Brasero to burn the image to a DVD, Windows users can use ImgBurn.
5. Some laptops do not boot well when the image is burned to a DVD-RW. They seem to have some issue booting from such a DVD. Case in point is the Wipro BC4830R model. So, to be on the safe side, write the image to a DVD-R disk.
6. Be warned that booting and installing from DVD is much slower compared to booting and installing from USB disk.

Preparing your laptop for the installation

If you are installing on a clean laptop which has no other OS, skip this section and proceed to the next section

1. If you want to install MeeGo alongside Windows, follow these steps. If you already have free space of at least 4GB on your disk (not free space in a partition but free space on the disk), skip the following steps on partitioning. If you do not have free space of 4GB on the disk, use the following steps to create free space.
   1. If you do not have Windows 7 or Windows Vista installation / rescue disk, create a GParted live CD first. Download the GParted live CD image and burn to a CD. Defrag your hard disk.
   2. Boot from the GParted Live CD now and use it to resize an existing partition to gain at least 4GB free space.
   3. If you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista installation / rescue disk, boot using the installation / rescue disk, choose the rescue option and choose to enter at command prompt.
   4. At the command prompt, use the DISKPART command and resize the partition that you want to shrink and gain space from. Use the command 'shrink querymax' to see how much space you can gain.
   5. If you want 4GB space, use the command 'shrink desired=4096'
2. If you want to install MeeGo alongside Linux (such as Ubuntu), and do not have free space, use GParted to reclaim space as outlined above in step 1.

Installing Meego

Now that you have the required free space, let's install Meego.

1. Insert the USB disk / DVD-R and boot the system.
2. Follow the instructions on screen. It is better to follow defaults and create 3 partitions for /boot, / and swap as suggested by installation steps.
3. On one laptop, in which root file system which was formatted as btrfs failed after some days. It was reinstalled with root file system as ext3.
4. At the end of installation, Meego will ask which OS you want as default if another OS is installed. Any choice you make here is immaterial as you will have to manually edit the boot configuration file to get the correct choice.
5. Reboot the system. If MeeGo is your only OS, proceed to the next section. If you have another OS and want to dual boot properly, see the following steps.
6. You will notice that even if you chose another system as the default, Meego boots automatically without showing any choice.
7. Boot into Meego. Launch the 'terminal' application and execute the following commands:
   1. sudo su
   2. Enter password when prompted
   3. gedit /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf&
8. In this file, make the following modifications:
   1. The line where it says timeout, change the timeout value to 100. This gives you 10 seconds to choose an OS.
   2. The line where it says ontimeout meego, change it to ontimeout <labelname of other os> if you want to boot other OS on timeout
   3. Under the section 'label meego', remove the line 'menu default' and add 'menu default' to other OS entry if you want other OS to be highlighted by default
9. That is it, save the file and reboot. You should see boot options correctly now.
10. Boot into Meego and other OS to make sure that you are able to dual boot fine.
11. In some cases where Windows is the other OS, if you choose to boot Windows, you will get a message that bootloader cannot be found. It could just be that Windows is on another volume and not the volume that Meego thought it was. Under the section for Windows in extlinux.conf, you will find a line 'append boot 1'. Try and change that to 2 or 3 and see if Windows boots. This happened with a Toshiba Satellite and setting it to 2 worked.

Using another bootloader

1. If you have already installed Ubuntu on your system or another Linux OS and want to use the bootloader of that OS, the bad news is that Meego will overwrite it. The good news is that you can fix this.
2. If you have Ubuntu already installed, chances are that you are using GRUB or GRUB2. Use the Ubuntu installation CD (desktop or alternate) to boot, choose to rescue a broken system.
3. You will get an option to reinstall GRUB / GRUB2. Choose this option and GRUB will be reinstalled and it will also add an entry for Meego. This entry though will show up as 'Unknown Linux'.
4. If you were already booting Windows along with Ubuntu using GRUB, reinstalling GRUB will give you the option to boot Windows, Ubuntu and Meego. This has been tried and tested successfully on Wipro BC4830R laptop.
5. If you wish to use the boot loader that comes with Windows Vista and Windows 7 (and later), please see Using MeeGo with the Windows 7 Boot Loader.

Wireless Drivers

1. Some laptops come with Broadcom wireless cards (Dell Latitude E6400) and some come with RealTek RTL 8192 (8191SE) wireless cards. These wireless cards do not work out of the box. You will need to use wired connection till you can get your wireless working. Follow these instructions to get your wireless working.
2. For Broadcom cards, use Slaine's instructions from the site: http://slaine.org/_slaine/Meego_1.0_Wifi.html
3. For RealTek RTL 8192 (8191SE) cards, follow these instructions.
   1. Download the driver source code from RealTek's site: http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?id=1&PNid=21&PFid=48&Level=5&Conn=4&ProdID=226&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false&Downloads=true
   2. If that link does not work, go to www.realtek.co.tw, choose the product 'Communication Network ICs', choose the sub product Wireless LAN IC, WLAN NIC, IEEE802.11 b/g/n single chip. Go to the download section and download the relevant source for your card.
   3. To determine your card, run the command 'lspci' in the console.
   4. Once the source is downloaded, unpack the contents to a folder.
   5. Download and install gcc, make and kernel-netbook-devel from software catalogs. You may have to enable the source catalogs to install kernel-netbook-devel.
   6. Open terminal and execute the following commands:
      • sudo su (enter password when prompted)
      • cd /[path to folder where realtek source was unpacked]
      • make
      • make install
      • Reboot your machine and wireless should be working

Other information

On all the laptops (Wipro BC4830R, Dell E6400 Latitude, Toshiba Satellite U305-S5077), devices such as integrated webcam, bluetooth, mike etc worked out of the box. On the Wipro laptop, the wireless key (Fn+F10) had no effect on wireless state (it was always on) though the keys for camera, Bluetooth worked