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I got one of those Eee PC 901s – the 20 GB model with Linux pre-installed.

Short story:

I decided to install Ubuntu on it rather than the pre-installed Xandros Linux. But I am unable to re-mount a USB stick, which rather limits its usability.

After struggling with this for several days, finding a number of folks are having similar issues, but no one quite had a solution that made sense, I figured out a very simple solution and present it thus to anyone experiencing the same problem.

Edit /etc/fstab and comment out this line:

/dev/sdc1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

How do you do this, if you’re clueless as I? Easy:

1. From the Applications menu, choose the Accessories sub-menu and select Terminal.
   This will open up a terminal window.

2. Type: sudo gedit /etc/fstab
3. “Sudo” is Linux for “please”. It allows you to do things you don’t normally have permission to do. Sudo will ask you for your login password – type it in.
4. GEdit is Gnome’s text editor. Change the line
   /dev/sdc1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0
   to
   #/dev/sdc1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

5. From the File menu, choose Save.
6. From the File menu, choose Quit.

Now your USB stick should mount automatically when inserted.

***

Long story:

Why the Eee PC? It’s a 1 kilogram notebook with 5+ hour battery life. For $600 (or cheaper if you are okay with less storage).

Why the Linux version? For work, I carry around a Dell XPS M1710 that weighs 4 kilograms (5 with the power brick), is a 17″ widescreen monster, and gets just over an hour on its battery. It is a portable multi-track audio/video editing and encoding station, which is great for hardcore work, but it’s a bit of overkill most of the time when I’m at on the road or a meeting, or for most personal purposes.

It’s a work machine, so I shouldn’t be using it for personal purposes anyway. But most of my personal needs can be met with a web browser, a text editor, Perl, and a few cross-platform, open source applications (OpenOffice.org, The GIMP, Audacity, LAME, VLC). I need to my desktop computer to do real audio work, but everything else could be done on a cheap, small, fast notebook.

I’m not a big fan of Windows. Windows became reasonably stable and usable with XP SP 2, but there are still too many silly annoyances – the biggest being it’s not a Mac. I’ve been a Mac guy since the early 1990′s, and the MacBook Air is a gorgeous machine, but it costs three times as much as the Eee PC. And the smallest regular MacBook is about twice the weight and more than twice the price.

The Eee PC 901 is a nice combination of size, weight, battery life, and price. It has a decent size screen and 20 GB of solid state storage, with a SD card reader and three USB ports. The Linux version means I don’t have to use Windows, and I get to learn more about Linux. What could possibly go wrong?

Out of the box, it worked pretty well. I was able to get it on a Wi-Fi network very quickly and was on the web with Firefox within minutes. The Xandros interface is dirt simple, which is a bit of a double-edged sword – it’s easy to use, but all the Linux-y bits are hidden away if you want to do much other than what’s pre-installed. I figured I would be installing a different Linux distribution on it eventually, but decided to do it right away when I got hit with what seems to be a common but – the File Manager icon disappeared within a few minutes.

So I downloaded an Ubuntu 8.04 live CD that was supposedly optimized for the Eee PC, moved it on to a USB stick (no optical drive on the 901), booted up the Eee PC on it, and installed. Easy peasy, rice and cheesy. I even re-partitioned the two internal SSDs in a more sensible manner.

Of course, the wireless card that Asus uses is a little wacky and isn’t supported by Ubuntu. So I found some instructions on how to download and install a driver for it. I don’t know what the heck I’m doing, but the instructions seem good and it starts out well.

But then something bad happened. The USB stick that I have the Ubuntu live CD on, and from which I’m trying to install the make tools to build the drivers, wouldn’t mount. It mounts the first time I put it in a particular USB port, but the second (and subsequent) times. It gives me an annoying “invalid option” error. If I can’t get a USB stick mounted, I can’t get files on and off, and I don’t have a chance of getting the wireless drivers installed. The computer in this state is essentially useless.

This is bad. Linux fanboys can get preachy about their operating system of choice and the virtues of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). It’s all good on paper, and the OS is technically superior to Windows, but the fact of the matter is that for the most part, Windows works. It comes pre-installed on most computers, and you can turn on and do most of the things you probably need to do without having to dig around in the registry or building drivers. Windows fanboys get to point at Linux and say “it can’t even use a USB stick!”

The Mac is a great solution – you get the Unix underpinning, with a UI layer that not only works, but works very well. You get all the power without practically needing to know how to build an OS by hand. And you can run Windows on it if you really need to. My next work laptop will be a MacBook Pro.

I don’t know enough about how Linux works to figure out how to fix my problem. Sooo, off to the web. Google is our friend.

Unfortunately, while lots of other folks seem to be having similar problems, I am not finding any solutions that seem to work. And no one is explaining what is going on. Lots of assumptions that everyone knows everything about Linux already, despite the “I’m a newbie” pleas in the posts (and the fact that if everyone already knew everything about Linux, no one would be having this problem).

The Linux literature I have seen makes similar assumptions. Unix and its Linux variants have good built-in command documentation, but there isn’t much information about how everything actually works. There are folks out there who know this stuff, but I have no idea how they learn it. I suspect it’s largely from fumbling around with it as I have been.

Anyway, I eventually find a helpful post that explains in better detail than most how mounting volumes works.

By inserting the USB stick and using the dmesg command, I could tell it was trying to use /etc/sdc1 for the USB port/stick, and then I could manually mount it to a mount point I created:

$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /mnt/usb

The default /etc/fstab file included a /dev/sdc1 device, for the CD-ROM drive:

/dev/sdc1 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

It seems to be trying to mount the USB stick as a CD-ROM drive. I changed the line to:

/dev/sdc1 /mnt/usb auto user 0 0

and suddenly it works. But it doesn’t mount the USB stick to /mnt/usb. And dmesg says the USB stick then is mounting as /dev/ssd1.

I don’t fully understand it, but that’s fine. It works. I can mount, unmount, and re-mount the USB stick as much as I want.

Now on to getting the make tools and the wireless drivers installed…