The latest Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex, was released yesterday. We will overview in this article how to install that lovely operating system on an EeeBox.

Installation

Here are the steps to follow in order to install Ubuntu 8.10 on your EeeBox:

• You have to download the .iso file from the official site.
• You can create a Live Linux USB easily from the .iso file following our guide.
• After booting Ubuntu from the USB pendrive on your eeebox, you will find an install icon on the desktop.

The installation program will ask you for the standard questions (Language, keyboard, timezone) and then the partitioning part.
You can use free space on the windows partition, erase the whole disk, or make a custom partitioning.

Eeebox’s disk partitioning for Ubuntu

As you can see on the picture, I did already install Mandriva 2009 on this EeeBox. Ubuntu recognized it and prefered that open source neighbour…
I just had to drag the marker to set the allocated size for both.
You will be asked if you want to import your windows documents and profiles, and Ubuntu will complete the process.

Making the wireless adapter work

Ubuntu 8.10 did not recognized the EeeBox’s wireless adapter out of the box. It is not hard to install it, we will go through that process.

I have regrouped all the files you need in this archive.
1) You have to install ndiswrapper first. The folder wireless in the archive contains two files, ndiswrapper-common_1.43-1ubuntu2_all.deb and ndiswrapper-utils-1.9_1.43-1ubuntu2_i386.deb.

They can be installed easily, by double clicking on them and providing your administration password (the password from your main account).

You just have to click on Install Package.

Installing the ndiswrapper package

2) Open the terminal (Applications/Accessories/Terminal). We will first get to the folder with the driver. For example, if you have unpacked the file on the desktop, you can type:
cd Desktop/wireless

Now we will load the drivers with ndiswrapper (you can copy and paste all of the commands):

sudo ndiswrapper -i rt2860.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -m

Note: My EeeBox came with an Azurewave wireless adapter based on the RaLink rt2860 chipset. If your EeeBox came with a different adapter, you can find the windows drivers on the CD-Rom provided by Asus and load them in the same way.

To complete the installation, run the following commands in the terminal:

• echo -e ‘auto lo\niface lo inet loopback\n’ | sudo tee /etc/network/interfaces
• sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
• echo ‘ndiswrapper’ | sudo tee -a /etc/modules
• sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

The wireless connectivity should work now.

I have encountered a bug with WPA. For some reason Ubuntu did not store the PSK (Pre-shared key) in plain text, but in Hex, so I had to enter the key again at every boot. You can fix this by running the command:
sudo gedit /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

You have to add the following text in that file (modify the SSID and PSK in the bolded area with yours):

network={
ssid=”YourNetworksName”
proto=WPA
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=TKIP
group=TKIP
psk=”YourKey”
}

The next system update will install the latest version of ndiswrapper on your eeebox.
Ubuntu did recognize the rest of the EeeBox hardware well, it matched the resolution with my 22″ monitor (1680×1050).