Test Drive: Linux Mint 16 “Petra” on the EEEPC

With the end of November the latest Linux Mint distribution release has arrived. Even I haven't got Mint installed on any of my computers anymore I decided to give it a look to see how it behaves, at least running live, on the EEEPC. I so downloaded Mint 16, the version shipped with Cinnamon 2.0, and prepared a USB disk using Unetbootin.

First impressions

The system started with reasonable speed and booted into the (good) old fashioned view of the Cinnamon desktop.

Mint 16 behaves smoothly enough and is responsive even on the EEEPC 900 limited resources.

More Mint 12 tuning on the EEEPC 900

After installing Linux Mint 12 on the EEEPC and fixing some immediate post installation issues my netbook has been working fine in all but one last thing. When running on battery power the EEEPC often warned the battery being near to full discharge. Sometimes the computer went in automatic power off even with the battery almost fully charged.

It's no new that the early EEEPCs battery aren't properly recognized on most of Linux distributions. That's because of the buggy way EEEPC BIOS handles ACPI, I noticed it since I first installed Ubuntu years ago, but it usually never been a problem apart from some meaningless estimation of the battery duration.

Linux Mint (on the EEEPC): fixing some post-installation issues

The installation (upgrade) of Linux Mint 12 on my EEEPC left the system with some little problem to be solved together with many applications that had to be reinstalled. Not all of these problems are Mint-specific since one, at least, hat its solution reported on a Ubuntu forum. And I'm not also sure if these problems appears after upgrading from Ubuntu to Mint 12 or after a fresh installation too. By the way all have been solved with a couple of shell commands. I spent more time looking for solutions than executing them, so I hope it might be useful to have them all in the same page.

Missing Windows boot option

The first thing I noticed once I rebooted the EEEPC just after installing Linux Mint was that the Windows boot opting was missing from the Grub boot menu. After a brief looking for it in the 'net I did find on Mint forum a couple of commands to solve it:

sudo os-prober

sudo update-grub