Some time ago I bought a Lenovo s10-3t netbook which has a capacitive touch-screen and thus should be able to understand multitouch. Additionally the lid can be rotated and the netbook can then be used as a (rather heavy) tablet. Seems like a nice toy! What I actually want to advertise is the possibility of installing Android on the s10-3t and how to make it comfortable to access the different operating systems, and I can give some insight into the interior of the netbook as I opened it just recently and took some pictures with my smartphone.
The netbook came with Windows 7 Basic (?) preinstalled which survived only 5 minutes. I instantly emptied the hard disk playing around with different Linux distributions (Ubuntu, MeeGo, Mint, Mandriva). Several distributions because I was desperately looking for good multitouch support (out-of-the-box). But this wasn’t a question of distribution rather a question of time. Nowadays, at least within Gnome, you can use the Multitouch quite well if you know how. I was a bit disappointed when the end of MeeGo was announced, I really liked the light-weight system, and it seemed to me more free than I would think of Android as a free distribution. But this is no opinion I did a lot of investigations for and btw, also in the development of MeeGo, at least one large company – Nokia – was involved. But as the s10-3t still is only a netbook with
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz
processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz
and 2GB of RAM a light OS is very favourable, especially if it is configurable and extendable as MeeGo promised to be. Windows allows me to do all the fancy multitouching stuff but it is no good netbook OS, it’s too heavy. Basically also a full grown linux with KDE as the desktop environment is rather heavy, but I’m simply used to that, so Kubuntu stays on the machine.
I am going to present my partitioning and to show you how I configured grub.
My partitioning
Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 Köpfe, 63 Sektoren/Spur, 30401 Zylinder, zusammen 488397168 Sektoren
Einheiten = Sektoren von 1 × 512 = 512 Bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Festplattenidentifikation: 0x0000ad94
Gerät boot. Anfang Ende Blöcke Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 206848 24578047 12185600 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 24580094 488394751 231907329 5 Erweiterte
/dev/sda5 24580096 44109823 9764864 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 44111872 83171327 19529728 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 83173376 102703103 9764864 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 102705152 106608639 1951744 82 Linux Swap / Solaris
/dev/sda9 106610688 488394751 190892032 83 Linux
sda1 and sda2 are used for Windows. sda5 is my linux root partition, I have an extra /usr partition on sda6, sda9 contains my /home, on sda7 I have installed Android.
Multiboot Windows, Ubuntu and Android
According to my old conventions, I first did the partitioning, then installed Windows and afterwards Ubuntu. Then grub was correctly set up. A bit later I installed Android (taken from http://www.android-x86.org/) on /dev/sda7. To make it appear in Grub I modified /etc/grub/40_custom in a way that it contains:
menuentry "Android" {
set root='(hd0,msdos7)'
linux /android_exp/kernel quiet root=/dev/ram0 androidboot.hardware=s103t SRC=/android_exp SDCARD=/data/sdcard.img
initrd /android_exp/initrd.img
}
In the grub manual (grub and the corresponding manual entry) you can read how to use the special power on key (the one above the ESC key) to start a specific operating system. Therefore you need to find the BUTTON_CMOS_ADDRESS which for the s10-3t is 57:4. The corresponding entries in my /etc/default/grub are:
GRUB_BUTTON_CMOS_ADDRESS="57:4"
# if the special button was pressed change DEFAULT to android
GRUB_DEFAULT_BUTTON='Android'
GRUB_TIMEOUT_BUTTON=1
With this the main power button starts into Ubuntu and the small one into Android, only for Windows (which I only installed for a known problem with the wifi) I need to go into the grub os chooser menu.
Interior
I had to open my netbook, as suddenly both WIFI and battery did not work anymore, also the VGA out was down. Opening helped as some contacts were loose (who knows why…). I fixed it and I hope now it works again. Here are some pictures, so you have an idea if you run in to the same problems:
