Now that’s more like it 
Hi Mark, finally! Just managed to switch OS to Peppermint, already loving it!
Just 2 questions (and here we start, I hear you sigh…): How do I see the memory status of ssd and left sd card (not what’s in it, but the free/used memory).
Also, there are quite few commands to run for the optimal setup (skype, fan, etc), I’d like to save everything as it is now to save me from having to do it again in future. Is there a good program to do a full backup of the system on a usb drive? Can I use the directions you gave me long time ago on how to do it for the Linpus (don’t know where they are, have to search through the topics now)?
Also, the Fn commands are working for the brightness, but not for the volume (no icon coming up), is it normal?
Thanks in advance, Mark, you’re the greatest, as usual!!!
Hi andrea,
Sorry for jumping in (I hope Mark doesn’t mind!)
To see a list of drive space for all mounted drives you can run;
df -h
This will show total size, amount used and what’s available.
As for doing a backup there a number of ways of doing this. I recommend CloneZilla. The easiest way is to use their Live CD/DVD or a system which includes CloneZilla, such as partedmagic.
Another option is to use the ‘dd’ command. With this you can either create a clone of your hard drive by running;
dd if=dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
‘if’ and ‘of’ are the input and output variables with hard drive ‘sda’ being cloned to hard drive ‘sdb’. You must ensure that the output hard drive, in this case ‘sdb’, is either the same or larger in capacity. You can’t clone a 40GB drive onto a 20GB drive.
You can also use ‘dd’ to create an image of your drive by running;
dd if=/dev/sda of=~/disk1.img
You can then compress the image using your favourite compression, ie gzip, bzip.
This saves space but will take a long time, varying on the size of hard drive.
To restore from an image, after uncompressing, run;
dd if=disk1.img of=/dev/sda
If you don’t fancy making a complete copy of your OS you can make a backup list of all your installed packages. This way on a clean install you can run the list through your package manager and it will install all the applications.
To create the backup run;
dpkg -get-selections > installed-software.log
And then to restore on a new system run;
dpkg -set-selections < installed.software.log
apt-get dselect-upgrade
I hope this helps! Any problems let us know.
Thank you, Glitch, much appreciated, and nice to ‘meet’ you, so to speak. Hope I won’t drive you mad with my Linux misadventures as I did with Mark, lol.
I used the “df -h” command, it’s all good. It’s there a command to see the ram available (I fitted an extra 1GB ram, just curious to see if peppermint is seeing it)?
Also, I mentioned the volume controls (Fn key + arrows), for some reason the brightness icon/meter shows up, but the volume ones don’t. Any reason why, or command to make it work? Thanks a lot, and all the best.
OK …
Free space on SSD and SDcard - When you open the file manager (menu>File Manager), the free space on the SSD will be displayed at the bottom of the file manager window in this format:-
Free space: 2.2GB(Total: 6.4GB)
Now still in the file manager, click on your SDcard in the left hand panel (so you can see it’s contents) … the free space of the SDcard should now be at the bottom.
Saving to USB - the only way I can think of to do this would be to use something like Clonezilla to clone the SSD to an image on the USB stick … but as this would entail having 2 USB sticks (one for the image, and one for use as a bootable Clonezilla LiveUSB), then creating the image, then when you need to reinstall, booting to the Clonezilla LiveUSB, and reinstalling from the image … I’m not sure it would save you much time and effort.
The Fn + Up/Down arrow keys should work for volume ??? … nothing is displayed to screen, but the volume should go up/down.
(use the volume panel applet to set the volume to 100% … then hit Fn+down arrow … now check the volume slider again … it should have gone down)
If your problem is … the volume doesn’t seem to go loud enough … let me know and I’ll post instructions to install pulsaudio and pavucontrol, where you can increase the playback level.
and here we start, I hear you sigh...
Heh … I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t enjoy it, so I’m more than happy to help where I can 
and the command for checking RAM usage is:
free
Or you could look in the System Monittor which you’ll find at
menu>System Tools>System Monitor
then look on the “Resources” tab
How embarrassing… I actually forgot about just doing that! Shows how much I use my file manager! facepalm
@andrea - Nice to ‘meet’ you too. Glad I could help!
@ glitch
Heh … I also immediately started thinking of command line options, and had typed up a response, then suddenly remembered that
@ andrea987
Can I add something to glitch’s response … if you decide to use dd from the command line, be VERY careful with the syntax … if for example you type if/of (input_file/output_file) in the wrong place it will happily destroy the data on your SSD … take it from one who knows … dd is a very powerful and very handy command line tool, but is also VERY unforgiving if you have a brain laps whilst entering the command.
Though it must also be said, that Clonezilla probably uses the dd command in the background … so again if you select the wrong input and output locations it probably will destroy it too … but it gives you more hints, such as drive sizes etc. and asks you to check your entries multiple times (giving you a chance to correct any mistakes) … dd just does what you told it to do without question.
There’s a reason “dd” is often referred to as an acronym for “Data Destroyer”
Thank you guys, is great having 2 experts on the case! Yay, ram is recognised no problem, don’t know if it makes a difference, though.
I thought of using clonezilla, but the process you described, Mark, does really look much more of an effort than just starting afresh. I might keep your instructions handy, and hope I won’t need them again.
Yes, volume does go up/down pressing fn/arrows but for some reason icon doesn’t come up…strange. One problem with the volume, though, is with Skype, even after following your instructions about the mic, it goes off every now and then. Not just the mic, speakers too! Any ideas why?
And I noticed that battery goes down much quicker than with Linpus, is it due to the slightly larger size of the OS?
Sorry for the trouble and thanks again!!!
Extra memory, will make a difference when you have multiple applications open
Skype … I don’t use it, but you could try installing pulseaudio and see if that helps:
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio pulseaudio-utils pavucontrol
then REBOOT, and test skype.
You may need to go into Skype’s Options>Sound Devices and change the settings to “Pulse Audio server (local)”
Battery … have you installed the Jupiter power manager, and are you manually checking it’s switching to Performance>Power Saving when you remove the power lead ?
And apart from more modern or better security, what is the difference or advantage with PP3 vs PP2? Is it possible PP2 works better with an old clunker like the AA1?
Seems to me there were alot less steps in the installation of 3, did they clean up issues w the AA1?
There’s no real benefit to PM3 over PM2 other than support for Ubuntu 11.04 (so therefore PM2) will end in October, so there will be no updates after that … PM3 on the other hand is based on Ubuntu 12.04 (Long Term Support version) so will receive updates for everything except the Peppermint specific stuff for a full 5 years.
(I can feel a question coming after that last bit )
The PM3 tutorial was slightly shorter because auto login is now offered during the installation rather thaan having to be applied afterwards, there may have been a couple of other things that were easier in PM3 too, I can’t remember.
As to which “works better” there’s little in it … I think PM3 is slightly heavier on system resources (probably due to the switch to gtk3) but if it is, it’s by such a small amount that it’s not noticable … indeed after removing bluetooth and the mint updater (which I replaced with the Ubuntu one) PM3 was actually slightly lighter on RAM at bootup … as I said, there’s little in it, but nor is there any need to rush into a reinstall … PM2 updates will stop in October, but it will be some time before it becomes outdated enough that things stop working, there are a LOT of people still using Peppermint One
Move to Peppermint Three if/when you’re ready.
Well, the LT support is a big deal. But there is there is a Mint updater- can’t Ubuntu repositories just be added to that? Seems losing PM specific updates wouldn’t be healthy.
If PM is so light, might put it on my dying laptop. What percent of resources does it use compared to Ubuntu 10.4? One thing you talked about was writing temp files to RAM-
might that avoid these horrible write delays I have sometimes (also long waits till get “unresponsive script” error. And is that something you must specify on installation?
OK, one part at a time …
But there is there is a Mint updater- can't Ubuntu repositories just be added to that?
Not sure what you mean by that … The Mint Updater (mintupdate) is already the default updater in Peppermint Three, and the Ubuntu 12.04 repos are already in the sources.list … personally I’ve swaped that for the Ubuntu updater, but there’s no real need, they both just use the repos that are defined in the sources.list file.
Seems losing PM specific updates wouldn't be healthy
Nor is it a major problem … if you check what Peppermint gets from the Peppermint specific repo, it aint much, stuff like icons, goffice, gimp3, mintupdate (which I swap out anyway) and a few other things … well they will no longer get updates … but everything else (ie.99.9% of the OS) will get updates for the full 5 years, as it comes from the Ubuntu repos not the Peppermint one.
Think of the Peppermint specific repo as containg just a few “additions” to the Ubuntu repos … those “additions” will stop getting updated after a year, but they should still continue to work … meanwhile the other 99.9% of your OS and software wil continue to be updated for 5 years.
If PM is so light, might put it on my dying laptop. What percent of resources does it use compared to Ubuntu 10.4?
Dunno exactly … I can’t remember what Ubuntu 10.04 used, but Peppermint 3 will be lighter for sure as most of the “weight” of a desktop distro comes from the desktop environment, and LXDE is lighter than the full Gnome, be that Gnome 2 or 3.
One thing you talked about was writing temp files to RAM- might that avoid these horrible write delays I have sometimes (also long waits till get "unresponsive script" error. And is that something you must specify on installation?
This is a bit harder to get a handle on …
If most of your write delays occur whilst you’re browsing the web, then they may be being caused by writes to the web cache … so mounting /tmp in a tmpfs ramdrive, then making your browser write its cache to /tmp probably would help
The downside is you’ll have less RAM available for other tasks … so if your amount of RAM is already bordering on needing to swap out to the swap partition, it will even more … kind of nullifying any gains.
So a ramdrive isn’t going to help unless you have plenty of RAM to spare … I wouldn’t bother messing with ramdrives with the AA1’s default 512MB RAM.
Easiest solution would be to get a better SSD and/or more RAM
In answer to the last part … you can set up the tmpfs and mount /tmp to it AFTER installation … so I guess the answer is NO, it doesn’t NEED to be set up during installation.
Many thanks Mark from a grateful AAO ZG5 user who needed an alternative to Ubuntu after maverick expired, one of the first things I did was get rid of linpus for ubuntu and it took months to get it totally right on jaunty with various bugs. The prospects of upgrading to a unity desktop which I couldn’t disable easily as I did with Meerkat meant my old NetBook was gathering dust until I saw this thread.
All setup and working fine in about an hour, thanks to you there’s life in the old NetBook dog yet.
If you’re ever in the Croydon area I owe you a pint!
You’re more than welcome
I’m glad it helped, and it’s nice to hear from people that found it useful … so thanks for taking the time to let me know.
Oh, and welcome to the forum.
One good turn deserves another I say!
It might have been rather quicker than many not only from my past experience seeing all the very familiar terminal commands with jaunty, koala and maverick but its got 1.5 gb ram and the super talent 32gb SSD upgrade. I did have some problems with data corruption with the upgraded drive which meant I had to zero to fix (Bug 574462: udisks-probe-ata-smart causes HSM violations) but I did get an email a while back saying it was fixed in the kernel finally (after almost two years!)
If I get any more issues I know where to go first.
Cheers again and I’ll send this link out to a couple of friends who are ZG5 owners.
Yeh, I think it’s time I upgraded the SSD (default one being very slow), RAM is already maxed.
A lot of people have said the super Talent SSD’s are quicker and don’t suffer the write delays that freeze the AA1 for a few seconds occasionally … so I’ve been planning it for a while, though I was also toying with the idea of a 1.8" ZIF PATA (IDE) hard drive (as used in the early iPods etc.), but I prefer the SSD route for a netbook.
Yup you’re more than welcome to bring issues/info here, the more the merrier, so pass that on
[EDIT]
I’d be interested to know if after using Peppermint for a while, you’d let us know if your Super Talent SSD/Peppermint Three suffers from the occasional freeze for a few seconds (where that SSD activity light is permanently on) … any chance you can let us know ?
[EDIT 2]
Interesting bug report … I think I’ll have a look at hdparm and SMART probing and see if they’re still relevant to the occasional short freeze (or if it’s just the standard SSD as I suspected) … cheers for that
Don’t get me wrong, the freezes aren’t show stoppers, it just seems that for a few seconds every now and again there s some serious I/O occurring on the SSD … up till now I’d just considered it the fault of the default SSD being known to be slow … but you’ve got me thinking ???
I don’t have to wait to tell you those hangs you get with the original SSD are history with the super talent drive, I didn’t experience it with any of the Ubuntu distros when I threw the stock drive out on Jaunty and I don’t expect it to happen with this either. It was dead simple to install as its designed specifically for the AAO so no fiddling around with ZIF’s inside. It made it so quick that win 7 32 bit was actually useable though in comparison Ubuntu ran like a quad core Xeon so it didn’t stay on very long!
If I run into any problems ill be back…
Cheers for that … I’ll not bother looking at hdparm and SMART probing then, seems I was right all along it’s just the default rubbish SSD that comes with the AA1
If you thought Ubuntu was quick, Peppermint should be like greased lightning
No need to look - that bug was purely an issue when I upgraded the SSD, but in the bug thread before they patched the kernel there were a few workarounds which seemed to stop it trashing the drive any more, though I’d get the occasional fsck at boot.
I wouldn’t bother trying to attempt to try and alleviate the problems with the original SSD as its the hardware itself that’s the problem. The words Polish and turd spring to mind