Installing Vectorlinux 6.0 light on Acer Aspire One

In this post I'm going to explain the whole process I followed to install vectorlinux 6.0 light on my AAO. One of the trickiest things is AAO doesn't have CD reader, so you have to manage everything through USB ports unless you have an external cd-reader.

Getting rid of Linpus

So you have a brand new AAO with our sucky linpus or WinXP (huh...). You probably want to have separate partitions for your root and /home directories, so we must have some partitions half ready for the installation. If you have 2 usb's
saf

Partitioning and installing
At the moment, I have vl standard and arch linux with a 1Gb swap partition and a 90Gb partition for home.

I've decided to replace vectorlinux standard for vl light. As I already have the partitioning, the installation will be pretty straight (I hope).
Time now -> 16:50

Getting vectorlinux light iso
To install vl from our archlinux partition we need mainly 2 things, the iso and vinstall-iso script.

To get the iso just open a terminal and type

wget http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/veclinux-6.0/iso-release/VL6.0-Light-Final.iso

It's the same as browsing to http://vectorlinux.com/downloads and downloading the iso with your favourite browser.

vinstall-iso is the script that will allow us to install vl without any extra media (usb keys, cd...). The script is in the iso. We could mount it as a loop device and extract, but as we still have some time (the iso is just at its 21%) we'll gonna get it from somewhere.

googling for vinstall-iso leads us some results, one being from uelsk8s (vl dev) home directory @ vectorlinux servers. We can trust this file :)

wget http://vectorlinux.osuosl.org/Uelsk8s/iso-test/vinstall-iso

I placed both files in the archlinux partition, because we'll need them accessible from the other partition.

install

Time now -> 17:28

Let's install!
Reboot into the other live system you have. If you are installing from a bootable usb, you may have the iso into another usb key.

In archlinux, log in as root and

chmod +x vinstall-iso
./vinstall-iso VL6.0-Light-Final.iso

I got an error :

     mount: could not find any device /dev/loop#

This got fixed executing (as root)

modprobe loop

Back to the installation.

- In the first menu, I don't need to do any partition change so I choose directly to INSTALL , if you need to repartition that's the moment to select FDISK.

- Select SWAP . I usually bypass checking media (too slow for my impatience)
Usually you only have a swap partition, so chose what's by default

- Root partiton. I only give 5 gb to root partition. I don't need much software.
Filesystem: xfs . I usually choose reiserfs, but heard good things about xfs. Let's try it then ;)

- Optional partitions:
/home . I have a separate partition for /home
DONE

- Optional packages:
Serve yourself

Time now -> 17:48
...

Time now -> 18:02
When Vectorlinux tries to install lilo, it does not see archlinux partition, so I didn't install lilo. (I prefer to touch grubs menu.lst than lilo configs)

Reboot

Configuration

Configuration is pretty straightforward. Just select desired options.

Select 1024x600 resolution

Reboot

Time now -> 18:09 (it's getting fast)

Performance

Now we have a functional vl-light.

Wifi is working great sofar (there's no led, but it works).

Let's look at some numbers.

100Mb ram with a fully functional desktop. It's not bad :D

Booting goes around 30 seconds.