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wigout2
August 20th, 2014, 04:26 PM
Hello all-

I use Ubuntu 12.04 at home and am comfortable with it.

I have a laptop Acer Aspire Timeline 1810T-8638 Core 2 Duo SU7300 - 4 GB RAM with detailed specs at the bottom of the post (not sure what will be relevant, so am including almost the kitchen sink).
Important note: it came with a harddrive, of course, but it has an FPC (flexible printed cable) connector and I managed to break the tiny plastic push clamp that secures the connection to the motherboard. So the drive can't be read/used/ at all. I have tried to rig it up lots of times with no success.

What I have is a tiny profile 16gb flash drive
What I want is:
Ubuntu 14.04 Liveusb
that loads to an account login page instead of the no name administrator
As much (>4gb) ext4 persistent memory as can fit, given other needs.
a 2gb fat32 data partition in case I need to share anything with a windows computer.
Swap space adequate to permit suspend and hibernation

What I have done so far:
I created a 14.04 liveusb using the supplied creator in Ubuntu 12.04.
I deleted the casper-rw loopfile, and created a casper-rw ext4 partition, (which it seemed to use).

It went to "install ubuntu" selection screen first, and took (unbearable) minutes to move on to the desktop after clicking try me.
I could get around this by choosing F6 and typing " persistent" at the end of the boot command line, but this had to be done every time manually, at just the right boot up time.

I could create a user account and choose to "logout" then "login" to that account- but I'd like it to go the login screen at boot time.

When I tried to suspend I got a "black screen" from which I could not wake the laptop- and hibernation failed.
I can work around the suspend issue (it happened with previous generations of ubuntu and I google a now forgotten cmd line fix), but I really need hibernation to work.
I gather, from reading posts, that the swap space/partition issue is the problem here. But all the instructions I came across were for very particular circumstances that did not much match mine, so I don't know how to address this/ create and automatically use this here.

Finally, after running the application updater (new Update Manager?), and a restart, the whole installation was broken.

This took all day, and while I learned much, I have no working ubuntu installation for my laptop.


I have read posts and wikis, but I can't quite put together the setup I wish for.
I am hoping that someone(s) can either:
point me to a one-stop solution/program
OR
can tell me how to do this properly, or near properly enough that after two more (hopefully not all day) tries, I can have a working install.

Any and all help appreciated,
wigout




Acer Aspire Timeline 1810T-8638
Core 2 Duo SU7300 - 4 GB RAM

Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 / 1.3 GHz
Cache
L2 - 3 MB
Front Side Bus
800 MHz
Chipset
Mobile Intel GS45 Express
Platform Technology
Intel Centrino 2
Memory
RAM
4 GB ( 2 x 2 GB )
Technology
DDR2 SDRAM
Speed
667 MHz

Storage
Interface
Serial ATA-150
Audio & Video
Graphics Processor
Intel GMA 4500MHD
Memory Allocation Technology
Dynamic Video Memory Technology 5.0
Camera
Yes
Sound
Stereo speakers , microphone
Compliant Standards
Dolby Sound Room

Input

Type
touchpad
Features
multi-touch touchpad

Communications

Wireless
802.11b/g/n (draft)
Wireless Controller
Intel WiFi Link 1000
Network Interface
Gigabit Ethernet

Battery
Capacity
5600 mAh

Connections & Expansion
Interfaces
3 x USB 2.0
LAN
VGA
HDMI
Microphone input
Headphone/SPDIF combo jack
Memory Card Reader
Yes ( SD Card, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, MultiMediaCard, xD-Picture Card )

ubfan1
August 21st, 2014, 01:55 AM
You could better just install to the 16G stick, then tweak the install by moving some things like /tmp into ram. There are several tutorials on that, and comparisons between the full install and a persistent live media (C.S. Cameron wrote some in askubuntu.com and here). Maybe see the Howto section. I run off sticks, but without any swap.

wigout2
August 21st, 2014, 03:31 AM
I got it working-ish. I'll post the nitty gritty tomorrow.

The suspend is not working, so I didn't try hibernation.
I have to track down if that's a general laptop bug, my specific laptop bug... and what workarounds exist.

Thanks,
wigout