MeeGo 1.1 on HP Mini 110

A couple weeks ago, a friend asked me to install a Linux OS on her HP mini netbook.

At first, Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.10 was automatically poped-up in my mind. But after testing it’s live usb version, I choose not to install it. The UI often suffers from serious lags to the point where it no longer acceptable for me

The next OS I look at is MeeGo. I’ve heard from friends that it’s a nice OS for netbook.

Tested the live usb version and it looks great. But, after googling around about MeeGo installation on netbook, i’ve found out that it would take a lot of manual setup after the installation proces.

The installation process itself is quite brief. but the next customization took me hours to complete. The installation process is quite similar to Ubuntu’s installation process.

The first stop you should visit after Installed MeeGo on netbook is this forum thread.

On that forum thread, most of the tutorial are still using yum, but since Meego 1.1 is omitting yum in favour of zypper, all we have to do is replace the yum command with zypper.

So after Meego has been installed, it’s time to do some configuration like installing ntfs-3g, mp3 support, etc.

First, we need some tools and library to step further.

sudo zypper install gcc flex bison make diffutils glib2-devel pango-devel cairo-devel wget gcc-c++ fribidi* *hal*dev* libXpm* libXt* moz*

ntfs-3g

The next thing I’ve done is installing ntfs-3g to read and write into a NTFS partition.

• Download ntfs-3g from here.
• After downloaded, extract that file.
• Do the standard procedure of ‘./configure‘, ‘make‘ and ‘sudo make install‘.
• Create a symlink: ‘sudo ln -s /sbin/mount.ntfs-3g /sbin/mount.ntfs‘
• That’s it

mp3 & DivX support

Next, installing mp3 & DivX support. I’m an installation script I got from here to help me. But on the middle of the script, it stopped because I don’t have liboil-devel package. So, what I’m doing next is installing that package.

sudo zypper install liboil-devel

After installing that package, I’m resuming the installation of mp3 & DivX support manually as described here.

cd ../gst-plugins-base-0.10.29
./configure -prefix=/usr && make && make install

cd ../gst-plugins-good-0.10.23
./configure -prefix=/usr && make && make install

cd ../gst-plugins-bad-0.10.19
./configure -prefix=/usr && make && make install

cd ../gst-plugins-ugly-0.10.15
./configure -prefix=/usr && make && make install

cd ../gst-ffmpeg-0.10.10
./configure -prefix=/usr && make && make install

And that’s it, mp3 and DivX support should be available now.

VLC

I love vlc, and because the default movie player in Meego is incapable of loading .srt file so I decided to install vlc as an alternate video player.

The installation process is available at this forum post. But, for me it seems I need another packages first before successfully follow the instruction described there, YMMV.

sudo zypper install yasm libqt-devel lua lua-devel libgcrypt-devel

Skype

Installing Skype should be easy, that was my thought at first. I’m following instruction from here, just to find out that it’s not that simple. Skype (I’m using version 2.1.0.81) request an additional library to be installed, qt4-x11. Got it from here.

No, that not solved the problem either. qt4-x11 requires another library! arggh, dependency hell!

Finally, I’m installing Skype package and ignoring it’s request for qt4-x11 package. It installed, but probably some functionality is missing.

Enabling fonts anti aliasing

Some application showing a jagged fonts, that’s why I’m following the instruction here to enable fonts anti aliasing.

Create a file .fonts.conf in your home directory containing this xml code:

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
<match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
   <const>hintmedium</const>
  </edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

Open Office

Open Office can be easily installed by following this instruction.

Dropbox

You can follow this instruction to get Dropbox working on Meego. Just download Dropbox for linux (Fedora x86 package) and install it using zypper.

If you put your Dropbox directory beside your home directory, you’ll probably going to need a little bit of tweaking to do so it won’t crash, as described in here.

Unrar

Going to need it to extract .rar files. Luckily, the installation process is quite straightforward. Just download it from rpmfusion.org and install it using zypper.

wget http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/releases/14/Everything/i386/os/unrar-3.9.10-3.fc14.i686.rpm
sudo zypper in unrar-3.9.10-3.fc14.i686.rpm

MS Fonts

Since some websites is using fonts that available at MS Windows, so to display it correctly we’re going to need this fonts too.

Download the package from here, and install it using zypper. I got the installation procedure from here.

 

Yup, that’s it. Meego looks great, I personally like it’s UI design. But, I think it still have a lot more to do. That configuration process above, reminds me of the day where Linux is still quite hard to use and configure, that was a long time ago.

And, after a few days after the installation process, I’ve replace that Meego on my friends neetbook with EasyPeasy Linux 😀