The mininote can be a pain on many distributions - because it is via based, with the via C7 CPU and a via Chrome graphics card. Also it has a broadcom wifi card which seems to not always be recognised in many distributions, often the distribution’s own b43 drivers did not work on my mininote. SO after lots of trial and error I found a small number which did work. First one, SliTaz

I found out that unless I got certain steps in exactly the right order, things did not work out with the install, or later with the wireless - putting it all up as quicknotes for now, will add screenshots and more explanations later

* Download slitaz ISOs from http://slitaz.org/en/get/

I have used here a recent (April/May/July 2009) version of the “cooking” version, because in early testing the stable version just would not let the wireless work. In the past I have had to manually compile some of the drivers, but it seems the current release has a better package for the broadcom drivers, which means there might be no need for manual compilation as I have had to do in the past. Yay!

IMPORTANT: if you do not have a wired internet connection, download the “packages” version of the cooking (over 1Gb) distribution so you can install the necessary things to make the wireless work

get and run the unetbootin tool

UNetbootin allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions from Windows or Linux, without requiring you to burn a CD. You can either let it download one of the many distributions supported out-of-the-box for you, or do it from your own iso file. I tend to use my own iso files, as some of the files unetbootin dowloads automatically seem out of date versions. But I have found out that about half the distributions iso I downloaded do not boot when you go the naive run unetbootin with iso and standard config route I outline below. I am certain many more would work with the custom settings, but I dont have the time or inclination to try to read up on each distribution’s bootloader modules to make it work. Thankfully slitaz isos have always worked via unetbootin.

* download from http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ (linux or windows). It will run straight from the downloaded file, no install needed.

* put your usb key in the USB drive and clean/format it (fat32 is fine)

* run unetbootin, choose the “iso” option and select the downloaded ISO. Wait till it’s done (can take a while if you have the “packages” iso)

* get to your mininote

Step 2: boot

* put your key in the machine and start the machine

* press F9 (a few times) to trigger the boot menu

* choose USB

* at the boot screen, normally all you need to do is press “enter” to start booting.

If you see the white/blue unetbootin boot list instead of the red/brown slitaz boot screen shown above, choose the “core” option to proceed

* it will take a little time as everything is decompressed and a memory disk is created

* you will need to set 3 choices: the resolution (slitaz does offer the native resolution of the screen, something which so many distributions failed at), the language and keyboard

* once you are on the login screen, just leave the suggested name (tux) as is, and press enter twice (no password)

* IMPORTANT mount the USB key first (else slitaz might mount it to an inconvenient place as you browse around and then you have to reboot and start over)

* at this point it is worth testing if the current packages for wireless work out of the box or if manual work is needed (...)

Step 3: install

The SliTaz install is rather simple - a few caveats though:

* you need to have your partition ready in advance (the install script will format, but it can’t partition)

* you need to have the USB mounted as /media/cdrom to fool the installer

* the grub bootloader instance that SliTaz installs does not include any existing partitions, just the SliTaz instance - if you have others, keep copies of your Grub menu.lst to copy the entries after the install is completed

Step 4: reboot into your new SliTaz

You will have to make the same 3 choices again (resolution, language, keyboard) and you get your newly installed SliTaz

If you have a wired connection, the first thing to do is update packages and get the wifi set of packages installed. This can be done from the command line or from the GUI package manager, I will show both ways in the next article. I will also list a few of the workarounds for some problems I have encountered at one time or another