Partitioning

Here's how I opted to format the 4GB SSD on my Eee.

The main thing of interest here is that tiny little partition at the end. That's an EFI partition which is required to use the BootBooster feature which lets the BIOS skip the POST every time you turn the machine on. The Eee comes with this set up out of the box, however, none of the netbook installers create this for you if you re-partition the drive. Without this, the Eee requires a few extra seconds to boot up.

I found the directions for how to set this up stashed away on the Ubuntu site. The nice graphical tools don't even know anything about this kind of partition, so you have to use old-fashioned fdisk to do it. I just switched to the console (Ctrl-Alt-F1) from the UNR installer to create this, then rebooted and re-ran the installer no rmally.

Using the graphical partition manager, I allocated all the remaining space to one big ext4 partition. Note that I did not create a swap partition. The 900a's 1 GB of RAM is more than adequate for anything I am likely to do on a netbook, enough to run without any swap. With only 4 GB of storage, we need to conserve every bit we can, so using any of this on a swap partition is just a waste.

The grub that ships with Ubuntu 9.04 boots to ext4 with no problems!

I'm also putting /tmp on RAM disk. The SSD that ships with this thing is pretty slow. I just added the following line to /etc/fstab :

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults 0 0