Perfect Ubuntu Jaunty on the Asus eeePC 1005HA (and 1008HA)

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The 1005HA is one of the brand new Asus eeePC netbooks, and it is a great little machine — aside from the fact that it comes with Windows XP or a dumbed-down customised Xandros (allegedly — as time goes on, Asus seem to be selling out to Microsoft).

As the 1005HA is pretty new, it has a few odd hardware quirks that won’t be fully supported out of the box until the next release of Ubuntu.

Here I run through what I did to end up with a 100% working install — including all Fn hotkeys. The good news is that it is very easy!

My perfect Ubuntu setup on the 1005HA

My perfect Ubuntu setup on the 1005HA

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Ubuntu: Getting rid of icons for mounted network shares

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I have several network NFS shares that I mount in Ubuntu using /etc/fstab. While this works fine, recent versions (I think it has been annoying me since Edgy) of Ubuntu have an annoying habit of creating a desktop icon for each share.

Annoying!

Annoying!

A desktop icon is fine for an SD card, or a USB stick, but it’s not ideal when you have a ton of network shares.

It is easy to turn off all desktop icons for mounts using gconf-editor. But I still want some of them (such as the aforementioned USB sticks) to show — just not the NFS mounts.

As it turns out, the solution is actually obvious: semi-permanent items should be mounted in the right place, under /mnt. If you mount elsewhere, e.g. under /home, you get the annoying icon. Under /mnt? No icon.

Although this turned out to be quite obvious, it is new to me — for well over a year now I’ve just had all desktop mount icons turned off waiting for the solution.