Help with Acer Aspire One, SD Card, and Linux
 

I am really hoping somebody can hold my hand and help me out with this. I have an Acer Aspire One that was recently gifted to me as a secondary computer. Ultimately, I will probably give this computer to my 10 year-old daughter. She has been playing with Sugar via USB (the Sugar on a Stick thingie), and she really enjoys it. I have Jaunty-Ubuntu installed on my Acer, and I would love to get Sugar running either as a Desktop environment for her or as a SD boot because the computer is just too small to have my clunky USB thumb drive sticking out of it at all times. I tried to install Sugar from the repos., but it just doesn't seem to want to work properly. Some of the activities never bother showing up, the internet has major issues, and it is, well, very buggy to say the least. This would actually be my ideal install, but I tried it so many different ways to no avail. The second possibility would be to install Sugar on a Stick on the SD card (which I have) and to get the AAO to boot it somehow...although I realize it won't boot from the BIOS. Now, I found this: http://www.hubbardandhubbard.com/con...ard?format=pdf

BUT, I am not getting the instructions in certain areas on how to do this. I am, after all, pretty much a newbie. Once I get to step 4, I start feeling confused. I'm okay on partitions and tinkering around with things to the point of messing this newly installed system up. I don't have anything on it at all, and it wouldn't be a big deal if I had to reformat things. I would just really like to have this work out somehow or another--I just need much more help if somebody could take the time and help me out!

Thanks so much!

Kristin

Ok, Kristin,

I read the link you posted. I need to know specifically where you are having a problem in step 4. There are a number of things in step 4. Linux is big, so you need to be as specific as possible. I found the link fairly easy to understand. It isn't exactly the way I would do it, but it sounds like it will work. I'll try to come back to this post soon.

Thanks for your willingness to help me out AM--Well, like I said, I am pretty much a newbie, although I am completely a hands-on experimental kind of user, so I basically live and learn until I can figure things out. This is something I just can't figure out. As soon as I read the word "initramfs" in step 4, I was like, oh crap. I don't know what that is. Are these commands to pop into the terminal? Then I go to step 5, and I don't understand, from step 1, what I am supposed to do here or how. I didn't know I could partition the pen drive...so I guess the instructions of telling me to do it don't really help me, as a newbie user, when I'm not being told how to do it. In other words, I know Linux is gigantic--and I don't understand from step four onward at all exactly.

Seriously, if you have your own way to do this, and if it is something you would even want to take the time to do because I know we're super busy more than likely, I would much prefer the method you know. If this is something that just seems way beyond anything I should be doing, I would understand that as well without taking it personally. Just tell me "Hey ya goofy noob, go back to school before you try doing stuff like this." I was totally prepared and excited until I figured out this afternoon that this computer didn't boot from the SD, so I'm down with going without.

Looking forward to a response,
Kristin