Installing skype

Was super easy. I just downloaded it from skype:
http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-beta-ubuntu-32

Install by double clicking it in nautilus. Cam and audio worked out of the box. If there wouldn't be the internal microphone issue it would be 100% perfect.

Installing lucid

Lucid looks so nice that I cannot resist and just decided to install it although it obviously won't work out of the box. The installation itself went very smooth. ASUS thankfully partitioned the disk in two visible partitions and one invisible which probably contains the recovery system. Then I shrunk the empty visible partition by 4 GB and created a swap partition in that space. I still think about installing 2 GB RAM, so I thought 4 GB swap might be good. So my partition table looks like this:

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 85.9GB 85.9GB primary ntfs boot
2 85.9GB 149GB 62.7GB primary ext4
4 149GB 153GB 3999MB primary linux-swap(v1)
3 153GB 160GB 7345MB primary fat32 hidden, lba

Installing from the USB pen drive was quite fast. After reboot it came everything was the same as in the live system. So still no wireless and unpredictable brightness controls. But beautiful.

Booting lucid beta1

I prepared one of my 4 GB USB pen drives with the lucid-beta1 image. For that I downloaded the latest beta1 image:

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/beta1

To make a bootable USB pen drive I used the free windows software Linux Live USB Creator. It has quite a colorful UI but it is easy to use.

1. Insert your FAT foirmatted USB drive and choose it. ATTENTION! it will be deleted.
2. Click ISO and choose your downloaded lucid image. It will later prompt you that it is an unsupported image but it will work anyway.
3. I didn't use any persistent storage.
4. I checked format the stick and unchecked the windows direct launch option as I don't need that.
5. Hit the flash and it starts working

Now reboot with the stick inserted into USB and go into the bios by hitting F2 when the machine starts up again. Goto the boot options and disable these options: boot->boot_booster and boot->boot_settings->quiet_boot. In the boot drive options make the USB drive the first device. F10 to save and exit. Now the ubuntu boot manger should come up.

Very helpful was this thread on the ubuntu forums:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1396074&page=4