Monday, February 13, 2012

MenuetOS/KolibriOS on Acer Aspire One

This is my next conquest in the series "OS for the Acer Aspire One". I've managed to boot MenuetOS and KolibriOS (it's based on MenuetOS) on my AOA110 by using a flash drive. Some may ask why? Because I can :) KolibriOS is a bit easier to make as it has bootable CD image already build on their site, where MenuetOS has only a floppy image and we have to make a CD image out of it. But the hardest (and dangerous) thing to prepare is your flash drive! You have to divide it into 2 partitions - one with CDFS file system (the FS on all compact disks) and one normal (FAT or NTFS). Not every flash drive supports that, and the way to be done depends on the controller in it. I really should make another post about how to do that, because it's really big question, but for now search Google how to do it on your flash drive and then follow the instructions below. Of course if you have an U3 flash drive, then you don't need to search anything, just use Universal Customizer to insert the CD image into your CDFS partition. After you get the things going with your flash drive, everything else is pretty easy - put the CD image into your CDFS partition on your flash drive, reboot and boot from it :) This way you should be able to boot other OSes (like Windows XP), but I haven't tried it yet. Now let me show you the steps to boot MenuetOS, as it's a bit harder:

1. Download Menuet32.
2. Use UltraISO or other imaging software to put .img file into your CD's boot sector like that:
2.1. Click on Bootable -> Load boot file...
2.2. Choose .img file
3. Save .iso image.
4. Open the program corresponding to your flash drive and burn your .iso image to your CDFS file system.
5. Reboot your netbook and boot from you newly added USB-CD

KolibriOS steps are just two - 4 and 5 from the above ;) Hope you like the experiment :)

2 comments :

  1. Were you able to use your wifi with KolibriOS and if so, how?
    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sorry, I don't remember and I don't have the AOA anymore to test.

    ReplyDelete