Not having the funds to buy myself a Freewrite (formerly known as HemingWrite) I blew the dust from an old, but still working netbook (Samsung N150) and followed this great tutorial “How to turn your laptop into a typewriter“.
Here are some handy tips if you want to redo the tutorial yourself
After installing: a black screen
Apparently, the Ubuntu Server is very barebones and on my netbook, it simply boots to a blank screen with a blinking cursor. Nothing more. To get started, you need to open up a terminal using ctrl+alt+F1. Yeah, I’m a Linux noob.
Only boots using USB stick 😦
I followed the tutorial as is and discovered that my fresh Ubuntu wouldn’t boot unless I inserted the original USB-stick from which I had installed Ubuntu in the first place. The problem? The Ubuntu installer installed Grub on the stick instead of on the master hard disk.
This can be remedied simply by using the command:
sudo grub-install /dev/sda
Autologin and boot to terminal
The part about configuring tty1 to automatic login doesn’t work anymore in more recent Ubuntu Server version. What you will need to do is override the getty.service, as explained here.
First:
sudo systemctl edit getty@tty1
Then add the following content:
[Service] ExecStart= ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --autologin yourusername --noclear %I 38400 linux Type=idle
Save and exit.
Next, you will want to change the bootloader, grub, settings:
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
and change the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT value to text.
Next up, write the changes to grub:
sudo update-grub
Connecting to wifi is really hard
Most modern wifi networks have WPA or WPA2 security, which is a bit of a pain in the a$$ to get connected to using a terminal-only shell.
Luckily a nifty tool called “nmtui” exists which is basically a text-based UI network configurator. It can be installed using:
sudo apt-get install network-manager
and can then be started by typing:
nmtui
Getting battery status
Use upower as explained here.
Tim Dams 