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As I mentioned last night, HP plans to make a utility available on its web site within the next few days that will let users either restore an HP Mini 1000 Mi Edition netbook to its factory default settings or replace Windows or another operating system with HP’s custom Linux environment. But the tool that you’ll be able to download from the website is designed to work from Windows. If you want to create a system restore USB flash disk using Linux, you can do it today.

The steps are a little quirky, and they might not work for everyone. In a nutshell, if you already have Mi Edition installed, here’s what to do:

1. Open a terminal window by hitting Alt+F2 and typing “gnome-terminal” (without the quotes)
2. Type “sudo synaptic” to launch the Synaptic package manager (If you want, you can skip the terminal step and just launch Synaptic by hitting Alt+F2 and entering “gksudo synaptic”)
3. Search for a file called lilveusb-creator and install it
4. Now close the Synaptic package manager and go back to the terminal window
5. Make sure you have a 2GB or larger USB flash drive plugged into your system
6. Type “liveusb-creator” to launch the utility
7. Make sure that the utility recognizes your flash drive (it should say something like /dev/sdb) and that there’s something listed in the Download recovery image box
8. Click start

The utility will now download the recovery image and copy it to your flash drive, while making the drive bootable. You can use this as a system restore disc, but keep in mind when you use it you will erase any data currently on your computer. You can also use this utility to turn a Windows XP netbook into a Mi Edition machine.

If you don’t already have Mi Edition installed, you can try to download the liveusb-creator by running Ubuntu Netbook Remix and adding HP’s repositories so you can download the correct version of the installer. Timm McCoy posted instructions for doing this in the MyHPMini forums.

I would not recommend using the USB installer to try loading Mi Edition on an unsupported netbook. HP’s recovery image is designed to run on the HP Mini 1000 netbook and it supports the keyboard, Ethernet, WiFI, display, and other hardware. It may not work with other netbooks. However you can try adding the HP repositories and downloading the custom Mi Edition theme for Ubuntu if you want. The package is called glassy-bleu-theme. You’ll also want to download the glassy-bleu-browser-skin. (Note that this will install the glassy black and blue theme, but not the HP program launcher). Update: I’d recommend downloading the .deb files directly instead of going through the HP repositories.

Update: After a few hours of downloading, I just tried to create a restore disc using the liveusb-creator tool in Linux and the creation failed on two separate USB sticks. So your results may vary. If you have any successes or failures to report, let us know about them in the comments.

via Portable Monkey