Downloaded Elementary OS Luna 64-bit
Turned off Secure Boot and Fast Boot in the firmware. Turned on CSM Launch
Booted Elementary from CD/USB Flash, and installed as the only OS on the hard drive.
The only installation change I made was to configure 2x physical swap (8GB in my case) to make up for the limited RAM in the UX31a
Ran the Update Manager (277 updates). Then just to be sure, ran
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Installed tcsh, Emacs, Chrome and VirtualBox from Software Center
Emacs give the following error when run from the command line:
Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: “pixmap”
This is fixed by installing the gtk2-engines-pixbuf package:
sudo apt.get install gtk2-engines-pixbuf
copied .emacs and .tcshrc from another computer
Installed Elementary OS Tweaks using the info from Ubuntu Geek. Essentially, it was:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:versable/elementary-update
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install elementary-tweaks
set Files to double-click, activate natural scrolling
Really need to adjust font scaling to 138dpi (instead of 96), but in the mean time… Increase font sizes.
Tweaked system to optimize for running from SSD based on this article from How-To-Geek:
Add tmpfs, and add the following options to / to noatime,nodiratime,discard
Also setup the deadline scheduler by editing /etc/rc.local to add the following lines:
echo deadline > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch