Ubuntu, Here I Am

Done! Voila! I write this from Firefox within Ubuntu.

...Not quite a cakewalk. ...Much to my chagrin, the installation page has this "Please Wait" screen after handling your video card. This is highly unusual, in my experience, for a Linux app to do: usually such screens (and indeed, the REST of the installation) kindly tells you exactly what it is up to. So my assumption was that the process had crashed, after the "Please Wait, 6%" screen stayed up for 20 minutes. I tried twice more (changing some suspected settings), and got the same results.

But I grabbed my wife's laptop and dug into the Ubuntu install docs, and, lo, they explain that packages are installed on TTY4 during this process, so you can switch over to view them, if you care to.

The dialog should say as much. Harrumph.

Anyway, I'm off to run the additional installation pacakges... getting ruby, mysql, The GIMP, and whatever else strikes me as missing. There's also a bunch of Linux music apps to check out. ...Oh, and I'd like to grab WINE (though Ubuntu kindly set up a dual-boot system, so I don't need it).

Awesome. I'm glad I did this. Linux in under 24 hours, and without a CD drive. : )

Not bad.

Ubuntu, Round 2

The thumb drive image was corrupt.

I don't know why, but after I copy the boot sector image to /def/sdf, it ends up changing the size of the volume to 16 Meg. Weird.

After re-trying that in vain a couple of times, I decided to follow the long way around, which involved installing syslinux, running that (there's a win32/ subdir with an EXE in it, takes a drive letter as an arg), and then copy "files from the Ubuntu archives" to the disk. Archives? WHAT archives?!? No clue.

[dig dig]

Oh, you mean THESE archives. Okay. ...But where the heck ARE They?!? No clue.

[poke poke]

It looks like two of the files are available, but the other one (which I guess is optional, really) isn't there. Hmmn. It occurs to me that the image that I unpacked (and which mucked up the format of my stick) has these files on them. Perhaps I'll grab another (small) stick and unload the image onto it, copy the files to my HD, and yada yada. Sure... let's do that and be safe. -Ish.

The smaller stick came up with a different drive letter (why?), but was still mounted on /dsv/sdf, so I copied the image over to it, ejected it, put it back in, noted that it, too, was reduced to 16 Meg, and copied all the files over to the disk. So far, so good.

Format the small stick (to bring it back to 64 Meg, grr), and eject it. Pop the big 'un back in. Copy all the files over to it. Whee. I peek at the file that was missing from the archives and see that, yeah, I probably wanted that... it seems to have prompts and what-not, probably making the install easier. I hope. There's a note on the Ubuntu site about how this file should contain a line saying "default vmlinuz", but I guess this is bullshit: the default directive (install) seems to point to a viable set of commands. I trust in the file as-is. Last step: copy the ISO image over to the (now big) thumb-drive. This takes 4 minutes: it's a big one.

And now it's time to reboot.

If you don't hear from me in 4 hours, call the President.

Linux

So, I did research on Linux tonight, and I'm edgy about the whole thing. I wondered what I would really be gaining, besides "sticking it to Windows".

I suppose I'd be learning lots of new geekery. That's worth something.

Regardless, I decided to go ahead and try out Ubuntu in the short-term, perhaps switching to SuSE if I decide I really can live with Linux and no Windows. It couldn't hurt too much, right?


My CD-drive is fried, so I can't write the ISO image to a disk and boot with that. I do have a handy 1Gig thumb drive, however... but the instructions say that you need to build the thumbdrive with a Linux system. Hmmmn.

I thought perhaps I could cheat with Cygwin, which I have installed (another reason I'm feeling odd about the move)... but it turns out you can't redirect STDOUT to a directory. No worries, I'll just go... to... /dev... wha?!? There's no /dev in cygwin.

[dig dig] Okay, there is /dev, but for some unexplainable reason, they hide it from you. You can still type /dev/sda and get to the harddrive, for example. Weird. But there's no /dev dir, and you can't see everything that's there. They do, however, point to a utility that makes this possible. I install. I run. /dev appears.

And it's huge. Nothing is clearly the USB drive... and I'm not sure how to find the bloody thing.

I decide to start heading each of the mount points, and I find that, indeed, /dev/sdf seems to be accessing by thumbdrive (by virtue of the fact that the thing blinks as I head it). Neat.

I zcat the boot image to the drive, I copy the ISO image... and... OH MY GOD, it's Saturday!

Time for sleep. Plenty of time for this over the weekend: the wife is away, so I'll be bored, anyway.

Fear and trepidation... mixed with perverse glee. We shall see.