Friday, 18. July 2008, 11:38:43
It all started with Tux, the Linux penguin, a Thai friend who sat like Tux on a rock in the middle of a river, and some memories of work done on Unix some years ago. Something about that photo of the Thai friend reminded me of Tux whom I saw on so many web pages. After making some jokes about him, I eventually read around the picture and became so confused about which distro to use.
I remember Mandrake to be quite popular as it was mentioned many times in conversations between people or the media, but anyway, it rang a bell. So I decided to go for Mandriva and installed it on my old Pentium 3 computer, which then felt like new. By that time, I just got a new Compaq Presario V3407TU laptop (from the V3000 series) with Vista installed. I wasn't very impressed with Vista after the laptop failed to boot only after a week's use. On the other hand, I had only started with Linux on a personal level...
The Ubuntu distro got my final vote for the folowing reasons:
1. When doing a search for Linux, there are almost always a lot of listings from the Ubuntu forums. Most of the time the answer I look for is then also within an Ubuntu forum.
2. Not a solid reason, but the distro originates from my home country, South Africa.
3. I was convinced that the support is superior when I ordered an Ubuntu CD with the Gnome desktop and it arrived here in Thailand within a month, absolutely free of charge. I downloaded and installed XUbuntu, just before the CD arrived, as I was very excited to get started. By the way, a CD can be ordered after registering at Launchpad, accessable from the Ubuntu home page.
4. There were no serious issues which convinced me to try another distro.
5. Ubuntu is very popular even among computer manufacturers.
6. There are special Ubuntu projects like running Ubuntu side-by-side with Windows, without partitioning the hard drive.
The installation of XUbuntu - "Gutsy Gibbon" on the Presario took place about six months ago. I shrank the partition with Vista on it with Vista's partition manager, in the hope that Vista would know how to handle its own partition. It could possibly been done within the Ubuntu installer's partitioner, Anyway, the formatting and installation went smooth, but by that time I didn't know that at least the root file system (/) needs to be mounted onto a partition, so the installer wouldn't let me continue without selecting a partition to mount "/"! The Mandriva installer on my former computer must have assumed the only partition to be the default to mount "/" and let me install happily. On the Ubuntu installer, I then selected "jfs" as a file system and it installed "/" on the new available partition. "jfs" is a file system used by IBM. Normally Linux is installed on an "ext3" or now a new "reiserfs" system. In the past "ext2" was used. "ext2" is more volnurable to immature system shutdowns, during which it can leave data corrupted if nothing worse. I changed to "ext3" later on, but more on that later...
The installation went fine and dual booting Vista, XP and Ubuntu was possible without difficulty, thanks to the "Grub" bootloader of Linux, which doesn't overwrite an existing operating system like Windows's boot entry in the master boot record (MBR), unless you tell it to sweep off an existing partition. The installation was very quick, maybe twenty minutes at most and no floppy is needed to install any SATA drivers, as it is included within the Linux kernel.
At first, the sound didn't work, but after the next boot it was there, but so soft. I got advise to turn up the volume controls in the interface for "ALSA" (Advanced Linux Sound Application if I remember correctly). The volume was normal after that. The command used in a console was "alsamixer", which exposes the volume controls. The wireless needed some setting up, using "NetworkManager" applet. The built-in card reader didn't work as well as the other quick keys with blue LED's. Some function keys on the keyboard might be linked to do aome function, which I haven't tried yet. I was surprised to see that it is possible to access Windows's NTFS file systems within Ubuntu, even accessing user folders without a security limit, while from Vista, it was impossible to see the file system where Linux is installed.
The XFCE desktop of XUbuntu have reacts fast, but lacks some rich eye candy, like the Gnome and KDE desktops. I thought of installing Ubuntu from the received CD, to get Gnome, but didn't want to loose the XFCE dektop I got used to. Then I read thet it is possible to install the Gnome and KDE desktops together with the XFCE desktop. After about two commands in the console, KDE and Gnome downoaded and installed. So then I could log in in any desktop environment and still see all my programs, although it is rearranged in the different menu layouts of the different desktops. The startup screen showed the splash screen of KUbuntu (for KDE), the desktop I installed last. It had been changed to Ubuntu's standard splash screen, using a program called "Startup Manager".
Xfce.png]
Vista enquired about the registration key after the Ubuntu installation. According to what I have read up on the net, Vista uses a daemon which analyses current hardware installed on a computer. If it finds a change, it will require a re-entry of the registration key. Microsoft intended it this way to prohibit illegal copying of its operating system. I suppose the resizing of partitions fired that one off. I also read about the built-in software monitoring daemon, which "decides" what may or may not run to avoid license breaches. That process steals resources. Some of my XP programs were still incompatible with Vista.
I decided to remove Vista. After using the wonderful program called "Vista Boot Pro" to recover the MBR of XP, to be able to boot XP without Vista's boot loader, I used "QtParted" in Ubuntu to remove Vista's partition. I didn't take into account that the partition number for Ubuntu would decrease from three to two. The former partition were defined as sda3 for Ubuntu, and sda2 and sda1 for Vista and XP respectively. The new partition number for Ubuntu would then be sda2 and sda1 for XP. When I rebooted, I got error 2.2 from the Grub boot loader. Installing from the XUbuntu CD again and rolling back a system backup from a tar file which I made shortly after installing Ubuntu put my system back in little time. I kept the newly installed boot folder with the correctly assigned partition numbers though, by copying the installed one to somewhere, then rolled the backup, and then moved the boot folder from the installation back again. I could have saved myself this trouble if I had changed the partition numbers in the menu.lst file in the boot folder, before rebooting. When reinstalling from the XUbuntu CD, I knew by then that at least the root (/) file system needs to be assigned a partition as mount point. It was then that I decided to use the "ext3" file system in place of the former "jfs" one used. There was no problem with the "jfs" but the partition manager didn't support resizing of "jfs" file systems. The swap partition didn't mount due to a new partition id assigned to it, which neede to be updated in the fstab file in the /etc folder. That caused havoc when the system tried to recover from suspend mode. The laptop would shutdown after recovering from suspend mode. The swap partition was also corrupted and neede a reformat, easily done in "QtPAred". After fixing the swap mount the system recovered successfully from suspend mode, but usb ports would fail to recover. That was fixed by white listing the usb kernel module to not turn off during suspend.
WIDGETIZE