kindproject

from xp to ubuntu

Posted by jonathan - 19/10/08 at 10:10:34 am

Yesterday I made my third attempt and first successful one installing a linux os on a home computer. Previously I had stumbled with Mandrake in ~2001 and Red Hat in ~2004. With $10 million dollar cash infusion, and initiatives to put machines in the hands of the bottom of the pyramid, ubuntu comes pretty close to matching the ease of use standard established by Microsoft’s simple GUI wizard install.

While packaged quite nicely for people making the switch, its important to follow the directions as there are still some hurdles.
Here are my cliff notes:

1. My first cd burn was crap.
   Follow the instructions here, using the cd burner it recommends.
2. I could not boot from cd
   Neither the full install or the help boot from cd option worked. I had to use the install in windows feature.
3. The install would hang partitioning drives.
   After some reading here, I tried going to the application > gparted software from the disc os but could not partition anything as ext3 (the favored drive format of ubuntu). My machine had two ntfs formatted drives so after shuffling around some files, I split the second drive into an ntfs partion and an unformatted drive using xp’s disk management tools. Once I did this the ubuntu installer had some unformatted space to play with and did its thing.

My only other gripe is that since I had to shuffle back and forth between operating systems and then reformat a drive, despite having burned the os onto disk the install process downloaded the 600+mb install more than once. I spent most of the day on this yesterday, but am happy with the results and will be spending some time sifting through documentation here and look for my next post about getting nx setup.

Finally, I went down this road because:

1. Microsoft OS’s are dead. Unless they start a new product line based on the newer xbox codebase, it will be a hard sell to get people to buy an os because it uses less resources. ubuntu, 256k ram, vista 1gb. I know the ram is cheap, but I’d still like to turn older machines into functional specialty appliances.
2. I hate Mac’s. I had a mac mini that I sold to a machead friend for .40 cents on the dollar, because i would have had to buy an os upgrade and then a ntfs file system reader etc. Macs have all the trappings of closed eco-systems, but they leech off of the open source community and then rape the consumer on price. Macs are for people who like designer jeans and overpriced coffee. Their concept of “it just works” means it just works if you overpay for a small set of products we have sanctioned.
3. I simply wanted to learn something new.

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