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More from our continuing stooooory about migrating to Ubuntu
Well, it seems pretty clear that the CD drive in the old PC is not working properly for some reason.
Thinking about my various options, along with some helpful comments in the first update post from a FOAF who's a Linux guy, I was pretty sure my next move was going to be trying to run the installer from a USB flash memory stick.
I have a couple of 2GB sticks and find them incredibly useful for all sorts of PC support tasks. I even did an installation of USBUbuntu on one of them not too long ago just for fun. So it seemed that it would not be too unreasonable to try putting the ISO image on one and giving it a whirl.
Then, I read a post at Lifehacker yesterday extolling the virtues of some beta software called Wubi. Wubi is a Windows installer for Ubuntu. Wubi itself is a very small app (5-6MB, I think) which fetches the alternate-install CD (NOTE: not the Live CD) and then begins the install while Windows is still running, just the way most Windows software installs work.
This is a brilliant idea, not just for people having difficulties with other installation methods, but for the 95% of Windows users who aren't terribly technical and might be intimidated by the process. UNIX geekery be damned, you have to stick to the KISS mentality to get people to use technology.
It took about an hour for the whole thing to run. I don't know if I believe the claim that you can run the Live CD and be up and running in under half an hour, although I do think that the relative pokey speed of this old PC is a factor. It wants 3GB of disk space, most of which is for swap. That could have been a problem for me; the C drive only had just under 2GB free even after I had done some savage trashing of files. But the installer was smart enough to see that there were multiple hard drives in the machine and simply set itself up in the largest (and emptiest) one. It also sets up the computer as a dual-boot, leaving your entire Windows installation intact and available to use whenever you restart the machine. Another very smart idea for the technically challenged who might need to go back to their Windows ways now and again.
Since it was nearly 11:00 by the time the installer was done, I only poked at it for a few minutes. Ubuntu seemed to recognize and configure all of the hardware. I've read a lot of people saying that they've had particular trouble with wireless network adapters especially. It recognized the one on this PC, and the driver seems to work, in the sense that it initializes the adapter and sees my wireless network. I wasn't able to get it to authenticate, though, so no Internet connection yet. I don't think that's the fault of Ubuntu, honestly. I have always had a hard time getting my Linksys router to play nice.
Next task, then, is getting the wireless adapter to connect to the router. Once that's accomplished, I'll give everything a more thorough shake-down cruise.
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