The Oatmeal tells it like it is.
I’ve had my MacBook for just about a year now and am fully into Phase 2, but I visit a lot of clients who have been relegated to the neverending hell of Phase 3 because they can’t (or, more often, won’t) spend $500 to put themselves out of that misery and go back to the unparalleled joy of Phase 1. Protip: if you bought your computer during the Clinton Administration, its time for a new one.
 |
 |
 |
For months now, I’ve been wanting to replace the old PC we have in our library room with something newer that would be of more use to Charlotte now that she has started elementary school. Earlier this year, I made a sort of half-hearted effort to install Ubuntu on that computer, but ran into just enough roadblocks that I didn’t feel like I wanted to spend any more time on it, and decided the best plan was to simply buy something else.
At this point, my daughter’s computing needs are pretty simple. She likes to visit a few kid-oriented websites like the various Nickelodeon and Disney sites and, like every other kid right now, Webkinz. She likes to play the online games they have, and she often prints out the coloring and cut-out project pages. Because she is a beginning reader/writer, she hasn’t yet been sucked into the swirling vortex of instant messaging or the online clique-clack of social networking websites. In fact, she really only needs something a little more capable than the Nintendo DS handheld she loves to play with. But, within the lifetime of whatever sort of computer we might choose to replace the old one, she will develop needs for something she can use for more practical purposes.
(this is a pretty long post, so I’ll place the rest of it “after the jump”)
Read more
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.
I did say I’d keep you apprised of the developments in switching Charlotte’s PC from Windows to Ubuntu, so here’s the first update.
Bridget offered to take Charlotte to her dance lesson on Saturday morning, even though it was my turn. So it seemed like the perfect time to sit down and have a crack at it.
I had already downloaded the Live CD ISO and burned it to a CD. The Ubuntu website promised me that the CD would do all the work of cataloguing files and settings and so on, and the whole thing would only take 25 minutes.
Except that the computer wouldn’t boot from the CD. Even when I set up the boot order in BIOS to ignore everything but the CD drive, no soap. It would display a line on the screen that said something like ISOBOOT blahblah Debian blahblah and a blinking cursor, then reboot automatically after about 30 second of going nowhere.
If I booted into Windows, the CD would spin up and launch a browser with links to install software, but not to install Ubuntu itself.
So I went to the Ubuntu site and read their page about troubleshooting the Live CD, which suggested that I should try the “alternate install CD”. That download took about 20 minutes, so I went and washed some dishes while it ran. Using my own PC, I burned that CD and started all over again.
Still nada. Okay, I thought, this is one of those cases where the CD drive in the old computer won’t read CDs burned in my computer. That’s not unusual. So I copied the ISO image from my computer to the old computer. Ready to burn to another CD…except the Windows built-in CD burning software doesn’t extract ISO images, and there was no other CD-burning tool installed on the machine. Time to go look for a free CD burning tool that isn’t loaded down with all sorts of spyware and crap. Not as easy to find as you might think, but eventually I did.
While that software was downloading, I took a pile of laundry upstairs and put it away. By the time I got back, the download was done. Another few minutes spent extracting/installing the software and burning the CD, change the boot order again and……nothing. Not even the ISOLINUX blahblah thing.
At this point, I decided to try another tack — if the CDs weren’t going to boot, maybe I should try burning the installer to a DVD. Except I was all out of blank DVDs. I had to go to CVS anyway to pick up some prescriptions, so off I went. Once there, I could not remember which type of DVD format my DVD burner uses, DVD+R or DVD-R, so I bought a package of each.
(Oh, at this point it’s about noon. I had started at 9:30.)
Get home, re-burn the Live CD to a DVD, take it downstairs, restart the old PC…bupkis.
Unlike Georgie-Boy, I know when I need to cut my losses, so I gave up. Three hours into a 25-minute install with absolutely no progress. On the upside, I did get all my Saturday morning errands accomplished, so it wasn’t a total waste of time.
Next step: tonight I’ll see if there’s a BIOS update for the old PC that addresses the “won’t boot from CD” option. If that fails, then Plan C will be to build the Live CD on a USB memory stick and try that method. Plan D involves drop-kicking the PC and buying the Mini Mac after all. Stay Tuned.
Comments:
Hi Brian,
Carol P. asked me to have a look at your problems here. I had a couple of ideas:
1) I know it may be a stupid question, but are you sure that the ISOs are being burnt correctly? You should see a bunch of different files and directories, including an isolinux\ directory, on the CD when it’s burnt; if you see the one ISO file, then your software is copying it to disk rather than writing the ISO as an image. Just worth checking; I don’t think this is your problem, however.
2) Have you tried downloading any other CD images, such as the System Rescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org), burning them and see if they work?
3) Can you boot up off another CD, such as a Windows install CD, correctly? Just checking that the drive can detect boot sectors correctly…
HTH,
Paul
Posted by Paul Wayper [URL] on 05/07/07
1. Yes, the ISO file was extracted correctly. I also know that the CD works because it will boot my other PC.
2. Also works.
3. Yes.
I also verified that I have the last-released BIOS for this particular PC. Tonight I am going to try booting from a USB flash memory stick. Stay tuned.
Posted by Brian [URL] on 05/08/07
Hi Brian,
I hope the USB stick boot works for you. They can be tricky to format correctly, from what I’ve heard.
Five other options I can think of:
1) Try another distro – I’ve always had good luck with Fedora Core, but http://www.makethemove.net has a few other recommendations.
2) If this doesn’t work directly, Fedora Core also has a ‘network install’ option where you burn a very small image to disk (I use rewritables for this) and then accesses the entire ISO from HTTP, NFS or FTP server either locally or on the internet (the latter, of course, being much slower). That might boot. The page http://www.samspublishing.com/articles/article.asp?p=169466&seqNum=2&rl=1 also mentions booting into the install from a floppy disk.
3) I think Ubuntu has a ‘Live CD’ option which also allows you to run a program in Windows that can then launch the Ubuntu install process.
4) Try taking the hard drive out of the Dell, putting it into a machine that can boot it, and installing Linux on that. Then put the hard drive back into the Dell and Kudzu/Anaconda should do the rest.
5) If you’re really keen, try setting up a network boot option to boot the machine directly off a bootp/tftp server on your home network.
HTH,
Paul
Posted by Paul Wayper [URL] on 05/09/07
Thanks again, Paul.
I had thought of the network option myself, since I know the CD runs on my own PC, but a netboot option does not aappear to be available on the old PC.
I might try an earlier release of Ubuntu, but I don’t think I want to put a different Linux distro on this computer. It’s for my 6-year-old daughter and needs to be easy-to-use/easy-to-maintain.
The Ubuntu Live CD itself does not install inside Windows, but I just read about a package called Wubi that IS a Windows Installer for Ubuntu. It also gives you a dual boot option, which might avoid some of the emulator issues I am anticipating.
As you can see, I have come nowhere close to exhausting my options yet.
Posted by Brian [URL] on 05/09/07
All Original Content Copyright © BrianKaneOnline
All Other Content Copyright © Its Original Authors
Built on Notes Blog Core
Powered by WordPress