Mon, 03 Nov 2008
Interesting Involvement In Installing Intrepid Ibex
So I went to visit a school friend over the weekend, in the other Newcastle. An enjoyable but not especially blog-worthy weekend was had by all. So, I hear you ask, why the blog post?
I've been engaged in a campaign over the last few years to convert my friends and, hopefully at some point, my family to using GNU/Linux, free software and open standards. With my school friends I have been pleasingly successful, with two of them now using Ubuntu. Over the weekend, that became three. In itself, that's not an especially interesting occurence. So, I hear you ask, why the blog post?
Well, this blog post isn't so much about having installed Ubuntu, but how disappointingly painful the process was. Once we had burnt a CD that was working (damn you, Woolworths!), we shoved it in the CD drive and the boot menu came up. Now, Nick (the latest convert to the cause) didn't want to try Ubuntu before installing, he just wanted to install it. So, naturally, we chose the 'Install' option from the boot menu.
This was our first mistake.
When we had finally gone through the installation process (which was, in itself, very slick), we rebooted into the Ubuntu installation, as is traditional. Unfortunately, X wouldn't accept input of any sorts. The consoles would, but nothing we could do would fix X. So, we turned to Google. This turned up a similar problem that some people had experienced when upgrading to Intrepid, the solution for which was to purge GDM and reinstall it. So, we did so.
This was our second mistake.
None of the network interfaces were configured, and apt didn't want to use the CD as a source of packages. There was no easy way to install any packages, even those that shipped with Ubuntu. So, at this point Nick was getting impatient, so we booted into the LiveCD so he could piss around on Facebook or something. Once he had finished wasting his life away on Facebook, we decided to try reinstalling. The most convenient way to do this was the Install icon on the desktop, so we used that.
It. Worked. Perfectly.
Nick is now happily using his mostly-free laptop, so we all live happily ever after. My only thoughts are that the LiveCD installer copies the X and network configurations from the LiveCD, whereas the boot menu option can't. But that shouldn't break it as much as it did.
Oh, and, lamby, before you ask: my bug report.
Posted: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:06 | | Comments: 0 |