The initial idea was to get Ubuntu running on my Rose laptop with a wireless card. I figured that this would be justification for continuing to use it and keep it out of storage and to have a reason -- other than "I can't really afford one" -- to not start looking at new laptops. Somewhere along there, I became frustrated with switching back and forth between a windows desktop and linux laptop to solve problems and learn.
To make a long story short, I'm typing this in Opera 9 Beta running in Breezy Badger on my desktop after a couple of false starts. Almost everything I'm using so far is now working the way I want it, but I'm still a newbie as far as 98% of the command line is concerned. Given enough free time, that should be remedied by Google and two large books on Linux, both of which break an annoying habit of writers assuming that all new users want to run RedHat products.
Once UPS fixes their routing error and gets my new hard drive from Terre Haute to here, I can set up a permanent installation using this one as guidance. Having the BIOS select the boot drive and associated OS is still working, so the plan is to keep Windows and Linux on completely separate drives, for ease of formatting during clean installs or recoveries.
Edit: The hard drive is here and installed. Somehow, it managed not only to break the boot process, but also the install process. Nothing is wrong with the drive; it just doesn't like Linux much. In addition, the installation described above has been formatted away. No Ubuntu for me. :(
Comments (3)
How well did Ubuntu end up working on your Rose laptop? I'm about to try something similar, but haven't decided which distro to use.
Sorry to hear about the crippling installation. Better luck to you.
Posted by opticsdoug | April 30, 2006 10:08 PM
Posted on April 30, 2006 22:08
Actually, it runs fairly well on our Rose laptops, but window loading times are noticeably slow when you have a lot of things going. I even had wireless functioning with an Atheros chipset PCMCIA card from D-link. WEP works flawlessly, but WPA access still needs some more effort on my end in properly configuring wpa-supplicant.
The reason the install process went south is kind of embarrassing; I had gotten an icing thumbprint on the cd right over the spot that had the kernel image and didn't notice for about four hours. Now it works fine.
Posted by charles | May 1, 2006 1:29 PM
Posted on May 1, 2006 13:29
I suppose I should note that I don't have the original 6 GB hard drive in my laptop. It has a 20 GB that I bought later.
Posted by charles | May 3, 2006 3:26 PM
Posted on May 3, 2006 15:26