Monday, April 28, 2008
Travails with Linux
Another weekend of trying to install Linux, this time Ubuntu, and I've finally given up on trying to set up and maintain a dual-boot system. It just ain't happening.
Something random going on with Ubuntu version 8.04, which is only recently released. I even bought a self-help book to make sure I wasn't missing something in the set up, or the partitioning. Swop file set? Check. Format spare partition on primary SCSI hard drive with EXT3 fs? Check.
I took the easy route - booted the Ubuntu live CD and ran the install from there - and I took the harder route and installed from the CD. Why did I do it twice? In fact I did it four times. Each time, after the system was up around three to five minutes, the screen would blank and the system would freeze me out. Not a CTRL-ALT-DEL freeze-out but what the techies in the late 80s used to call a problem that needed the BRS solution - toggling the the Big Red Switch on the front of IBM PS2s to get them out of a lock-up type of freeze-out.
Much as I hate cycling the power on a running system, I did it - and eventually after the fourth try, I gave up and installed VMware on Vista. The VM version of Ubuntu works perfectly - and I really have not got the time, inclination or deep technical skills to try and work out what went wrong.
So, I'm stuck with using Windows as the underlying OS. At least everything works, including my webcam (a few years old, and flaky with Linux) and the toaster - the Netgear SG101 NAS device - where I actually made a bit of progress. Yep, discovered that it is possible to run my Linux VMs from the NAS drive, even though the disks are rather slow and offer a maximum R/W speed of around 5MB per second. This discovery helped sweeten the bitter pill and widens my choice of Linux flavors. The rather excellent ThoughtPolice website even provided me with super-fast downloads (via BitTorrent, faster than HTTP) for some ready-baked VMware images such as Fedora.
Something random going on with Ubuntu version 8.04, which is only recently released. I even bought a self-help book to make sure I wasn't missing something in the set up, or the partitioning. Swop file set? Check. Format spare partition on primary SCSI hard drive with EXT3 fs? Check.
I took the easy route - booted the Ubuntu live CD and ran the install from there - and I took the harder route and installed from the CD. Why did I do it twice? In fact I did it four times. Each time, after the system was up around three to five minutes, the screen would blank and the system would freeze me out. Not a CTRL-ALT-DEL freeze-out but what the techies in the late 80s used to call a problem that needed the BRS solution - toggling the the Big Red Switch on the front of IBM PS2s to get them out of a lock-up type of freeze-out.
Much as I hate cycling the power on a running system, I did it - and eventually after the fourth try, I gave up and installed VMware on Vista. The VM version of Ubuntu works perfectly - and I really have not got the time, inclination or deep technical skills to try and work out what went wrong.
So, I'm stuck with using Windows as the underlying OS. At least everything works, including my webcam (a few years old, and flaky with Linux) and the toaster - the Netgear SG101 NAS device - where I actually made a bit of progress. Yep, discovered that it is possible to run my Linux VMs from the NAS drive, even though the disks are rather slow and offer a maximum R/W speed of around 5MB per second. This discovery helped sweeten the bitter pill and widens my choice of Linux flavors. The rather excellent ThoughtPolice website even provided me with super-fast downloads (via BitTorrent, faster than HTTP) for some ready-baked VMware images such as Fedora.
Labels: Linux, Ubuntu, virtualization, Vista
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