Linux Trials 1 - Ubuntu 7.1
After a very busy couple of weeks I am finally able to start testing various Linux systems. I found a great source for small hard drives so that I could install each system on a different hard drive - Free Geeks Vancouver. This group, part of a chain of volunteer organizations in many different cities, helps to recycle unwanted computers. I’ll blog about them another time. When I explained what I was doing, the manager, Dave, rooted around in a box and gave me a bunch of used hard drives for $5.
The test system is a retired Athlon 600Hz system with 520MB of ram, a CD player, a good Invidia video card, 4 USB ports, and an ethernet card. The system bios is an old _____. The computer is connected to a Dlink router with an Ethernet cable. I cannot capture screen shots during the install process - So I’ll use a tiny Nikon digital camera to that.
I didn’t have to burn the install CD as Dave at Free Geeks loaned one to me. I could have d
ownloaded the Ubuntu 7.10 desktop edition at disk at Ubuntu.com, and burned a disk image from an .iso file. I’ll describe how to do that when I review the next Linux system.
I’ve read that Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux desktop systems. It is based on Debian, which is also a popular version of Linux. Apparently some Debian followers felt that Debian management was too conservative in releasing new functionality, and that releases should be made much sooner - so they started Ubuntu, which has new releases every 6 months. Ubuntu and Debian are very similar… I’ll download Debian as a future trial and report on it in a future blog.
To have a consistent start, I used a Windows XP install CD to delete the existing partitions on the hard drive. My thought there is to limit the variables in the different install trials. It took about 3 minutes to boot XP and delete the partitions. Although its possible to do a dual install with Windows and Linux on one computer, I’ve decided that I’ll do these trials with only Linux on the system. I think I will try a dual boot install only after I’ve decided on the Linux system I want to install permanently.
To start the install, I put the Ubuntu 7.10 disk in the CD player and pressed <cntrl><alt><del> to get started. I set my timer to 0:00 so I could keep track of the install time.
An Ubuntu screen came up. It recognized the out-of-date bios immediately and made some screen comment “Bios out of Date range (1999) force…” and jumped to a new screen before I could read the whole sentence.
All I saw for the next two minutes was some orange blocks going back and forth in a horizontal bar on the screen. I would have liked to have some feedback… The light on the CD player was flickering regularly, so I knew it was not dead.
Next, I heard a short snippet of music and the screen went black. I watched for a full minute as nothing happened… finally, I hit <enter> to see if that might get it moving.. and surprise!!!, a pretty new screen popped up - a brown and orange swirl.
I noticed an install icon in the top right corner of the desktop, so I clicked it and a short questionnaire popped up, asking me my location, keyboard type, language type and such.
After a few moments a hard drive install screen came up giving me a number of options. I chose a Guided install for the whole hard drive. A very clear warning came up saying that all data on the disk was going to be lost - did I want to proceed. Yes.
The install began, and I went to make myself a cup of coffee. I peeked in at the install screen from time to time, and it gave me regular updates about what it was doing. It recognized and installed the HP 3015 printer I had plugged into a USB port.
At 31 minutes the CD drawer opened, and an instruction to remove the disk appeared on the screen. So I did that, and once again a black screen appeared - I waited a couple of minutes this time to see what would happen, and became impatient at 34 minutes, and pressed the <enter> key. There was a short burst of music, and the screen went black. I pressed <enter> right away this time, and a new screen came up telling me that I could install a non- open source driver for my NVidia card if I would like to. I accepted, and the system downloaded and installed the driver.
At 37 minutes I was told that 124 software updates were available - would I like to do that now? I accepted, and a screen came up telling me that the updates were being downloaded at 608kb/sec and it would take 5.5 minutes to complete.
At 49 minutes I got a blank screen again. Pressing the <enter> button go the install screen back telling me that updates were complete. Checking around the desktop I saw that the windows network was recognized, I tested the printer, and it worked.
The install was very smooth. I would have preferred not to have had the black screens, but pressing <enter> got it all going again so aside from some anxiety, it wasn’t a problem.
I like the “Gnome” interface. The alternative is KDE - I’ve talked about the difference in another post.
To test out the installation of some new software, I called up Synaptic, the program installer and did a search for blog clients. Three came up, and I chose to install all three of them. I noticed that there were 23,132 programs (”packages” in Linux speak) available to chose from… I’ll spend some time in the next day or two looking through the catalogue to see what might be useful.
I was finished at 61 minutes.
It looks like a good system. I’ll play around with it for a few days to see how it looks and feels, and report on that in a future blog.
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