Ubuntu Lives!!

Discussion in 'Linux / Unix Discussion' started by tripwire45, Aug 9, 2006.

  1. tripwire45
    Honorary Member

    tripwire45 Zettabyte Poster

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    ...on my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop, that is. I took the plunge last night and completely blew away Windows XP Pro, replacing it with Ubuntu 6.06 (naturally, I backed up all my data to my lab machine first).

    Things started out rough when I rebooted the laptop with the Ubuntu live CD inside. It started loading the kernel and then I'd get an I/O error saying that it couldn't read the disk.

    I researched the error and discovered that it can be caused by an incompatibility between the BIOs and the kernel loader or can be caused by flaws in the CD if it was burned at too high a speed. The CD is a commercial product and I had installed my Ubuntu VM with it so I didn't think the disk was at fault.

    I tried to upgrade my BIOS only to discover that it's the latest version. Finally, I took a look at the CD's surface under a strong light and saw two small smudges on the edges of the disk. I used a soft cloth to wipe them away, put the disk back in the laptop, rebooted...and it's off to the races.

    The installation seemed to take forever, but that's probably because I was nervous some other fubar would turn up. However, the install went without incident.

    It took hours to update Ubuntu from the various repositories but that was finally finished sometime after midnight.

    Today, I set up printing and it detected every computer in the house that has ever printed including my son's wireless laptop that uses a separate printer. It detected the printer's hose and the printers share name just like that (I agonized to get the ubuntu VM to print).

    All this while, I had the laptop connected to the LAN via a patch cable. While Ubuntu detected my PCMCIA wlan card, there was no wireless connection.

    I got into Networking and enabled the card. I put in the WEP key for my wlan (it had already detected my SSID as well as my neighbor's). At first was puzzled because the card got an IP from my DHCP server but when I tried to ping the server, I got a "destination unreachable" message...even though they're on the same subnet.

    I issued the dhclient command (like doing ipconfig/release ipconfig/renew in Windows) and it got a new IP address lease. I pinged the server again and it worked. I pinged Google and got returns on that too. Wireless works and I didn't have to tweak one darn thing.

    Power management couldn't be easier. The menus are pretty intuitive...at least to me and despite what Linus Torvalds and a horde of others may say, I prefer Gnome to KDE so it's a comfortable fit.

    I'm now trolling for other software to download and install (there are a ton of free packages out there. I checked out my disks and Ubuntu correctly identified my optical drive as being able to play CDs and DVDs and burn CDs and assigned default programs for those tasks.

    I'll be testing those functions out by the by but so far, anything I could do on Windows I can do on Ubuntu. I am very pleased with Ubuntu's performance and if anything, it performs better on my laptop than as a virtual machine in VMware.

    Just thought I'd report in on my adventures. Cheers.
    [​IMG]
     
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  2. simongrahamuk
    Honorary Member

    simongrahamuk Hmmmmmmm?

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    Nice one Trip! Good to hear that all is going well! :biggrin
     
  3. Boycie
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    Boycie Senior Beer Tester

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    Three cheers for Ubuntu. Ubuntu Rocks :rocks
     
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  4. wizard

    wizard Petabyte Poster

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    When I get another box built I'll be using ubuntu again :)
     
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  5. fortch

    fortch Kilobyte Poster

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    I've got Dapper installed on a server (LAMP), and it rocks so much that it might occupy a desktop. I've currently got Gnome installed, in case I can't figure out something in CL, and will probably remove it once it's live. It's got webmin, so remote administration is a snap.
     
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  6. madman045

    madman045 Kilobyte Poster

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    Sounds good, im half tempted to do this with my work laptop....

    I currently have XP Pro and Vista Beta 2 running...

    Are you going to run XP in a VM then and if you do I would be interested in its performance...

    Andy
     
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  7. tripwire45
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    tripwire45 Zettabyte Poster

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    Not sure who you are addressing Andy, but if it's me...I have my lab machine running Windows XP Pro. It has VMware WS 5.5 on it along with all the data I backed up from the laptop. Now, of the three machines I normally interact with, only one runs windows and most of the time, it's running Linux in VM. :)

     
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  8. fortch

    fortch Kilobyte Poster

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    More and more, there's only 3 reasons to mess with Windows in my life:

    1. To keep up to date, for employment purposes.
    2. For gaming, although most of my gaming is migrating to the 360!
    3. Most recording/guitar software is only developed for windows (or Mac, sometimes -- which I *don't* own).

    With #2 fading, and #3 only a matter of time, #1 doesn't seem so important :dry
     
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  9. ffreeloader

    ffreeloader Terabyte Poster

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    Take a look at Audacity. I've seen some real rave reviews of it. I have installed and looked at it, but don't really have any driving desire to learn it so I can't tell you much about it other than it seems to have a lot of features and is rather popular in the Linux community.
     
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  10. fortch

    fortch Kilobyte Poster

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    I have been using Audacity for years, and it is a good alternative -- but it can't compare to something like ProTools. However, I'm not adverse to taking the plunge. Really, I've been enamored of Line6 gear recently, and their software only runs on Windows and Macs.

    Someday... :rolleyes:
     
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