The arduous move to ubuntu
so, I killed Debian and Windows after backing up a few years worth of random documents and switched to ubuntu 8.10 per Nick Tillman's recommendation. The main issue I was having with my previous setup was that I only gave my Windows partition about 10 gigs of space, so it was continually complaining about not having enough space. This time, I decided to give them an even split of 30 gigs each. We'll see how that goes.
I basically spent yesterday's entirety dedicated to the move, and it went pretty much as follows.
step 1: research the methods for the move. This was especially important for my situation as my laptop does not have a cd-drive and had to find alternate methods for booting and installing.
I found a utility that allows you to create a bootable usb key, which is what I anticipated doing. I downloaded the iso for the ubuntu installer, expecting to use that, but I found out that the utility just puts a few files on the usb key and allows the installer to pretty much run as a net install, which I prefer, so I'm unnecessarily using disk space on my desktop
step 2: prep the installer, which is explained above... the utility pretty much took care of everything
step 3: run the installer. I wasn't sure about how to partition, size of swap space and where to put the linux partition. I don't think it makes a difference where the partition is, but I basically made a root partition and a swap space of about 1 GB. The root partition was set as bootable.
I was actually pleasantly surprised that it was able to detect my wireless network card and run the install off the wireless card. I anticipated less problems with the wireless card because of this. The connection dropped once, but the network was being finicky at that time. It essentially installed without any hitches.
step 4: troubleshoot initial problems - mainly booting problems, making sure peripherals work.
The laptop would not boot without the USB key for some strange reason. When I would tell it to boot from the USB key, instead of running the installer, it would boot up off the hard drive. I think this has something to do with the fact that the hard drive is considered an sdx drive instead of an hdx drive. The wireless card worked right off, connected to my wireless network without any problems, so I searched for the problem and found a fix using the grub command line, which I had never used before. took a couple reboots to fix, but once that was done, everything was good! made sure sound worked and installed java run time environment so that I can use VNC. Install a flash plugin and tested flash video and sound. Everything works great! This install was several times easier than the Debian install and troubleshoot.
step 5: new problems! the wireless card stopped working as soon as I got to school. I spent about 30 minutes in class trying to troubleshoot the problem, but I couldn't figure out how to get the network manager to recognize my wireless card and scan for networks. It would work automagically when at home, under my network, but not at school, even with my previous knowledge of iwconfig and all the wireless tools. Many people were having the same sort of problems as I was having, but they were all slightly different and required the whole reinstalling of the drivers and all that fun stuff. I finally stumbled, about 2 hours later, onto a site that explained that sometimes the wireless has problems with the kill-switch to enable and disable the wireless card and that the network manager had problems dealing with this. The site explained that Wicd has control over the kill-switch, so I downloaded that and presto! worked like a charm.
step 6: yet to see, I've still got the bluetooth to play with, so we'll see what happens
-Arthur
"learning all the engineery stuff, so you don't have to"
I basically spent yesterday's entirety dedicated to the move, and it went pretty much as follows.
step 1: research the methods for the move. This was especially important for my situation as my laptop does not have a cd-drive and had to find alternate methods for booting and installing.
I found a utility that allows you to create a bootable usb key, which is what I anticipated doing. I downloaded the iso for the ubuntu installer, expecting to use that, but I found out that the utility just puts a few files on the usb key and allows the installer to pretty much run as a net install, which I prefer, so I'm unnecessarily using disk space on my desktop
step 2: prep the installer, which is explained above... the utility pretty much took care of everything
step 3: run the installer. I wasn't sure about how to partition, size of swap space and where to put the linux partition. I don't think it makes a difference where the partition is, but I basically made a root partition and a swap space of about 1 GB. The root partition was set as bootable.
I was actually pleasantly surprised that it was able to detect my wireless network card and run the install off the wireless card. I anticipated less problems with the wireless card because of this. The connection dropped once, but the network was being finicky at that time. It essentially installed without any hitches.
step 4: troubleshoot initial problems - mainly booting problems, making sure peripherals work.
The laptop would not boot without the USB key for some strange reason. When I would tell it to boot from the USB key, instead of running the installer, it would boot up off the hard drive. I think this has something to do with the fact that the hard drive is considered an sdx drive instead of an hdx drive. The wireless card worked right off, connected to my wireless network without any problems, so I searched for the problem and found a fix using the grub command line, which I had never used before. took a couple reboots to fix, but once that was done, everything was good! made sure sound worked and installed java run time environment so that I can use VNC. Install a flash plugin and tested flash video and sound. Everything works great! This install was several times easier than the Debian install and troubleshoot.
step 5: new problems! the wireless card stopped working as soon as I got to school. I spent about 30 minutes in class trying to troubleshoot the problem, but I couldn't figure out how to get the network manager to recognize my wireless card and scan for networks. It would work automagically when at home, under my network, but not at school, even with my previous knowledge of iwconfig and all the wireless tools. Many people were having the same sort of problems as I was having, but they were all slightly different and required the whole reinstalling of the drivers and all that fun stuff. I finally stumbled, about 2 hours later, onto a site that explained that sometimes the wireless has problems with the kill-switch to enable and disable the wireless card and that the network manager had problems dealing with this. The site explained that Wicd has control over the kill-switch, so I downloaded that and presto! worked like a charm.
step 6: yet to see, I've still got the bluetooth to play with, so we'll see what happens
-Arthur
"learning all the engineery stuff, so you don't have to"