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banjoplayinnerdIt seemed like a simple proposition. Put Xubuntu onto my computer alongside mainline Ubuntu so I could try running my radio software with the lighter weight Xfce desktop manager. Shoulda been a two hour job at most. Instead it's turned into the three hour tour of computing.
It's enough to make you want to take up stamp collecting.
Here is a brief synopsis of what I've been through in the last week or so:
* Booted from a CD and created a new partition for Xubuntu to install into
* Downloaded and burned the latest Xubuntu CD.
* Booted from the CD, ran the Ubiquity installer and answered the questions. The installer died about halfway through. No warning, no dialog, no helpful information in the logs. One second it was running and then bang, it was gone.
* Downloaded the previous LTS (long term support) version of Xubuntu, 10.04 and burned a CD. Booted the CD. It came up with a "boot: " prompt. I hadn't seen one of those in years. Luckily I remembered that it was asking for the name of an image file to boot from. I entered "live" and was off and running.
* Ran the installer and installed Xubuntu into the partition I made for it. Rebooted the computer.
* Got an error saying it was trying to boot from a non-existent drive and a cryptic message, "grub rescue>". Huh??
A couple of other error messages I got during this time period led me to believe that this hard drive might be failing, so I stowed it away in case there was any information I might need to get from it. (Luckily my home directory is on a different disk, which is fine.) I ordered a new hard drive from Newegg. I'll skip the part where I found another hard drive in the bedroom and it too turned out to be in declining health.
* Installed Xubuntu 10.04 LTS onto a USB drive and was able to boot from it and run the computer, although the booting was not automatic like it should have been. This is a solution but not an optimal one for several reasons. For one thing, I can't update all the software packages on the drive because it's a small drive with limited space. For another, the drive is somewhat slow. And for a third, the memory in USB drives tends to ablate after a few tens of thousands of writes. Granted that could take a while, but the idea of running my computer off of a device that will eventually succumb to cybersenility bothers me.
I'll skip the part where I had to fight with the volume levels on the sound card so I could get the radio software to work. All evening Tuesday.
* Last night the new hard drive arrived. Me and Igor the Younger put it into the computer, closed up the case and booted from the USB drive. (His contribution to the effort primarily consisted of telling me "Good job, Grandpa!" and eating a cookie I brought home from a meeting I went to at City Hall yesterday.) So far so good. Xubuntu saw the new hard drive, put a partition on it, installed the software, rebooted . . .
and got, as far as I can tell, the exact same error message I had a week ago about a missing partition and "grub rescue>".
I have a plan for fixing this when I get home from work today. I may also have a plan for going out skeet shooting with a few Xubuntu CDs.
This has been the most frustrating experience I've had in Linux in 15 years. Even setting up dial-up networking with chat scripts back in the day wasn't this frustrating. If I were coming to Linux for the first time and this was my first experience with it, I would write it off as something I'm obviously not geeky enough for and go back to Windows. As it is in my darker moments I occasionally wonder whether I shouldn't just give up and install XP on the darn thing. That would be capitulation, though.
I'll have an update later tonight. Maybe.
It's enough to make you want to take up stamp collecting.
Here is a brief synopsis of what I've been through in the last week or so:
* Booted from a CD and created a new partition for Xubuntu to install into
* Downloaded and burned the latest Xubuntu CD.
* Booted from the CD, ran the Ubiquity installer and answered the questions. The installer died about halfway through. No warning, no dialog, no helpful information in the logs. One second it was running and then bang, it was gone.
* Downloaded the previous LTS (long term support) version of Xubuntu, 10.04 and burned a CD. Booted the CD. It came up with a "boot: " prompt. I hadn't seen one of those in years. Luckily I remembered that it was asking for the name of an image file to boot from. I entered "live" and was off and running.
* Ran the installer and installed Xubuntu into the partition I made for it. Rebooted the computer.
* Got an error saying it was trying to boot from a non-existent drive and a cryptic message, "grub rescue>". Huh??
A couple of other error messages I got during this time period led me to believe that this hard drive might be failing, so I stowed it away in case there was any information I might need to get from it. (Luckily my home directory is on a different disk, which is fine.) I ordered a new hard drive from Newegg. I'll skip the part where I found another hard drive in the bedroom and it too turned out to be in declining health.
* Installed Xubuntu 10.04 LTS onto a USB drive and was able to boot from it and run the computer, although the booting was not automatic like it should have been. This is a solution but not an optimal one for several reasons. For one thing, I can't update all the software packages on the drive because it's a small drive with limited space. For another, the drive is somewhat slow. And for a third, the memory in USB drives tends to ablate after a few tens of thousands of writes. Granted that could take a while, but the idea of running my computer off of a device that will eventually succumb to cybersenility bothers me.
I'll skip the part where I had to fight with the volume levels on the sound card so I could get the radio software to work. All evening Tuesday.
* Last night the new hard drive arrived. Me and Igor the Younger put it into the computer, closed up the case and booted from the USB drive. (His contribution to the effort primarily consisted of telling me "Good job, Grandpa!" and eating a cookie I brought home from a meeting I went to at City Hall yesterday.) So far so good. Xubuntu saw the new hard drive, put a partition on it, installed the software, rebooted . . .
and got, as far as I can tell, the exact same error message I had a week ago about a missing partition and "grub rescue>".
I have a plan for fixing this when I get home from work today. I may also have a plan for going out skeet shooting with a few Xubuntu CDs.
This has been the most frustrating experience I've had in Linux in 15 years. Even setting up dial-up networking with chat scripts back in the day wasn't this frustrating. If I were coming to Linux for the first time and this was my first experience with it, I would write it off as something I'm obviously not geeky enough for and go back to Windows. As it is in my darker moments I occasionally wonder whether I shouldn't just give up and install XP on the darn thing. That would be capitulation, though.
I'll have an update later tonight. Maybe.
