The Ubuntu Files - Part 1

First off let me say, that I don't give praise often, so don't expect much in these articles, instead I will torment you with my gripes and hassles when replacing Windows XP SP2 with Ubuntu 7.10. SUNDAY So I arrive home on Sunday to discover my PC mysteriously blue screening on start up. A quick poke under the hood reveals XP has become corrupt. No worries, I boot of the install disc into the recovery console, run a check disc and quietly ignore the ominous "pinging" noise coming from my case. Right I get back into windows except now explorer.exe has somehow managed to successfully half load, that is it's loaded but making use of things like the file browser and non existent task bar is a bit tricky seeing as how they aren't there. No worries I tell myself and run a quick "sfc /scannow"... The pings grow more frequent... That finishes up, I reboot, and BAM I get slapped with a blue screen. Things are starting to get serious now, so reinstall windows, all goes well, till I try to reimport my mail from the backup partition on the disc, I get OPOD'd (the Ominous Ping of Death). Right, this drive is clearly busted I tell myself, I manage to get windows stable enough for me to backup up my life's work to my 500gb. MONDAY At work I decide that all this praise I am hearing about Ubuntu must me true, I mean the 30% take on the Linux desktop in 3 short years must mean something right? So I set me up with the 7.10 CD image, try to burn it to DVD in Nero, which confused the living daylights out of Nero. So I downloaded DVDDecryptor, which being free, is a whole lot cheaper than Nero and apparently smarter, it burned the image to a DVD for me no problems. Now before I just go and install willy nilly, I need to be clear on a few things, so I consult with a mate of mine who claims to know his stuff and whom I know has been running Ubuntu for a while. The conversation went as such:

ME: Dude, does the Ubuntu mail offering allow me to import PST files? JAHN: Yeah, off course, dude , Ubuntu is awesome it can do anything. ME: Will the partitioner, in the install, allow me to resize some of my partitions without losing all my data? JAHN: Yeah, off course, dude , Ubuntu is awesome it can do anything. ME: How quick and easy is it to get windows file sharing and my wireless network set up? JAHN: Yeah, off co-- ummm, I mean, no it's really quick and easy, Ubuntu is awesome, it can do anything quick and easy! ME: Jahn, how do you spell "fanbooii"? JAHN: What?

So I stick in the install disc, which boots into the live demo, now a word of advice my very first attempt at installing failed because I thought the installer might need some internet should it want to look for updates. And in the process of configuring my network I changed my hostname, which may or may not have had a warning dialog, I don't remember. The point is the install cannot deal with this. So I reboot. This time, I don't touch anything but double click the install icon, the installer runs through quite quickly, when the partition options load, I opt out on set them up manually and just chose the guided mode which can use a whole disc or largest chunk of continuous free space. I do this because I have decided to install on my supposedly broken disc which hasn't OPOD'd me in a while. 10 minutes later at about 98%, I get a PING!PING!PING!PING! Frozen. At this juncture, I feel it necessary to not go into the details, but to relate after trying to install on a second drive I encountered the same problems, only more complexed by the fact that Jahn lied and I can't resize partitions safely in the install. The point is two days of partitioning and debuging lead me to the point where I had a clean installation of Ubuntu 7.10, all my drives intact and ping free, no data loss and one busted molex connector with a dodgey -12volt rail.

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