Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 2 June 2006, 6:00 PM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Thursday 1/06/2006
It's Ubuntu day! Yet more evidence of the power of fast networks: the moment the finished Ubuntu 6.06 LTS distribution is ready, I can snatch it off a server, write it to a CD, reboot a sacrificial machine and — whammo! The world's most user-friendly Linux is mine.
What could be easier?
Let's start with the fact that none of us in the office has burned a CD for some time. Why would we? We've all got broadband and portable hard disk devices for our info-pleasure. So this means I rediscover that XP has no ISO burning built in, but that this doesn't matter because IT has saved three quid fifty and not fitted a CD burner to my computer. My two nearest compadres do have CD burners, but neither work. One just doesn't plain work full stop, the other has the audacity to seemingly work but produces coasters.
There is a laptop with a CD burner that works, but the networking's a bit dodgy. How to get 660MB of image onto it? "You could always burn it onto a CD" said a passing techie. But don't worry, he'll be back on his feet in no time. I have a 2GB USB thumb drive that Kingston kindly sent me, but it is sitting in the back of a PC at a friend's house where we accidentally left it one evening, it being so small and easy to forget. In the end, something is cobbled together with FTP and I have a bootable Ubuntu CD.
Unfortunately, I haven't read the small print. The standard Ubuntu 6.06 CD is very, very clever: it's a live CD that boots into a fully working version of the OS, and if you like what you see you can then click on an icon to have it install itself on your PC. Ubuntu 6.06 also has the most excellent Linux characteristic of running perfectly well on slow, memory-sparse older machines. However, as I discover after an hour of CD thrashing on an ancient Compaq Armada, such machines aren't really capable of supporting the live CD while it's simultaneously doing the installation. "For machines with 192MB of RAM or less", the small print reads, "you should use the alternative, text mode, install-only image".
By this time, Ubuntu's release is common knowledge and the servers are pretty saturated. I try BitTorrent, but something on our network isn't having that. So it takes me the best part of a further hour to download the alternative ISO, then squeeze it through the ad-hoc CD writing system and slap that into the Compaq. It happily swallows, and I set it going to sort itself out.
Which leaves me with a spare Live CD... and my main Windows PC, which has a spare 10GB hard disk in it already, currently hosting a time-expired beta of Longhorn. Oooh. Tempting. Go on lad, ladle in that open goodness.
It all goes swimmingly. Ubuntu fairly flies in — not bad for a penguin — and despite a moment's hesitation while I convince myself that I'm telling it to put itself onto the secondary disk and not the main one with all my Windows work related stuff on it, I have little fear in pressing the Go button. Within ten minutes, I'm looking at a fully functioning installation. I even get Evolution talking to the company mail server, set up access to our content management system and start replacing Ubuntu's relentlessly brown colour scheme with something a little less... brown. It looks as if not only does the darn thing work, but that it will work well enough for me to use it as a direct Windows replacement in the office.
One last thing — I'd better check I can still boot into Windows. Close down Ubuntu, up pops the Grub multiboot menu (ugly as its insectoid namesake), and there's the old dear still slumbering away. Choose it, and off we go. Excellent. I do a couple of housekeeping tasks in XP, and decide to return to Ubuntu. Restart, please.
After a minute staring like a moron at my machine repeatedly resetting itself, it's clear that bad things have happened. I'll spare you the subsequent pain, but it looks very much that something in Windows — perhaps our corporate AV scanner — had spotted the multiboot loader and decided it was not to live.
By 11pm, I am deep in Linux partitioning hell, trying to work out what exactly gets loaded when and what happens next. Ironically, I can only get Windows back by reinstalling Ubuntu: there is some magic by which I can just reset Grub, but it escapes me. If I let Windows run just once, I'm back to square one — and I'm loath to tinker too much with the master boot record.
Looks like the plan to get Goodwins onto open source only may be progressing rather too fast.
Time for bed.
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