Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Thursday 3 September 2009, 8:53 PM
Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Alpha 5 - A Few Quick Comments
- During installation, it no longer asks anything about installing GRUB, it always installs it to the MBR. This is actually not a new change to this Alpha release, I'm not sure when they started doing this, but in my case, because of my multi-boot configurations, I wish it would still give me a choice of whether and where to install GRUB - especially since they are installing GRUB 2.
- The installation progress window now has an "information/education" window associated with it, which tells you things like "Surf the Web with Firefox"... over and over and over again. Sound familiar? I could live without this particular change...
- There is a spiffy new replacement for the boot progress bar. I guess it looks nice, but it doesn't tell you much about how far along in the boot process it is. I suppose when booting only takes about 30 seconds, this isn't a critical progress indicator any more. Anyway, this is the second time in two releases that they have changed this - and I liked the previous change a lot better than I like this one.
- There is a new panel icon for User identification and Shutdown, which is sort of nice... but I can't find a "Preferences" option for it, and thus I haven't yet been able to figure out how to remove the irritating delay when I shutdown or reboot. Either I'm overlooking this, or it is just missing in this Alpha release and will appear again before the final release. I hope.
I just realized that these comments almost all sound negative, and I don't intend it to be that way. This latest Alpha release is really good, it is very well developed and stable. I'll install it on various other notebooks and netbooks tomorrow. I'm just a bit puzzled by these few little quirks.
jw 3/9/2009
PreviousComments on this post
I used to install Ubuntu to an external disk and place all the boot configuration and grub on the external disk, thus leaving the MBR and existing boot manager(s) untouched.
If I wanted to run Ubuntu, I would shut down, plug in the external disk and restart (having previously changed the boot priorities in the bios) and, hey presto, Ubuntu without touching the internal hard drive.
Now I would like that option in order to install and try out 10.1 alphas and betas without disturbing my system(s) at this time. I know I can achieve this by yanking out the internal hard drive during the installation process but I prefer not to as advised by Lenovo.
You could get a USB/SATA/PATA interface gizmo. It has pinouts for 40 and 44 pin PATA/IDE, a SATA connection and it all plugs into a USB socket. Plug a drive into one of those three sockets. Plug in a power supply for the drive. The gizmo usually has an external power supply for the drive since a USB port can't run most IDE or SATA drives. Reset the BIOS to boot off USB HDD and you're in business.
To install it, I assume you have a DVD or CDROM drive in the laptop? Just tell the install to go to the USB connected drive.
I'm assuming Jamie that the alpha install will at least allow you to point the install at something other than hd0 right?
Moley - I had just started to think about something similar to what XWJ suggests. In fact, I haven't tried installing Karmic on a completely separate drive, as you suggest, I've only installed it on a partition of the internal drive of my laptop/netbooks. It's very possible that when you install on a separate drive, it will automatically install GRUB to the MBR of that drive, thus leaving your internal drive intact.
Here's another thought that I haven't been able to verify yet - perhaps the "Alternate Install CD" will let you control whether and where GRUB will be installed. I suspect that is probably the case, because the release notes say "if you have problems with the alternate installer, please file a bug report on the debian-installer package".
XWJ - Yes, you can point the installation at drives other than hd0. I haven't tried that myself, though.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
jw
Thanks XWJ and Jamie for your replies. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I remember a clear choice in earlier Ubuntu versions to install to an external drive without writing anything to the internal hard drive(s). Perhaps the alternative non-live install CD will will give that choice. I'll check that out.
I have triple boot of WinXP, Win7 and Ubuntu Netbook Remix which I do not wish to interfere with since I had so much difficulty after installing the latest Win7. First I lost the boot mechanism for Ubuntu and, when this was finally (but not easily) resolved using Easy BCD and the live Ubuntu CD, I had lost the ability into boot WinXP. This I ultimately discovered was caused by a corrupted NTLDR (new size - ~24Mb instead of 245 Kb) - no idea how this happened.
So I just like the idea of trying out Ubuntu without interfering with my current installations.
Moley - I remember that version too, and that's the version that I wish we had back, but I guess that "we" are in the minority, and questions about how, where and whether to install GRUB look pretty intimidating for ordinary users...
I think, or perhaps I suspect, that if you use the current installer and in the first steps you choose an external drive as the installation target, it will then write GRUB to the MBR of that drive, and not your internal drive. But I'm not certain, because I haven't tried it myself, and I don't blame you for not wanting to find out the hard way if this is true - especially after what has happened to me today (more on that later).
jw
@Moley - WARNING! The LiveCD installer does NOT work the way that I had assumed it would in this case. I just tested it, while in the process of reloading the Mini-Note. I connected an external drive on a USB/SATA adapter, and selected a partition on that drive for the installation. It seemed to install properly, but when the installation was finished, it had written GRUB to the MBR of the internal drive. Not good.
jw 6/9/2009
I'm sorry now I butted in. Moley if my idea caused you any grief I'm sorry about that.
Jamie and XWJ thanks for your consideration. I have only got as far as preparing the CD. However, I wasn't going to take the risk. I'll just try the live CD or USB installation in the meantime.
Another thing. I have read somewhere that installing Ext4 and Grub 2 might lead to broken access to other (Grub/Ext3 ....) Linux installations in a multi boot situation as a result of incompatibilities.
@Moley - I have several extensive multi-boot setups, as I suppose you know. They all have mixes of ext3 and ext4 filesystems; I always use ext4 if it is available, and ext3 otherwise. I haven't seen any real problems arising from this, the only minor irritation is the one-way compatibility. The situation is made a bit more complex by the fact that whether or not GRUB understands ext4 is completely independent of whether the Linux system itself understands it; openSuSE 11.1 and Fedora 11 are good examples of this; openSuSE 11.1 doesn't support ext4, the but GRUB that comes with it does, whereas Fedora 11 does support ext4, but the GRUB that comes with it does not.
This is all very confusing, and although I have always been able to get what I needed out of it, you really do have to think carefully about it. Here are a few examples:
- I have Ubuntu Karmic installed in ext4, and openSuSE 11.1 in ext3. I can access the openSuSE partition from Karmic, but not the other way around.
- Ubuntu Jaunty uses Legacy Grub, while Ubuntu Karmic uses GRUB 2. Neither of them can understand the contents of the other one's configuration file, so I can't use the "configfile" directive as I have always done in the past. But either of them can be installed in the header of their own partition, and can be chain-loaded from the other, so I can specify each of them to the other with "chainloader +1", and accomplish what I really need.
- openSuSE 11.1 doesn't understand ext4 filesystems, but the GRUB that comes with it does. So I can use its GRUB as the main bootloader, and then boot Karmic from it, even though I can't access the Karmic parition once openSuSE is running.
- Fedora 11 understands ext4 filesystems, but the GRUB that comes with it does not. So even though I have it installed in an ext3 partition, I can mount and access ext4 partitions from it (this is the only ext3 partition I can do this from), but I can't use it's GRUB as the main bootloader because I wouldn't be able to boot any of my ext4 partitions from it.
Confusing? Yes. But not fatally.
jw 7/9/2009
@XWJ - I don't think there was anything wrong with your suggestion, and I would probably have suggested the same if I had thought of it. I'm very glad that I took a little time to actually try it out and find out, though.
jw
My system has an nVidia chipset on the motherboard. Karmic 5 recognized it and wrote an nvidia driver line in xorg.conf. Unfortunately, it didn't also install the nvidia driver, so X wouldn't start. I had to comment out the nvidia line in xorg.conf, which allowed X to start. Then I installed the nvidia driver and got full X capability.
My question is, if I keep Synapticing this installation, will it keep me upgraded through the alphas, betas, and the release version?
I'm not sure if it will or not, but I wouldn't count on it. I have had mixed success in the past with updating Ubuntu Alphas and Betas via either Update Manager or Synaptic. Besides, knowing how the Ubuntu development typically proceeds, I would fully expect that this problem will be fixed somewhere along the line before the final release. I would recommend noting carefully what you had to do to get it working this time, and if it's not too complex then simply repeat that as necessary on the subsequent releases.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
jw
