All entries for August 2006

An Odyssey with Linux II

Progress!
Got the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS "Live/Install" CD (via Personal Computer World).
Put it in, fired it up. Eventually, it's there! Yes! With wallpaper that makes me want to go and eat a Galaxy Ripple. But it's so s–s–s–s–l–o–o–o–o–o–o–o–o–w–w–w! Reminds me of the DOS emulator on the old Acorn Archimedes, where you could actually watch the screen being painted. Thankfully my experience with Red Hat tells me this is not normal Linux speed.
OK. I have quick kip while I'm waiting for it to sort itself out (I am at home) and then start the installation. I have two 40 gig hard drives, one with Win98 on it, so I swap them to make this the Primary Slave, and put Linux on the drive which is now the Primary Master. That way I should still be able to boot to either drive, and if the Linux installation bombs it hopefully won't take out my Win98 installation with it.
About an hour later it's on. And running at a decent speed. w007!
The text is a bit small. Turns out its on 1600×1200 resolution. When I try to change to another resolution, it goes back to the sign–in screen. At 1600×1200. Is this a driver problem? Good job I've got a 21 inch monitor.
Also, there's no root account in Ubuntu. Whose bright idea was that?! It won't even let me copy files from my other hard drive or my CD ROM. How do I get round this? I've just figured out the only way to edit system files is by typing

sudo gedit

at a terminal screen. But surely there are ways other than terminal to copy loads of files over. What's the point of having a GUI otherwise?

I hardly dare say this, but it seems the horrid yellow boxes have also invaded Linux…...

Roger Lindley : 26 Aug 2006 19:03 |  Tags: Linux |  Comments (9) |  Close comments |  Report a problem