Newest Ubuntu Affiliate?

Linux, MSIE, Operating Systems, Windows

No, it’s not me.

Microsoft ’sold’ me a copy of Ubuntu this week, so maybe they should see if they couldn’t work out a deal for a PPC link to them … they might make a couple extra dollars from people like me who have ‘just had it’ with Windows.

Hey … as long as we are leaving anyway, why not pick up a few cents as we leave?

I’ve been using XP - Home with all service packs installed for a couple of years. I have two Gigs of ram and 60 Gigs of HD on a Toshiba A105 series laptop. THe only hardware change has been the additional ram a couple of months ago and a fresh battery in May.

Two days ago my wife needed to try accessing her browser-sniffing work web-site. This site, written by wannabee web-heads, will only respond to a Windows machine using some version of MSIE.  Ahem … would someone tell me why the operating system is relevant? Give me a good reason that doesn’t include my bending over pickle-barrels while my hard drive is rifled through.

At any rate, being the nice guy that I am, I downloaded a copy of MSIE 7 — nothing but the best for my Missus. The download went fine and the install shuffled along to an uneventful conclusion. Then, since MSFT can’t seem to wipe its nose without rebooting, I dutifully rebooted after the install.

I haven’t seen XP since.

According to “Insert” Linux, I’ve got a foo-barred file system. Well okay, corrupted file systems are not unheard of … not even on the Linux side of the tracks — that’s what the journaled file systems in Unix / Linux are all about. However, it turns out that the spare MBR isn’t quite right in the head, either. Apparently the boot sector has gone fungal. I can ‘cat /dev/sda’ and see that the files are still intact … but the dead boot sector means that they might as well be on the far side of the moon under a heavy rock.

When I bought the laptop it only came with a miserable piece of plastic called a “recovery” disk. ANd even that has gone missing … although I did find the crystal case it came in.

I think it reasonable to ask the musical question: “Recovery from what?”

The plastic assassin disk wants to begin the ‘recovery’ process by wiping out all of my data and 3rd party application / utility programs and then re-installing XP to a clean slate. Gee, thanks.

I’ve got nearly 40 G of data on my HD … who’s going to re-install my entire audio CD collection? (11 days worth!) Yeah … I own the disks — but I’ve got a LOT better things to do with my time than spend a week re-loading data I have already loaded once.

There is NO reason for formatting the HD that I can see. What is needed is to overwrite the OS files after running chkdsk /f. If more might be needed, let the user choose it … but don’t just blow away a boot load of work because you are too lazy to do things right.

Grrrr.

But then comes hope.

If I install Ubuntu in the remaining space on the HD, it will overwrite the funky XP boot sectors with GRUB — the Linux bootloader — which should then also make the Windows partition bootable.

At least, that’s what I am hoping will happen. =:-^

But I digress.

When I got my XP machine home, I had to set up networking for ethernet and wlan.

When I got my wife’s Vista machine home I had to set up networking for ethernet and wlan.

When I booted the Ubuntu Live-CD for the first time, the networking was setup (wlan reported my router and my neighbor’s, eth0 was up and grinning) before the desktop was visible. It found all three printers that my machine has access to and loaded the drivers for them. It even bought the coffee.

And it isn’t even installed yet.

But oh, it’s going to be!

Bill Canaday @ June 26, 2008