The Shell Game

Thank goodness it was a rainy weekend. I don’t feel so bad for sitting in front of the computer all day for two days.

I have been planning on triple booting (Vista Home Premium/XP Professional/Ubuntu Feisty Fawn) my laptop for quite a while. I started the process about 6 weeks ago. I managed to get the hard drive partitioned before I left for Korea. That process only took about 2 hours or so. I don’t know what I was doing wrong, but it was probably something stupid. By the time I reinstalled Vista, I was so frustrated that I knew Ubuntu was going to have to wait for another day. And XP is going to have to wait just a bit longer as well. I’m waiting on my brother to slipstream me a new install CD as the one I had doesn’t have the drivers for my SATA controller.

So yesterday was the day to install Ubuntu. I pulled out the tutorial I found online and popped in the installer CD I burned. The install was truly one of the quickest and least painful ones I’ve ever done. The only problem I had to solve was a silly one. All I needed to do was right click the ext3 partition to specify it as the mount point (errr… at least I think that’s what it was called).

One reboot at the end of the install and I was up and running. First thing I did was install all of the updates and then started trying to break it. My first project was to get BOINC installed. I was following a forum thread that another cruncher wrote and managed to screw it up at least twice. I did learn that Google and “man” are indeed your friends. But in the end I did get it up and running.

I got Firefox and OpenOffice up and running and set-up just the way I like them. I installed Flash and Java so I can see all the nifty things on the web. I half figured out the problem I was having with RhythmBox. What I did should have solved the entire problem, but hasn’t. So I’ve Googled and also posted on a message board for help from a Linux guru as my Google skills seem to be failing me.

So all in all, I think I did fairly well for a weekend’s worth of work. I have a shiny new OS to play with. I learned some new things. And I got myself out of jams all by myself (even if the terminal still scares me).