Booting from the Ubuntu Desktop Live CD

This week I downloaded, burned, and booted an ISO file for the Ubuntu desktop Live CD. Honestly I had never heard of the concept (at least to my recollection) of a live CD although most of my co-workers had.

The download, check sum and burning all went well as our professor and the online instructions said. When I initially booted up my iMac everything looked good. I got the splash screen and ran the verification to make sure my copy wasn't corrupt. So far no problems. I was pretty jazzed.

The next step was to actually finish the boot and about this time I was asking myself what issues might pop up. I have a wireless mouse and keyboard (blue tooth) and was concerned. Of course my fears came true. I got an initial firmware error and then once the desktop was finished booting up I could do nothing. The mouse and keyboard were dead.

I checked with our instructor Professor Fulton and the Ubuntu user forums and came to the understanding that since I was booting from a live CD there wasn't much I could do. I did go out and pick up a usb keyboard but for the time being I used a secondary laptop (Windows XP) and burned an new bootable disc. (We were instructed to burn a separate disc with the drive that would be booting it as each computer can be quirky when using discs burned on different systems.) This time I had no problems and was able to finally get to the terminal/command line easily.

Now I'm ready to actually run some lines and see how it goes. I'm also going through a massive amount on Linux tutorials. The videos are great (via VTC) but there are times the instructor is a bit quick and thick with the details and completely looses me. I'm not too concerned though because the written (hands-on) tutorials should reinforce the concept and drive home the things I need to learn. I'll write more about that later once I've delved further in...

Ubuntu User Forum

As part of our class activities we were asked to take a look at the Ubuntu user's forums and comment on anything we find interesting. I took notice of two threads:

Install Ubuntu 32 bit or 64 bit?

Interesting thread on 32 vs 64 bit Ubuntu. Some say there is no problem but that your results may differ. The Users then provide interesting snippets asking and answering the question of what RAM and your processor actually do, and how increased memory actually speeds up your work. Some basic but interesting stuff.



8.04 Keeps Getting Worse

The user upgraded to version 8.04 from 7.10 and began experiencing freezing errors on their laptop and loss of internet connectivity. The syllabus mentioned issues with laptops (I'm considering getting one instead of a desktop as my secondary system) and with wireless causing problems with the Linux install. This threads seems to correlate with that although it looks like most users have no problems.

The responses are very helpful in trying to diagnose an extremely frustrating problem for a user. From my experience I had similar problems but one resulting from hardware failures in in the logic board and power supply. Also, one user "muteXe" along with some others suggested that 8.04 is far more stable than 9.04 which also reinforces why we were asked to stick with the more proven version. For the record, I believe our administrators are using Ubuntu 8.04 for the repository we are building at our library.

A Student Again

After at least 5 years I'm taking classes this time and I'm actually a grad student at the U of A now. Distance Learning is amazing.