Scratching an itch with Ubuntu

I’m not sure why, but I have an itch to install Ubuntu on a real machine. I could install it in a VM in Parallels, but for some weird reason I want it on a dedicated machine.

I have a Lenovo clonepad sitting here (it’s basically a ThinkPad but without the branding and price tag) that runs Vista, but I haven’t honestly needed to run Vista for anything for months now, or indeed any version of Windows. I have been holding off doing anything to the machine “just in case”, but I think I’m even past that phase now too. If I need to do some Windows work it will undoubtedly be programming related and I still have my Motion LE1600 and a Parallels VM for that. So why the heck not.

I used to dabble in Linux a lot, but not so much these days. Macintosh does everything I need it to do, and then some, but from time to time I do find myself pining to take a look at the state of play these days. My favorite Linux distro was always Debian but I prefer something more leading edge than the Debian team’s ‘older is stable is better” view of the world, so Ubuntu (which is Debian with risks as far as I’m concerned) became my favorite as soon as it was released.

Ubuntu now ships as a nice hybrid bootable live CD that doubles as the install CD. I was pleasantly shocked to see the Gnome based UI appear pretty rapidly after booting off the CD without having to jump through a ton of hoops to get the graphics card recognized. Notebooks, from my own somewhat limited experience, have always been slightly iffy when it comes to getting all their hardware recognized by Linux.

Running the installer simply involved double clicking the “install” icon on the desktop and the process began. I did agonize over the partitioning page, asking myself over and over if I really wanted to just go for it and blow everything away to replace it with Linux, or whether it would be best to try out Ubuntu’s resizing tools to resize the Vista partition. In addition, I really don’t know where my Vista restore disks are if I change my mind at some point in the future. In the end though I decided to just say what the hell and blow everything away.

I’m really playing quite dumb with this machine – I haven’t used it much and I haven’t really paid any attention to the hardware inside it. I really have no idea what graphic card this thing has, what sound card and so on. So, in many respects I’m installing Ubuntu blind, just like a complete noob. Can a complete noob install an operating system that through it’s legacy is inherently complex and noob unfriendly?

So far it’s going good, the progress bar moving ahead nicely.

Update 1: Installing just finished. I’m now looking at a screen asking me if I want to continue using the Live CD, or restart. I think I’ll pop the CD out and hit restart and see what happens. If the Ubuntu team are moving towards their goals of making Linux erveryone-friendly, I should get a machine that will happily reboot into the soothing brown tones of the standard Ubuntu desktop.

Update 2. I hit restart and after a few seconds was prompted to remove the CD. That made me feel really dumb as I’d been frantically hitting the eject button as the machine shut down to prevent it accidentally rebooting and picking up the live CD before I could intervene. The notebook rebooted, went into a graphical boot sequence and hung. I’m being patient.

Update 3: THe hang was temporary. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on behind the scenes but it seems to have worked. After a few more scary seconds I got presented with the graphical Ubuntu login screen. Yay. The clock is completely wrong, but other than that it’s looking promising.

Update 4: The first thing I noticed after logging in is that while I have a graphical desktop it’s in a really annoyingly low resolution. When that’s happened in the past to me on other machines it’s meant the installer didn’t spot the graphics card and it’s capabilities. I clicked on System, then Screen Resolution to run the screen rez changer to see where we’re at with that on this box. Just as I thought, I got presented with a set of just three resolutions to choose from, all far lower than I know the machine can handle. Uh oh.

I started to explore a little more and picked up on the other missing components. Networking seems to be working with a wired Ethernet connection, but there’s nothing for the wireless card in the machine for example. Ubuntu did spot that I’m on a notebook though and is giving me an accurate power/charging reading which is promising.

The sound icon is crossed through and double clicking it throws up an error dialog telling me basically that Ubuntu failed to find my sound card. Hmm.

On the positive side, running up the System Monitor showed me that both processors (dual core machine) were spotted, the memory size was correctly guessed, and yes the whole hard disk is being used. So far so good on that score.

So, I’m left with the following tasks : How do I get wireless working? How do I get the screen resolution fixed and the graphics card correctly recognized, and how do I get sound working. And that’s all just for starters. I suspect when I dig deeper I’ll find other worries too.