Installing Ubuntu

[pozorvlak]

1100: collect delirium from IT department, now with new hard drive fitted.
Rest of day: move office, attend lectures, etc.
Evening: Attempt to find Ubuntu CD.
1930: start download of Ubuntu iso image on sharleen (wormwood_pearl's laptop). Go to juggling club.
2200: return from juggling club. Download 2% complete.
Midnight: finally find a server that doesn't stall after transferring less than 60 MB. Go to bed.
0300: wake up (hurrah for insomnia!). Check download. Download complete (w00t!). Fetch CD, set CD to burn. Go back to bed.
0309: get up, remove CD from writer. Pat sharleen gently on monitor. Take delirium upstairs, plug in, turn on, insert Ubuntu CD. Answer questions (of which the most difficult is "What is your name?"), wait, answer more questions, wait, recall ESR's comments about "the most obnoxious thing an installer can do".
0326: base system install complete, rest of installation copying underway. Go back to bed. Give silent thanks for the bed- and foot-warming powers of girlfriends.
0340: unpleasant drive seeking noise stops. Think "bloody hell, that was quick." Get up again. Watch last few percent of installation.
0350: boot into Ubuntu. Note with approval the icon warning me that I'm using closed-source hardware drivers. No network connection. Take delirium downstairs to plug into router. Wireless connection appears before I get there. Decide to test web browser by checking Reddit.
0405: block Reddit from computer.
0435: download of updates complete. Finish LJ post.
0445: Go back to bed.
0500: wormwood_pearl wakes up, completely oblivious to all the events of the last two hours.

So there you have it: Ubuntu is so easy to install that it can be done entirely while asleep or half-asleep, and the most difficult part is downloading the CD image.

What are you all waiting for?

Edit: actually, there are two nonobvious things you need to know about installing Ubuntu. One is how to get multimedia (DVDs, MP3s, etc) working: for legal reasons, this has to be done as a separate step. It's completely straightforward, and instructions are here for the current version of Ubuntu (just Google for "[version name] multimedia" if you're running a different version). The other is how to install software that doesn't come with the base install, like typesetters or CAD software or weird programming languages or mind-mapping software or ham radio software or... anything you like, really. You do this using the "package manager" Synaptic (or its command-line cousin apt-get), which you'll find in the System menu. Synaptic is great - it allows you to search for software that does what you want, then you can select it, and it will download and install the software you've selected and all the other programs and libraries it depends on, and all the programs and libraries that they depend on, recursively. Cool, eh?

Comments

[michiexile]

What do you mean waiting for? My laptop is already running Ubuntu!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

I wasn't talking to you :-) And actually, the percentage of my acquaintance that isn't running Ubuntu (even leaving aside the other flavours of Linux) is rapidly diminishing. Which gives me hope for Linux world domination by 2008 (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html).

There are some holdouts, some of whom have good reasons: bronxelf_ag001's reply would probably be "Linux-based CAD software isn't yet good enough", for instance - she's one of those AutoCAD users for whom nothing else will do. But as for the rest of you, get with the programme, guys! :-)

[michiexile]

Oh, and sleep tight.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Thanks :-)

[green-jedi.livejournal.com]

If all goes well, yes. I have been trying and failing for the last six months to install Ubuntu (as well as giving SuSe a try) - no dice. It doesn't like my motherboard, specifically the third-party IDE controller on it. Since my DVD drive is hooked up to said IDE controller, as soon as the installer begins to load it can no longer find the CD from which it just booted (talk about daft!). I keep hoping someone will write drivers for it, but so far no luck (at least, I haven't been able to find any).

By the way, I am impressed with the way you seem to be able to sleep for ten minutes at a time :)

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Hah. "Go back to bed" didn't imply "sleep", but rather "lie down, close eyes and get warm again". In fact, I didn't get back to sleep properly until about 0600 (and then slept in until 1000, when I was woken up by Women's Hour. Dammit.).

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

It could have been worse. I could have been In Our Time, or the Archers.

[michiexile]

Personally, I would actively discourage use of SuSE or any other RPM-based distribution unless you feel you have good reason to use them. I have had nothing but grief from RPMy distros.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Seconded. I've had nothing but trouble with them.

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

Completely matches my experience, except that it took about 6 hours to download the ISO due to Tiscali killing our broadband between 50 and 78% complete for the first n tries (where n>10). Oh, and the fact that my spare CD-Rs were buggered.

[androidkiller.livejournal.com]

I found it really easy - especially since our uni computing service mirrors the repositries locally, so it took practically no time at all to download the ISO.

The only thing I needed help with was then changing Ubuntu so that it used these local repositries so updates wouldn't count against my download limit.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Takes seconds to download the CD image if you live in the ethernet. (Damnit, I now live in the sad world of 1/2 Mb, or will do if it ever gets switched on). I did have quite a bit of arsing about for Duncan to do, though, what with wanting to leave the partition with all my documents on alone. Didn't you?

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

No, because I'm reinstalling from scratch after a hard drive failure - see line 1. I'd mentioned this before, but only in passing - suffice it to say that the last couple of weeks of my life have been a series of arguments over who gets to use the laptop, and even less work done than usual. And doing all the exercises from SICP on paper, because I didn't have a Scheme interpreter to run my code on.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Ah, not just an upgrade then? The pain! Hope it was all backed up.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Yeah, all backed up, so the worst thing was living without a working computer for an annoyingly long while.

[antoniabaker.livejournal.com]

pretty lap top, lap top plug in, hurruh internet porn. My life is so much easier than yours sometimes, I'm amazed poor bed warming girlfriend managed to sleep through it.

[bdunbar.livejournal.com]

collect delirium from IT department,

I thought this was - at first - well thought out snark about your IT department. Heck, you want delirium we've got it here by the bushel load. It's sloshing around in the aisles and spilling out of conference rooms.

Come by and take some, please!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

Nah, delirium's the name of my laptop. Named after Dream's younger sister from The Sandman.

[michiexile]

Oh look! Someone else has brilliant taste!

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

:-)

My old desktop was called Destiny, for much the same reason.

multimedia

[susannahf.livejournal.com]

I haven't tried doing multimedia things with my laptop yet. Except that someone wanted to look at a short divx(iirc) on it. I double-clicked the file, it went "I don't have the codecs for that, shall I find them for you?". So I said yes, watched as it fired up synaptic, complete with all the packages it needed. I agreed to them (after realising that it meant "I need all of these" rather than "pick one"!), it installed and Just Worked.
Laziness is a great thing.

[half-of-monty.livejournal.com]

Re: installing recursively all dependencies: don't all linux distributions do that? Gentoo does. Can't remember Mandrake.

Not that I recommend Gentoo in any way, unless you want to give up your day job and become a full-time linux hacker. Even if you have your own convenient live-in full-time linux hacker it's a pain.

[michiexile]

It's not THAT horrible.


The resident insane fulltime linux hacker mathematician says.

[pozorvlak.livejournal.com]

No, or at least, not historically. I believe the RPM-based distributions (Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE) now have some sort of recursive installer, but I could never get it to work (certainly not as easily as apt). I don't think they have the fine-grained dependency data (built up over many years) that characterises the .deb based distros and allows apt/synaptic/etc to work so well.

The real point is that Windows doesn't do it at all.

[necaris.livejournal.com]

Yep, there's no RPM-based distro that has quite the amount of fine-grained dependency data as the Debian family. I think it's mostly because of the lack of standardization of RPM as a format and distro-specific packaging choices.

That having been said, I'm a longtime Fedora user and yum these days is very slick. There are still some idiotic dependencies in the repositories (e.g. NetworkManager required metacity in a recent update), and Red Hat's graphical tools really suck, but it's very good otherwise.

Of more interest, perhaps, are things like klik and ZeroInstall...