Lucid Lynx

At last

This is my first post from my now totally free and open source system. I have finally kicked windows off my machine and am running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

This is how it happened.

I have had a fascination with Linux for a long time. I had a bootable CD of an old version of Knoppix given to me by my brother way back in (I think it was) 2003. Then at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences I had a dual boot machine that ran KDE alongside Windows (great fun to play Frozen Bubbles in between work bouts). I recently bought a Lenovo G560 on which I dearly wished to load Ubuntu, and I got a Lucid CD from the good folks at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University and tried to load that. However, all I got was a blank screen with no command prompt: a completely crushed machine.

However, I wasn't about to give up. My Kaspersky was running out in May 2011 and I wanted to upgrade my current crappy XP to something better. Before capitulating once again to Microsoft, I thought I'd have one last bash at freedom. Having fond memories of Knoppix, I downloaded the Knoppix 6.4 DVD. I tried running it off the DVD drvie (which is how its supposed to work) and was delighted.

Knoppix is ingenious. It's a whole OS on a DVD that you can carry with you, so if you have the DVD and a flash drive for your data, you can use any computer anywhere regardless of how crappy its hardware, how virus-ridden its hard disk, or how commercially cut throat its OS. You will have the coolest gadgets, the most awesome screensavers and the most user friendly OS on the planet, following you faithfully on your travels. The only hassle is, if you make any changes to your system you have to burn it all onto a new DVD to keep your changes. You can use the bootable DVD to detect and delete viruses from the systems you visit, to scan hidden data (if you feel like being James Bond) as well as do your ordinary stuff.

I was so impressed with the ineffable coolness of Knoppix that I installed it to hard disk. It booted just as advertised without a single hitch, and effortlessly detected all my stuff including my digital camera which had been invisible to windows and had needed a proprietary package just to dump photos. It had Libre Office 3 preinstalled that could read all my word docs, and it had a fabulous collection of free fonts in its guts. The one problem arose when I tried to install my HP 1020 laserjet printer. A quick search on teh net showed that a lot of people had faced problems with this. No problem, I thought. I'll just open a terminal window, crunch some code, and it'll be up and running. I discovered that my printer uses something called ZJstream and something called foomatic would fix it for me. I went to command prompt and ran the code I found on ubuntu forums to get it installed. Knoppix and Ubuntu are both versions of Debian, which is the brand of Linux that runs on desktops (the brand that works on servers is called Red Hat), so I figured that what works for Ubuntu ought to work for Knoppix.

Then my troubles began. Terminal kept telling me that it couldn't find something called 'dc package'. I looked this up and found that Ubuntu uses something called 'bc package'. I looked for hacks that would fix the broken link for me. Just when the whole thing was turning into the kind of mess you'd expect if Kafka was a computer programmer, I looked up Knoppix documentation and found this. Apparently Klaus Knopper, the man who invented Knoppix, was basically interested in creating a version of Debian that would run anywhere, in any conditions. So he cobbled together bits and pieces from several different distributions to get the best fix. As a result, while Knopix works well without human interference, the moment you try to get into its guts and change things, it has a tendency to fall apart. Which is basically what windows does, right? So back to square one.

However, by now my blood was up. I downloaded The Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx CD (the latest version is 11.04 but I figured next-to-latest might be more bug-free). I wiped off both knoppix and windows from the hard disk and formatted it (by the way, I have two physical disks in my system and a version of windows 7 that I briefly tried did not recognise the second one, my data disk. So that OS bit the dust). I rebooted from CD and installed Ubuntu.

So far so good. This time I actually got an install screen, and a rather plain-looking purple thing duly appeared which looked very unexciting after Knoppix. So I took the CD out as instructed and rebooted.

Black crush again, no prompt, nothing.

I put in the cd again, and ran the OS off the CD. Unlike on my laptop, the desktop has a net connection, so I prodded it into life and trudged over to Ubuntu forums to see what the mavens had to say. Turned out more people than most had this problem. The reason was Ubuntu's native graphics drivers were incompatible with my graphics card (I have an NVIDIA 8400). I read the instructions carefully, then rebooted and changed the install settings to NOMODESET, having deleted QUIET and SPLASH (don't worry if this doesn't make sense. Computers can understand it). Reinstalled Ubuntu, which then autodetected my graphics card and called the necessary drivers from the net. I fired it up again, confident that I would see purple instead of black.

Still no joy.

Then I discovered that Ubuntu had stuck the boot loader on the data physical disk, because that was on sr0 while my system disk was on sr1. I reinstalled a third time, copying the bootloader to the right disk using advanced install options, and did all the other stuff to get my graphics drivers.

Whew. It worked.

So Ubuntu is now up and running. It doesn't have the fizz of Knoppix, but it faithfully updates itself from the net, and there's something called synaptic package manager that lets you micromanage what capabilities your system has. It installed my printer with four lines of code. Minor beefs include the very ploddy screensavers, the fact that Mozilla firefox no longer autoupdates and I have to crunch code to get the latest version, and the FSpot photo viewer is very temperamental.

And I have to play Prince of Persia on Avijit's machine

Other than that, it rocks like Jimi Hendrix. It has Open Office 3.2 which effortlessly reads all my data. I had a slight hiccup in that my pagemaker files were unreadable, and I had to open them in pagemaker on another machine, laboriously save all the text as txt files and set em up again in Scribus. But that was more Adobe's fault than Ubuntu's. I'm still working out how to use some of the packages, but the forums are a great help.

Now for a celebratory game of Tux Racer.