All the cool kids are doing it! Everybody says it’s super-easy now and totally non-geeks can do it!
Yeah, right. Thanks, Slate, for convincing me that would be a great thing to do with my extremely slow desktop.
Now, this is not an essential computer - it’s our only desktop, it’s old and wasn’t great when I got it (corporate surplus). I’d like it to be fast enough not to be a pain in the ass for me to write on it. My laptop is too distracting for writing.
It’s a Dell Dimension looks-like-7700, but those could be other Ds or 1s or something.
I downloaded it, burned a disk image CD. Figured out how to get it to boot to CD, so I did at least learn something new. Thanks, Ubuntu - it was really obvious that that stick figure is Ubuntuese for “press any key”. That’s really cute.
I told it to install and got a screen that said “Ubuntu” with red and white dots moving under it. It took a couple hours before I figured out that that’s evidently Ubuntu-ese for “I give up and we’re not going anywhere”, because I looked up what I was supposed to see and it’s “So what time zone are you in?” and the sort of questions you’d expect.
Okay, so somewhere I find a guide about boot parameters which I can’t even find now, damn it, but I think I got there from the “it’s so easy to install Ubuntu” page. It told me to delete the “quiet splash–” bit from the end of the boot parameters line… okay… and that that might fix it right there. So I do that, and I see a bunch of scrolling text which seems to mostly say things like “can’t find this” and “this isn’t doing that”. I’ve tried using the first of the different parameters in the list of options at the install screen and got the same thing. I’m going through the others but am not getting a good feeling here.
One thing that I have found is that insufficient memory will prevent it loading or installing.
There could be other hardware problems that it can’t overcome. Generally it is simplicity itself to install.
You might try Linux Mint Isadora as an alternative. Same procedure, download the ISO, make sure the checksum matches then burn it, check the data then install.
What’s a live CD? Do you mean the first option on the install disk where you can try it out from the CD? Yeah, it don’t do that neither. Exact same thing.
Some older machines really struggle to run the standard graphical installer or live CD, but work fine once you get the OS installed and run it from the hard drive. - so you could try downloading and burning the alternate install CD - this allows you to follow a lightweight text-based install process that won’t tax the machine so much.
I just don’t see why they can’t have a screen that says, say, “You probably want to hit that big button on your computer now” instead of “Ubuntu! The musical!” Seriously, how am I supposed to know that isn’t supposed to happen?
It’s weird. Installing Ubuntu usually is a breeze - something must have gone wrong somewhere for you - maybe some bit of unsupported hardware is confounding the install.
Don’t feel bad, I’ve been using nothing but Linux for 10 years and had a lot of trouble trying to install Ubuntu. Finally got it working enough to see that I didn’t like it. I wouldn’t recommend it to a newbie, but Slackware is the only distribution I’ve never had a single install problem with.
Mint is working, but verrrry sloooowwwwly. It’ll ask me a question, I’ll answer it, and then I’ll go watch a bit of my movie while it thinks about it. My computer is already really slow, which is why I’m doing this, and then it’s running a whole OS from a CD… I should have tried an alternate whatever. But it does seem to be working, so far. Loaded a desktop and all.
Those Dell Dimensions are too old and slow for Ubuntu proper. Try a lightweight Ubuntu distro like Xubuntu. It has much lower hardware requirements and I think its XFCE desktop manager is much nicer than Gnome.
Mint worked - but now I gots another problem. I got the user manual, but it doesn’t say a word about installing stuff that’s not a program. How do I get my wireless to work? It’s a USB adapter, one of the Linksys G things. I have the CD, but I assume that isn’t what I need.
I thought any sort-of-recent computer could handle all this Linux stuff and that was a plus over Windows? Because I’m a bit disappointed if not - the whole reason I’m doing this little project is to make this computer at least as fast as it was new. (Learning something new is a plus, but a non-aggravating writing computer is expected to be the result.)
By the way, what the hell is wrong with these people? Obviously if I’m searching for help to get my wireless to work on Linux I am not a particularly technically inclined person. Step 1: “Type sudo lshw to list hardware (or lspci or lsusb).” Thanks for that, really.
You have come across one of the drawbacks of Linux that they don’t tell you about. USB wireless network support (and wireless in general) is pretty piss poor on Linux. Some devices will work out of the box and some never will. If it’s a particularly old and uncommon wireless adapter, you’re pretty much SOL. You may be able to find a driver that’s been adapted by someone, but unless you’re a Linux geek, you have about a snowball’s chance in hell of getting it installed (which sometimes requires recompiling the kernel).
This site covers all the wireless adapters currently supported on Linux. Notice that the devices listed refer to the chipset rather than the brand of adapter. You’d have to search the make and model of your wireless device to find the chipset it uses, then find out if that chipset driver is already installed on your boot drive. If it is, then you may have to manually enable Linux’s network access on that device.
I would strongly suggest trying out the live boot Xubuntu distro – if the wireless device isn’t supported, only then would I suggest you attempt to go down the above route.
Found the Window driver-faker thing in the menu, but the driver I found for my wireless adapter it does not like. I am about two seconds away from giving up and telling all my friends and family not to believe the Linux-is-for-normal-people hype.
ETA - downloading Xubuntu as we speak. But how does one pronounce it? X-ubuntu?
ETAA - and now I don’t know what I already have - there’s no file that says “Other Linux Distro” - I guess just the Windows one?
… aaaand Xubuntu is giving me the Xubuntu logo, which I assume means the same cryptic thing as the Ubuntu one does. Which is “Fuck this shit, I am going home”.
Dear techies: Fuck you. Fuck you long, and fuck you hard. I don’t care if you have your own pet operating systems, okay? Have a great time with that. But when you go around evangelizing and telling everybody that your grandma and your mailman and your toy poodle should use Linux because it’s not like it used to be and it’s totally accessible? That is a bald-faced lie and you should be ashamed of yourselves. I wanted a little project. I didn’t want to waste ten hours of my life on something that still doesn’t work, on something that I would never have tried if I hadn’t been convinced that, hey, it’s totally easy these days! This is bullshit and you will never, never, ten years from now when maybe it really is accessible to the masses, get me to try your brand of Flavor-Ade again.
Well, it hardly matters - Mint is no faster than the computer was before, and Xubuntu gives me the same problem as its big brother. So the one I can install I can’t seem to get the wireless to work on and totally don’t understand the page on how to do it, and I don’t care because there’s no improvement to my previous system, and the one that might go faster is a bunch of bullshit that hates me.