ubuntu distribution

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Lesson 1: Check you have at least 128KB of RAM memory!

My 5 FREE ubuntu CD-ROMS, that I ordered online, arrived a few days ago, 19 Jan, 2006 ... in each set there are two CD - an 'install' CD, which I have not tried yet, and a 'live CD' which began to boot, WITH NO PROBLEMS ...

Interesting to note - I had mentioned the Knoppix boot was off to the left on the screen, but only by about 1 cm, so not really a problem ... it was suggested that perhaps it was WINDOWS that was errantly positioned ... well ubuntu is about a cm off to the RIGHT ... so who is right? ... again it is only by a small amount, thus I have not yet tried to correct it, using the monitor buttons ...

This live CD boot appears no shorter than the Knoppix, but it put out lots more information ... telling you what it was doing at that moment, in various screen formats ... so SEEMS shorter ... perhaps just because all the messages make it a form of ENTERTAINMENT ;=)) there were a few 'blank' spots, especially towards the end, where you could begin to wonder if all-was-well ... but generally a very informative boot process ...

Oops - spoke too soon - I was writing this as the system booted, but it eventually led to a BLANK BLACK screen ... no CD-ROM activity apparent ... apparently STALLED ... I left it that way for more than 10 minutes, before I decided to try the boot again ... it is this part of linux that take real TIME and PATIENCE ;=()

The second live-CD boot trial eventually reached the same blank, black screen, but this time there was continued CD activity, which gave hope ... for FIVE MINUTES before a small X appeared in the center of the screen ... but at least it broke the monotony of staring at a blank black screen ... then 3 minutes of so later, it became a small white 'turning' circle ... a minute or so later, a white mouse arrow ... all the time almost continuous CD reading activity ...

At about 8 minutes from the commencement of the blank black screen, which was about 5-7 minutes into the boot, a total of about 15 minutes so far ... the screen turned 'brown' ... the ubuntu preferred colour ;=)) still with the white mouse arrow ... all the while churning away on the CD ... after some 7 minutes of 'brown' the screen went blank black again ... after about another 3 minutes of this, the CD light went OUT ;=((

I stared at this blank for 3 minutes before I saw another short flash of the CD light ... another two minutes of seeming silence, then the CD light started up again ... some 30 minutes since the boot started ... but this flashing only lasted 3 minutes, then back to silent blackness ... one quick flash after 2 minutes, then gloom again ...

I sat in this 'gloom' for a good 15 minutes before deciding I had had enough for today ... of course it had disabled the CD opening button so retrieving the CD will have to wait for another day ;=)) luckily, holding down the power button for about 5 seconds closed down the machine ... more than 45 minutes after starting the boot ... for now I take back all the nice things I started to say about this particular distro boot ;=))

The next day, I first read some read-me somewhere that said ubuntu requires a minimum of 128KB of RAM memory ... the trial machine only had 64KB! ... so I scouted around and found a spare 256KB module ... so I added that, AND UBUNTU BOOTED IN ABOUT 10 MINUTES ... all that waste of time yesterday, just because I did not have sufficient RAM memory in the machine ...

As ubuntu commenced, a small Boot: prompt is displayed ... if you type memtest here, and then continue, a memory test module will be loaded ... it takes about 20 minutes or so to complete all its test, when it then restarts ... but this showed me that the new 256KB RAM memory chip I used to replace the 64KB sip memory block appeared to be ok ...

Now, ubuntu boots cleanly in about 10 minutes, as mentioned above ... the brown desktop presented look particularly un-cluttered, if you have got used to the many ICONS on your windows desktop ... I have now booted it several times, and it seems to work each time, unlike some other boot CD-ROM disks I have tried.

Lesson 2: Browsing around ubuntu ...

The top menu line contains Applications, Places, and System, each which drops down with many sub-menu items - Applications has Accessories, Games, Graphics, Internet, Office, Sound & Video, System Tools, and Add Applications; Places has Home Folder, Desktop, Computer, cdrom, Network Servers, Connect to Server, Search for Files, Recent Documents; System has Preferences, Administration, Take Screen-shot, About GNOME, About Ubuntu, Lock Screen, Log out; Then there is a Firefox Web Browser, Evolution Mail and Help. And, of course many of the sub-menu items, have sub-sub-items ...

The next question, was how to get access to the existing hard disks on that machine ... under the menu item [ Places ] there is [ Home Folder ], [ Desktop ], [ Computer ], [ cdrom ], etc ... clicking on [ Home Folder ] opens a ubuntu - File Browser window ... it is the now defacto standard type window, with a left-hand vertical pane for navigation, and the central part of the show the item selected in the navigation pane in detail.

There appears two(2) viewing formats - the default is an icon view, and there is a list view ... the left navigation pane listed four (4) items - Home, Desktop, File System, and cdrom ... when Home is selected, there is only 1 icon in the central pane, namely Desktop ... clicking on Desktop shows nothing in the central pane ...

Selecting File System, shows about 20 icon in the central pane ... some folders - they have an icon, which is the shape of a folder - are - bin, boot, cdrom, dev, etc, home, initrd, lib, media, mnt, opt, proc, root, sbin, srv, sys, tmp, usr, var, then two that look different, initrd.img and vmlinuz, with an additional top right blue arrow pointing up-left - what can that mean?

Knowing my hard disks, in that machine, if mounted, will probably appear under 'dev', for device, I double click on this folder ... it opens, showing some 740 icons!!! ... first there are about 9 that also have a 'folder' icon ... evms, fd (with a lower-left blue arrow pointing up-right), input, loop, mapper, net, pts, shm, and snd ...

These folder icons are followed by four(4) icons that loop like 'chips' - with 'legs' - the connections - on each side. The first is acpi - it has a red background, with white x in the upper right ... one can assume the x means something like - not available, disabled, etc ... then 3, adsp, agpgart, and audio ... hmmm, this looks like chip-sets ...

These are followed by about 11 icons, that looks like a disk - a silver circular platter, with a read/write arm ... this looks like my disk system ... the first 3 have the blue backgrounded white arrow pointing up-left, and appear to represent my cdrom drives - there are labelled cdrom, cdrom2, cdrw - this system does have two (2) cdroms, and the second is an burner - cdrw ... but why three? Double clicking on each produced a small dialog that said dev/cdrom, cdrom1, cdrw could not be displayed - why not?

These were followed by 8, named cloop0-7 ... what can they be? Then another mixed 8 - chip icon - console, what looks like a mouse icon - core with both an upper right blue arrow, and a lower right red x, 2 more 'chips' dmmidi1 - midi sound? and dsp? Then a disk icon dvd, a chip fb0, disk fd0, chip - full ...

The next looks like one of the hard disks - it is labelled hda, but has a red X, then mare disk things hda1, hda2, hda5, 2nd hard disk hdb, hdb1, and then hdc, hdd ... all except the last two have red x's ... then there are many more ...

Lesson 3: Time moves on ... days later ...

Wednesday, 25 January 2006. Have now booted ubuntu many times ... and crashed it each time, trying to do something ... slowly getting the hang of it ... have now found how to 'mount' at least one of the hard disk drives, and was able to browse the files there ... but shortly after the system froze ... mouse moved, but nothing would 'open' ... one of the many 'crashes' ...

Tried the HELP many times, but it too seems to crash often ... Now that I can mount the drives, through the system menu item ... disks ... I want to get to the command prompt, or shell, as linux would call it ... but can not seem to find how to do that ... and because this cdrom boot is so slow ... about 10 minutes, if at all - it can still stall sometimes ... I must think further about actually installing it to the hard disk ...

The boot can be flaky, like today ... end up with just the mouse pointer on a soft brown screen ... do another restart ... it seems to do better the second time around ;=)) maybe, like me, it does not like the cold ;=)) no, this time it got stuck on 'Starting Enterprise Volume Management System' ... all this is being done while I wait for v0eur.tar.gz (VMAP0-europe), 239MB, to download in this machine ...

Froze again ... earlier this time ... seems this is NOT a good day for linux ;=)) if my download finishes shortly will give it a miss for today ... out of about 15 boots now, about 3-4 have failed ... is there a way to make this a sure thing? There is some help available right at the beginning ... maybe I should read more of that next time ...

This time, got a series of dialogs ... some things 'quit unexpectedly' ... what a weird message! ... what is the user supposed to do about that? ... but eventually, after deciding, rather randomly to reload some things, and delete others, the normal desktop arrived ... just in time to try a logout ... since my download has finished ... this is only the second time I have actually used the logout to try to close down ... a check shutdown ... here some shutdown music ... then the brown screen is replaced with a black and write text screen ... hundreds of things scroll by ... last message to the screen is
[4295527.216000] <0>Kernel panic - not syncing: Fatal exception in interrupt
I guess I will have to use the old POWER button again ;=))

My download is finished, and so am I for today ...

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