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Installing Ubuntu

So I’ve decided to get into this Linux thing by downloading Ubuntu. It comes as a “live CD” that you can boot your computer from in order to try it out. I burned the CD-ROM and tried it on my computer. It was amazing. Even though I had heard that Ubuntu’s Live CD runs like molasses, it worked like a charm for me, and it was almost as if I were running the OS from my hard drive. So after playing around with it a bit and familiarizing myself with a few things, I asked my dad about doing a dual-boot installation. He said that it was too much of a risk to the data on the hard drive. He had a bad experience once, apparently. But he said we could install it on a computer that happened to be lying around. He had installed Windows on it, but he didn’t want to run it because it was going to phone home and complain about licensing keys. With Linux, there would be no such problems, and I was looking forward to that.

So we booted that computer from the Live CD. Molasses. Sure, the hardware isn’t as good as my computer’s, but it isn’t that bad. Once we got to the desktop, we started the installation. But it kept freezing up during the part where you configure the time zone. After going through that slow, painful process several times, we checked the integrity of the disc to find that it had 5 failed checksums. This was news to me because it didn’t have any bad checksums when I was running it on my own computer. Anyway, I decided to burn the CD again at a slower speed. This CD, it turned out, had 1 failed checksum, but I went ahead with the installation anyway, and this time, we got all the way through. After a while, we had installed Ubuntu on the computer.

Almost immediately, the computer informed us that there were 104 software updates available for download. We decided to download them. By now, it was late, so we decided to let that go overnight. This morning, I checked on the computer to find that one installation had failed. A 99% success rate — not bad, I guess. After I closed the window with the error message, the installation apparently needed to continue as the screen said something about doing something else with the installed files. It was then that the computer froze completely. I saw no choice but to reboot. After that, everything seemed to be fine, although I’m not sure if the updates were installed correctly. After multiple instances of programs crashing and Ubuntu freezing, we’re trying to install it again. I’m tremendously frustrated. I really want to make a nice, smooth transition to Linux, but the software and the hardware aren’t cooperating, and I’m allowed no other choice.

Here’s a time-lapse video (Google Video) of a Picasso painting being made.

In the 1970s, an unknown writer named Chuck Ross submitted the manuscript for a novel to a number of major publishers. Of course, they all turned it down. But the joke was on the publishers this time: the manuscript was actually a published novel that had won the National Book Award in 1969. Read a 1979 Time article detailing the proof that the system worked against up-and-coming authors.