ubuntu, pcbsd and me
after two days and several retries, i was finally able to install ubuntu 7.04 on this friggin’ laptop and continue writing this post.
a friend of mine lent me his old laptop for a couple of months — an hp compaq nx6120 — with a note “have fun. do what you want.” cute. next thing i did was backup the data and tried installing ubuntu.
it wasn’t easy though. i tried for a whole day to install 7.04 and it just got stuck right after booting the graphical interface. i heard the welcome sound, i can see the status bar and then i see this note:
there was an error starting the gnome settings daemon.
some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not work correctly.
the last error was:
did not receive a reply. possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
gnome will still try to restart the settings daemon next time you login.
ugh. bad sign. i tried re-burning the iso at a lower speed and i still get the same error message. i even tried to install the kubuntu flavor and also gave the other boot options a go — noapic vga=771 — still no joy. of course, i consulted the forums and i read that there were several people who tried it with the same laptop model and it went well for them. this tidbit of information made my little situation a tad more frustrating.
while i was doing the rtfm thing (in another computer), i tried installing pcbsd 1.4 (da vinci) and it went pretty well on the first try. so i know it can be done with ubuntu as well. i do recommend downloading cd2 of pcbsd as well to make your life a little easier. i was able to surf, do some mails, view an avi file or two. installation of programs is easy thanks to pbidir.com. but…
i didn’t want to give up on ubuntu just yet. so one last thing to try before throwing in the towel — get the alternative install cd (text-based) for 7.04. its not as “fun” as the graphic install but it may do the job.
the first try stumbled a bit and i had to reset the laptop but after the second attempt, i was able to get ubuntu 7.04 installed and updated. so now, i’m a bit happier when i started out the day.
observations:
i feel like a kid with a new toy. but that’s just me. 
shades of brown is an acquired taste. i will get a new desktop in the future.
i was mildly surprised. this version of ubuntu is slick. i like the gnome interface. nicely done.
the usual gripe is — java and flash is not installed by default. i had to get them for me to be happy with youtube and play java games (my son).
screem seems to be a nice html/xml editor. its like homesite where i deal with the raw html tags. cssed looks promising as a css editor to replace topstyle lite. and quanta plus — a web development environment — deserves some looking into.
openoffice had a hard time updating. i’m not sure what the reason was but it was finally done after several retries.
i downloaded adobe acrobat reader and it gave me an rpm file. double-clicking on it didn’t install the program. bummer. i tried looking for it in the synaptic package manager but it came up empty. so i just deleted the rpm package. i know i can install it via a console but you can’t really ask an ordinary computer user to do that, can you? besides, envice does the job nicely and it came installed.
pcbsd has the right idea about pbi installers. its easy. my wish for pcbsd is to have more popular programs/applications available and packaged in pbi.
i should get more fonts.
i have to get a usb mouse for this thing. using the touch pad gets old pretty quickly for me.
these days 256 megabytes of memory is really not enough to do some serious work. it will get you by but things get slower when you have three or more programs running and the mouse gets choppy at times.
yeah. i can live with ubuntu. happily. the only hurdle now are games.
