Ubuntu - Day One

On my aging Celeron M laptop, Windows XP had nearly ground to a halt. I rashly decided to reinstall it. Eek! It reinstalled, sure enough, but it was goodbye to sound reproduction. All my attempts to fix this failed miserably, however much I searched Google.

In a moment of madness (or of inspiration), I remembered that I had a computer magazine cover disk with an up-to-date version of Ubuntu (version 8.10) on it. As I had other Windows machines that were still working all right, I decided that I might risk it.

Whew! Ubuntu installed really easily. I let it take over the entire hard disk. After the installation, the sound immediately worked again. What's more, Ubuntu identified and installed the Logilink wifi USB stick without any special prompting (a feat that Windows had not managed).

I immediately liked the uncluttered, smart-looking Ubuntu desktop with its three self-explanatory menus at the top of the screen. A glance in the Applications menu revealed that several key programs had already been installed (e.g. Open Office and Firefox).

It all seemed great, and was great. Of course there had to be a fly in the ointment. Although Ubuntu appeared to have installed a driver for my HP Laserjet 1020 printer, this did not in fact work.

This was when I had to turn to some of those scary and very geeky Ubuntu forums. If you haven't sampled them, I recommend you give them a look. Typically, some user writes in that he or she has a problem with some piece of software or hardware.

Even the questions can include great obscurities, e.g. this one from a question about USB sticks:

"I've tried running lsusb and this is what I got:

Bus 004 Device 005: ID 058f:6387 Alcor Micro Corp. Transcend JetFlash 110 USB 2.0 Flash Drive (2GB)
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 046d:c00c Logitech, Inc. Optical Wheel Mouse
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 "

The first answer to all this said: "Plug it in" -- so far so good -- "and post the last 10 or so lines of dmesg."

So that's clear then. Or, if not, try the next answer:

"Is this a new drive or have you already used it? If it's new you may need to format it.
You can use gparted (found under system-->admin-->partition editor, install with synaptic etc. if not present) to look at what partitions are on the device if any, and what filesystems they are formatted as."

These examples are from an "Absolute beginners forum"!

When I encountered this kind of stuff, it put me in mind of a comment I once read in a review of Linux, to the effect that below the nice graphical interface there is "a world of pain".

Somehow, blindly, without in the least knowing what I was doing, I discovered the 'terminal' in Ubuntu and typed in a long string of seeming jibberish. Fortunately, it worked!