Here’s to Linux! @ novus.volce

So a while back (more like 2000) I had bought this laptop made by Twinhead (WTH? Twinhead?) running an old Pentium 3 with a 10 Gig HD (o.0) and a 120MB of ram. Back then it was a pretty good computer. Well at least until I realized that the OS it came with (Windows ME) is a piece of crap. It crashed so often. Although the viruses didn’t help much. I think it had over 20+ virus on it (Thanks Microsoft!), even though I installed Norton (which was hell to uninstall), Mcafee, and a bunch of other virus/Spyware Scanner. Finally after getting tired of the crashing Windows ME, I decided to try and install Windows XP. A very BAD idea. Although it did crash less, and had no spyware/virus, it was damn slow. I think it took about 5 minutes to boot up. Even after cleaning up the list of startup programs. It was a pain to use. After I got a brand new Dell, I think I never touched it again.

So after gathering dust for many years, I felt adventurous and decided to try and install linux on it as a “test bed”. At first I tried this Small linux distro (Fox Linux), which was very slick looking, but had absolutly no english community to help me with it. Soon I decided to give up on it. It was even worse because I was a linux “Noob” back then. From then on I realized that a good community is what determines how a good distro is. So I decided to try again and find another good distro. I decided to use Damn Small Linux this time. I liked it because it was very light and had no trouble residing in an old computer system. It was a smooth and a rather fast install on the old computer. I was very happy with it. Well at least until I realized that the helping community that it had isn’t the best.

Originally, I was easily able to connect to my wireless internet with WEP encryption. But after an adventurous journey with my router and giving it uber “linuxness” I decided to change my wireless encryption to the newer WPA. And that was where the problem starts. It appears that Ndiswrapper can’t connect to WPA unless you add some extra packages. So I decided to try and install the extra packages. Sadly the only tutorial i can find for it are for ubuntu. But I tried to do it anyways. Too bad it didn’t work. Not feeling discourage, I decided to try the lighter version of Ubuntu on it, Xubuntu.

When I first popped in the CD, I always seem to hit a white screen where the installation process stops. Thankfully there was still hope. There was still other installation methods through the CD. I decided to try all of them and see if it makes a difference. Sadly all my tries ended in vain. With no where else to go I decided to try and fix it.

It turns out that the last message that was sent from xubuntu was

trying to enable frame buffer

So the problem must be because of the frame buffer (DUH). So I checked the help section in the CD by pressing F1(DUH again -_-, silly me). It says if i wanted to disable the frame buffer I should add

FB=false

to the boot command. So I tried that, by pressing F6 and typing it in (Don’t rewrite/delete the commands that was already there). Amazingly enough, it works!

Sadly, the happiness didn’t last, after a couple minute of installation, I was served again with another error. It says that it could not find

libc6-udeb

Apparently some users are experiencing the same problem. Thankfully there is some solutions around. One was to run the install in expert mode by pressing “F6″ in the menu and choosing expert mode. Which will add a new prompt called HDPARM to the installation procedure. Supposedly if you enter

-d1

to that prompt, your computer will be able to find the missing “libc6-udeb”. Sadly It didn’t work. But ofcourse there is always another solution. This one is the more obvious one. All you had to do was clean the lens of the CD reader. I tried the method happily to no avail. Another solution was to reburn the CD at a much slower speed. So I tried this as a last resort seeing how it will cost me and the planet a bit (a microscopic bit, but GLOBAL Warming! Oh no!). About 5 CDs, 2 ISOs, hours and hours later, nothing changed. As I was about to give up, I was presented with another installation method.

It’s called WUBI. Wubi allows you to install ubuntu like a program on windows but still run it natively. All you need is the ubuntu ISO you want. And if you didn’t have it, it will even download it for you! Installation was smooth and I am now happily typing this on my new Ubuntu desktop/laptop.