[nzlug] Acer + Ubuntu: initial impressions.

[Simon Bridge]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 20:25 +1300, Robin Sheat wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 April 2008 19:56:45 Simon Bridge wrote:
> > In my case - I can attempt to hack into the system.
> > More later.
> We've been having a bit of discussion about these on the DunLUG list, and I 
> got to play with one on the weekend. Some points:
> * Swap isn't enabled by default. It has a swap partition that doesn't have a 
> UUID, and fstab expects a UUID. You need to mkswap and put the UUID it gives 
> you into fstab.
... this seems like something you have to set up *deliberately*. It's
like they're *trying* to make things work poorly.

> * Wireless requires binary drivers and ndiswrapper, doesn't seem to speak WPA2
> * / is ext2, not ext3
?? Now why would they do that?

> * All updates are turned off by default, you need to tick the boxes 
> in 'software sources' to turn them on.
Get your Linux here - pre-broken.

> * The boot order is all wrong, it's something like 'network, HD, CD, USB'. 
I did find this out. (Actually, on the store machine.) The timeouts were
due to the attempted netboot.

I can see a rationale for putting netboot first, but then the HD should
be last.

> Putting CD and HD before network greatly decreases startup time, and stops it 
> getting stuck if there's a network cable plugged in.
> 
> Now that I've done these things once, doing them again takes 5 minutes, plus 
> half an hour to download and install updates.

:) I expect a lot of updates.
My Idea is to go as far as possible as a naive user, then write about
it, then reinstall from a CD.

Have you had a look at the modem mentioned? I'm still hacking into the
system.

I hit esc at the grub 1.5 message and edited the default kernel line to
add "init=/bin/bash" on the end, exit, boot that line. This gave me a
root shell...

tail /etc/passwd got me the username ... but the shell dosn't echo
keystrokes to the screen!

mount -o remount,rw /

passwd <username>

(only lets me type one letter.)

exit (gets a kernel panic - so 3FS)

reboot gets me to the login, but name and password still don't work.

This is too confusing, I'm booting to a live disk and
doctoring /etc/shadow