[nzlug] Acer + Ubuntu: initial impressions.

[Simon Bridge]

On Tue, 2008-04-01 at 21:34 +1300, Robin Sheat wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 April 2008 21:01:41 Simon Bridge wrote:
> > ... this seems like something you have to set up *deliberately*. It's
> > like they're *trying* to make things work poorly.
> Yeah, on the other hand, my thinking is that they had the hardware, and 
> determined it wouldn't run Vista, so they decided to do this in a bit of a 
> rush without really knowing what they were doing. Or perhaps it was set up by 
> someone who last used Linux 10 years ago.
Interesting idea - such a person would want ext2 and would disable
sources by commenting out the lines in sources.list

However - they went to the trouble of moving said HW into the new
form-factor. Perhaps I should play closer attention to how the live disk
behaves?

Lets see - HW DRI is disabled too ... so compiz won't work.
Isn't there something about compiz-fusion and the "intel" driver?

> 
> > I can see a rationale for putting netboot first, but then the HD should
> > be last.
> I'd guess they imaged it, and whatever tool they used didn't do a good job of 
> it.
> 
> > :) I expect a lot of updates.
> About 250Mb worth.
Having had a heads-up, I enabled only the security updates ... there
were 90 packages, total 105MiB. For some reason my bandwidth just
dropped to 20kBps (from around 100 - I'll have to look into that).

> 
> > My Idea is to go as far as possible as a naive user, then write about
> > it, then reinstall from a CD.
> It's probably the best plan. I'd be interested to hear how that works, if more 
> things work with a fresh install than with their one, it'd be worth doing on 
> my parents one.

I've recently run into a gutsy edition from the aussie
computerworld/pcworld whatever. This version was missing stuff too.
Maybe I should go winge in launchpad - let these guys know what others
are doing to their distro. Anyway - reinstalling from an official ubuntu
disk solved all issues.

> 
> > Have you had a look at the modem mentioned? I'm still hacking into the
> > system.
> No, I set my parents up with a wireless router. Their phone line isn't up to 
> dialup anyway, and there were time constraints when I was looking at it.
> 
> > (only lets me type one letter.)
> export TERM=linux
> might help there.

I discovered that the recovery boot in the grub menu has a reliable
terminal and used that. Guess what... this machine has been used for
training (the username was "DECA Training"). I'm definitely calling DSE
tomorrow.

> 
> > exit (gets a kernel panic - so 3FS)
> That makes sense, the kernel doesn't expect the init process to vanish.

Yeah - judicious cluebrick application revealed that I couldn't expect a
login prompt as I didn't get there via a login.