Installing Ubuntu

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

After reading all the recent articles on Digg about ubuntu.torrent (Desktop CD for PC (Intel x86) computers).  An ISO file will be downloaded so you will need to be able to burn the ISO to CD.  I currently have Windows XP and didn’t have an ISO burning utility so I downloaded CDBurnerXP Pro. 

Once the CD was completed I tossed it into the laptop and it booted up off the CD first without installing anything.  I clicked the ‘install’ icon and began the process of installing.  When it came time to partition it started to install but eventually failed with the message, “Failed to create a file system”.  I tried again and got the same message.  This time I rebooted and tried from scratch and was successful with the installation.  I googled around while it was installing and saw this error message has happened to others and the third time trying worked for others as well.  Not sure what is going on but it works.

Right after it completed I entered my WEP key and hit the ‘Updates’ button.  About 15 minutes later all the updates were installed and I rebooted and was ready to go.  I jumped on to my blog and clicked over to Eric’s site and noticed I needed the flash plug-in.  Clicking the download plug-in didn’t seem to work in Firefox so I found the Easy Ubuntu script.  This script will, as they say, “download the most commonly requested apps, codecs, and tweaks that are not found in the base distribution - all with a few clicks of your mouse.” That is no lie.  Following the simple commands given I had everything I needed pretty quick.

So far so good.  I recalled reading an article on Digg about setting the box up as a developer machine.  I read it again and the IEs4Linux install looked interesting.  As a web developer we are always testing cross browser issues and this install of 5.0, 5.5 and 6.0 of IE looked pretty good for using this new setup, at least as a testing machine. 

The first thing you need to do is download Wine. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix.  A more detailed explanation can be found on the site.  The link should bring you right to the download and instructions you need to install it.  Again this went very smooth.  Clear instructions and easy install.

The IEs4Linux install also requires CabExtract.  I didn’t realize it but this was installed already.

The final step is to download IEs4Linux, this can easily be accomplished:

wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-2.0beta8.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ies4linux-2.0beta8.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-2.0beta8
./ies4linux

You are prompted the rest of the way for what needs to be done.  Few minutes later I had all three versions if IE installed.

One nice thing I noticed was Remote Desktop was installed.  The UI looks exactly the same as the one Windows has and I connected easily to some of my remote machines. 

I have only been using Ubuntu for about 5 hours, and most of that was getting setup and reading but I am very impressed.  What used to seem like a mountain of command lines and usability issues has been handled with this installation.  I am looking forward to seeing how Eclipse performs and some other web developer tools.  If you have an old machine lying around it is worth the effort to install.

  1. I think I’m going to give it a shot once I get my spare PC online, why Ubuntu vs some other version of linux?

    You still need to partition the drive, is it just whats pre-installed in the distribution which is the main draw?

    Posted by web  on  07/05  at  01:47 PM

  2. Lots of hype areound Ubuntu lately and everything I am reading explains how simple the install is, drivers and so forth.

    I have to say it went faster and smoother than most XP installs I have done. 

    Ubuntu has a partion utility in the install process, it installs all the common stuff you need and is truly plug and play.  At least for me and this old laptop I was using.

    Posted by Brian  on  07/05  at  02:27 PM

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