Getting rid of Windows!

Oh man… Mr. Grub can’t start my laptop anymore. Error 1.5 and a newbie like me hasn’t got a clue what to do now of course… So, since I only have internet for one computer it meant resetting the cable modem, redoing the settings with the provider… Not a lot of work, but is sure gave a shock typing from my desktop again. Especially since my princess and me will start our 1-year sabbatical in 3 weeks time, so we’ll only have our laptop with us then…

This is what happened:

I took the advice to reformat my 2 Ubuntu partitions again with GParted and then re-instal Ubuntu with the LiveCD. The first part went smooth enough. The second didn’t. The initialization process stopped after a lot of lines saying Ubuntu “could not allocate” a lot of things and that he had been “respawning too fast”. This reference to fish and frog life unexpectedly gave me confirmation that Ubuntu also came out of the ocean! The wonders of evolution!

Anyway, up to this point I still thought “No Problemo!”, just reboot in Windy and ask my forum friends for advice before starting to freak out… But pffffffff… Now GRUB can’t load itself (error 15). And if GRUB can’t load a newbie like me hasn’t got a clue how to proceed from there…

I’m sure it’s exactly surprises like this that can put off people from using GNU+Linux. But I’m determined as hell to get this party started!

Note that I wrote GNU+Linux. I’ll also change the subtitle of my blog. That is because I have been reading on the website of the free software foundation NGO. And then moved on to do some more research on the web on the history of this movement. All very interesting and nutritious for my idealistic soul. I read a great bio of Richard Stallman on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

What I found particularly interesting was that he already opposed copyrighted software at the end of the seventies. Quote:

In the 1980s, the hacker culture began to fragment. To prevent software from being used on their competitors’ computers, most manufacturers stopped distributing source code and began using copyright and restrictive software licenses to limit or prohibit copying and redistribution. Such proprietary software had existed before, and it became apparent that it would become the norm. When Brian Reid in 1979 placed “time bombs” in Scribe to restrict unlicensed access to the software, Stallman proclaimed that “the prospect of charging money for software was a crime against humanity.”

It inspired him to found the Free Software Foundation which came up with the GNU General Public License (GPL), effectively copyrighting the idea of copyleft.

I read somewhere else on the Wikipedia that a poll amongst Sourceforge-users revealed that about 60% of the software they used was free (not as in freeware, but meaning being released under the GPL). Ok, sourceforge users are probably not the average computer users… But hey, it makes me optimistic about the future. Especially since apparently, and I quote again from a Wikipedia article:

In November of 2006, the Microsoft and Novell software corporations announced a controversial partnership to improve interoperability between Microsoft Windows and SUSE Linux.

I guess development of our “Third world” but be much helped if 97% of the world uses free operating systems (97% of the world’s PC’s run on Windows now) and free software on their computers. Imagine that!

Alright, have to get ready to take my fiancé and her cute little niece to the promised amusement park for the afternoon. Let’s spend some money

Alright. First big strubbles in my new relationship.

If I want to access all the logical places to store files (Places –> Computer) I am simply refused to do so. The only place where I can put files that is sensible is the desktop.

Unable to mount the selected volume.
error: device /dev/hda6 is not removable
error: could not execute pmount

Somebody then suggested to say this to her (she has a special place where you can chat her up):

wget http://media.ubuntu-nl.org/scripts/diskmounter
sudo bash diskmounter
rm diskmounter

This helped greatly to get access to all the partitions but led to a not so nice find: I had ended up with “copies” of all the folders and files of / (root) also being in /home. So I had suddenly double /home/home and generally a situation you can summarise as something that you should seriously avoid altogether…

I had to face fact to me myself and I having screwed up during the installation. Step 6.

So I wrote this blog whilst waiting for suggestions from my new friends at forum.ubuntu-nl.org, but since it’s now 3.30 a.m. in the part of the world where I live this help is not forthcoming just now. Which explains why and how this little blog-idea got suddenly so extended.

So restart… sounds of drums… and yeeeeeeeeeessss

a silly-named piece of software (GRUB) lets me select an OS to boot with. Unexpectedly, I can even choose between 2 types of Windows now. Ubuntu is the default OS.

Of course I want to start up with Ubuntu now, just a quick look before bed…

But again, my new mistress enchanted me and seduced me to stay longer with her. All this exiting new features and games and sounds… Aaaahhhh… I imagine her perfume to be having all kinds of subtle natural flavours. Fruity, but also some suggestion of musk and other adventurous smells…

My girlfriend now officially pronounces me completely crazy.

But look how smoothly Ubuntu updates herself! See these useful workspaces in the bottom right corner? Look at those curves on the default desktop…

Ok, not all is perfect under the sun. Ubuntu has never heard of my webcam. She doesn’t know about wireless internet just yet. With her, my speakers make a more silent and muffled sound and my skype friends can’t hear me clearly. I’m not allowed access to her more delicate parts just yet (but hey, on a first date!) But she looks willing to learn. She has great friends who give me useful tips on how to tame her and how I’ll get her to listen to me… She hasn’t seen the last of me yet!

I give myself shoulder taps and go to bed!

So, in again the LiveCD of Ubuntu and double click on install…

Step 1 to 4 are straightforward enough. Choose your location, keyboard, names for your laptop, etc… Choose manual installation unless you want to loose windows after all…

Next Ubuntu will analyze your harddisk. You’re now in Ubuntu’s own partitioning environment but since you did your homework with GParted you can click next. But make sure you have all the names of your partitions (hda1 to hda?) and what you want to use them for in your head or better yet: a piece of paper (I would have saved me 1 hour of frustrations because I was absolutely sure hda8 was my linux-swap because it came at the end, but appartenly I got named hda5 during the partitioning process…)

This part I found the most complicated of all… But nothing real will happen until after step 6 when you click the “install” button and there are plenty of error messages when you select impossible actions… And I’m still not sure if my solution will win awards but this is what I did:

/ to hda7 (for Ubuntu itself)

/home to hda8 (for my documents)

swap to swap

Beware those who don’t read this for entertainment purposes: this is probably definitely NOT a good way to perform the installation since it could have led to the situation described in the post above unaccessible partitions !

So next came the question: how can I operate 2 operating systems? Googled and read and found and enlisted the help of the great Ubuntu-nl forums (forum.ubuntu-nl.org). Apparently there are very helpfull and skilled linux-users around who spend free time answering questions of noobs like me. Beat this Windows Support!

I chose to partition my harddisk using GParted. Get it here. You have to burn this on a CD too (hey, another LiveCD!). Possibly with the help of Isorecorder again.

Then you have to boot up with the GParted liveCD. I didn’t back up my system because there was nothing to loose anyway. Apparently you better defragment and backup before you start toying with partitions on your harddisk if necessary…

So my objectives were:
- keep windows
- possibility to share files between windows and ubuntu
- run ubuntu

When installing Windows it had apparently made 3 partitions for itself, so GParted’s analysis told me. hda1, hda2 and hda3. hda1 and hda2 had several Gb’s of stuff on them so I assumed one of them to be the C:\ drive ACER (and the other the backup? - I still don’t know today) and hda3 the empty D or ACERDATA drive. Surprisingly all windows partitions were installed with fat32 (instead of the expected NFTS), I also don’t know why.

My friends on the forum gave me this advice:

delete hd3 and make it extended (I first resized hda1+2 a bit to free up some space, I gave them 10 Gb each).

once this was done you do the following with the extended part:

create a new partition for the sharing of files between win and ubuntu (logical, fat32) I gave this about 20 Gb.

create a new partition for running Ubuntu on and booting Ubuntu from (logical, EXT3). 10Gb suffices.

create a new partition for your files under Ubuntu (your /home) (logical, EXT3). This got the leftover Gb’s.

create a new partition for the necessary linux-swap. Apparently it’s a good idea to put it at the end of your harddrive. Advice for size was the same size as the DDR-memory + 200 Mb or 150% of your DDR-memory. In my case of 1Gb DDR2 I made it about 1500 Mb. (logical, Linux-swap)

Time spend reading up on and tinkering with this: about 2 hours…

So, OK, I liked what I saw with the LiveCD. No actually, I loved it. Even from the CD it ran very smoothly. Nice sound when starting up. I liked the default desktop theme. I thought it was great it came with all this great software (GIMP - image editor, open source Office suite, etc…) whereas Windows only comes standard with crappy notebook and crappy paint and Microsoft asks you big money again for their Office package.

I found the user interface very intuitive, very organized and very comprehensive. So yep, I wanted to install this beauty to my harddrive. But I also wanted to keep windows up and running on it. Like an old friend (and foe - regularly) you can’t just leave like that. Or maybe at the moment: Windows is like a spouse after a long marriage. We met in her 3.2 days (was that the eighties?) and over the years I got to know her better, with all her abilities and quacks. I got to resent certain behaviour. And even with her regular plastic surgery… Anyways, I trust her but she still doesn’t trust me a lot of times it seems.

So now I took Ubuntu as my exotic mistress. And at the moment I spend a lot of time with her. Windows doesn’t seem to mind. I don’t know what her father thinks of this but I never cared much for him anyway…

The LiveCD wouldn’t run. So I googled around once more.

Solution: enter the BIOS by hitting F2 in time when your PC boots up. Change the order of the boot sequence (or whaddoyoucallit?). Or in other words: get the cd-player on number 1. Exit and save changes.

The laptop now looks if there are any interesting disks in his drive to boot from before it boots from the harddrive. Great.

Time spend on this part: about half on hour?

Next came the task of selecting one of the many linux-based OS around. It was a bit like choosing a brand of cereals in our well equipped supermarket. You want one that looks like it will best suit your taste.

So I googled around a few evening and read a lot and saw some nice pictures. I finally decided to go for Ubuntu. Ubuntu sounds nice and the African word has a nice meaning which suits my idealistic nature.

I dediced to go for the “Dapper Drake” edition 6.06 LTS for reasons of stability and the Long Term Support (another 2,5 years from now on).

I downloaded the necesarry file from the ubuntu website and burned this iso-file on a cd-rom. This turns out, it now called a “liveCD”. From this you can testdrive an operating system without having to install it on your harddrive first.

My linux-quest had now started in earnest.

What happened first: i bought a rather cheap laptop last week, an Acer Aspire 3682WXMi.

I always get this fresh feeling when starting tinkering on a new clean system. It almost like new year: I make resolutions. I promise myself I won’t make a mess of my filing system (well, the intention of a system…) But it always ends up looking like the real life desk and drawers in my house look like…

Anyway, I also decided to finally try to get rid of Windows. One step at a time. Not that I don’t want Bill Gates to become richer than he already is. No no, he does really good stuff with his money a lot of times. But somehow I have this funky feeling that the world would become a better place if the majority of PC’s would run on open source operating systems and with open source software. Because it would mean much easier access to the world of computing for a lot of people in a lot of continents. So, ok, call me idealistically inclined…