Mal and Weasel’s Tech Crap

In his previous post, Malachai more or less chronicled the process of my ill-fated attempt at installing Xubuntu on my aging laptop. What spurred me on to it? Well, partially it was due to Mal’s suggestion that I scrap the Win2K install and get something on it that’ll run better and support a wider variety of more stable programs – I don’t entirely disagree with it – but more than that, it’s because I’ve been running Ubuntu 8.10 on my main machine (dubbed Zeus) for several months now, and to make the understatement of the year, I love it.

I’ve been attempting to “get into” the world of Linux and open-source software for several years now. The first time I had heard of Linux was in 2001, when my brother had stumbled upon (not StumbleUpon) Linux.org, through which he found Mandrake Linux. A little non-destructive installation later, he was running Linux – though since neither of us had any idea how to work the thing, poor Bro had no network or sound drivers, effectively neutering his experience. When the time came to upgrade his machine, he opted to completely wipe the hard drive and just start from scratch on Windows 98. (We were difficult to please in regards to upgrading Windows, as Dad hadn’t had the best luck with Windows 2000 and we heard nothing but problems with XP at the time.)

It was about 2002 that I gave Linux a try myself, with the Topologi distro. Topologi was designed to operate out of a self-contained hard disk image left lying around on the C drive, and was supposed to be accessible through a boot loader, but strangely, this feature wouldn’t work in Windows 98, forcing me to boot it with a CD-ROM instead. Topologi ran well enough, but a lack of sound drivers made the experience a little boring for me, and I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to get help with the thing.

I goofed around with other various editions of Linux for the following years, mainly in enclosed environments like MS Virtual PC, VMWare Player, QEMU, and Sun VirtualBox.

Only around the turn of 2009 did I finally work up the deluded notion that I actually wanted to have a Linux install on Zeus. I cleared a little space and set aside about 10 gigabytes to stick Ubuntu 8.10 on the machine. While I did initially have some difficulties getting sound and video drivers to work, most of the onboard hardware on Zeus’s motherboard worked out of the box with Ubuntu, and the parts that didn’t were easy enough to install drivers for. I never did get my Sound Blaster X-Fi working properly, but that problem kind of took care of itself.

Now, with just a smidgen of help from Malachai and the folks at #mzx on EsperNet (round of applause for both, please), I’ve got Ubuntu running pretty much everything I do in Windows.

Well, except the games. That’s a rant for later though.

You’ll soon learn to tell the difference between us two on this blog. I, Malachai, will sound mostly like an idiot, (however an idiot with somewhat of a knowledge about computer-related things.) Weasel, on the other hand, sounds much more intelligent in his style of writing. (Don’t beleive me? Check out his personal blog!) Typically I’m the one that tries new things, though, including setting up Wordpress. I’ve gotten quite adept at it over the past few days, but I digress. Given that this is the first post on a technology blog, I’ve decided to open it with a little bit about current “issues”.

Bootloaders suck.

Today, Weasel (with some encouraging, for which I feel horribly sorry,) decided to dual-boot his old HP laptop. Windows 2000 Professional, which he already had, and Xubuntu 8.10. The Xubuntu installer is (usually) particularly nice, given that it gives you the option to resize existing partitions, in order to make room at the end of the drive for a new partition. So, new partition created, and a swap space allocated, he hit the “go, baby, go” button. The installer took quite a while, seemingly doing nothing, and seemed to be fine, up until it decided to start being an idiot. For some strange reason, the installer decided, somehow, that GRUB was not a good thing to install on to the harddrive, along with some other files, so when the computer was restarted, the poor thing couldn’t find an OS. Any OS. Not Windows or linux were working. The installer deleted the Windows bootloader, and attempted to install GRUB over it, which failed, leaving the system completely unbootable. Time to dig out “Ye Olde Win2k Disque”. Yay recovery mode. Right? Wrong. We ran all of the things that it is possible to use to fix the bootloader. Fixmbr failed, along with fixboot. We then ran chkdsk /r, which should, in theory, find and restore bad sectors on the drive. After all of this, the thing was still unbootable.

Finally, Weasel decided to just re-install Win2k right over the copy that was already on the drive, and in doing so, was able to save all of his important files. Music, pictures and games.

To make a long story short, I’ll say this once again: Bootloaders suck.