extraocular
Random word list:
well-acquainted
extraocular
iodopsins
half-erased
nonpoisonousness
Word chosen: extraocular
Definition: Inserted exterior to the eyes; — said of the antenn[ae] of certain insects.
Free association word list:
eyes
bad vision
lasik
lasers
burning
slicing
dicing
chopping
Mr. Popeil
Weird Al Yankovic
UHF
VHF
VHS
DVD
high-def
television
analog signal
FCC phasing it out
ham radio
ham fest
electronics
computers
upgrades
operating systems
lots of problems
wasted weekend
Word chosen: wasted weekend
Writing:
I run Ubuntu on my work laptop, and Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) came out a few weeks ago. I sat back and read the forums to see if anyone had issues with an upgrade. I was also waiting for the mirrors to cool off, so I wasn’t fighting millions of other computers for bandwidth during the upgrade process. The time seemed right to do the backup. I was going to do it last weekend, but I was on call, and I didn’t feel like putting my system out of commission while on call.
This weekend was the big weekend. I backed up my laptop Friday night, and fired off the upgrade process. It had about 1.5 gigs to download, so I walked away. When I got up Saturday, the upgrade was downloaded and the install was going. I sat in my office for about an hour answering the random questions about config files as they came up. After it was done, I spent another hour fixing my customized config files (which were saved by the upgrade process.) I also had to fight with my video drivers. It took a couple of settings changes and two reboots, but I finally got it worked out.
Then I started eye-balling my personal laptop. I was running Windows XP SP2 on it, and I decided that I was tired of Windows. I still wanted to keep a Windows partition around for the rare game that I play. I downloaded the latest version of gparted, and Ubuntu Desktop, before leaving for my RPG Saturday night.
I got up Sunday morning, and started backing up my Windows stuff to my external hard drive. While that was going, I burned gparted and Ubuntu to their respective disks. Once the backup was done, I decided to clean up Windows as much as I could to see how small I could make the Windows partition. After spending most of the day tracking down random temp files, backup files, unwanted software, and all that good stuff, I had my Windows down to 25 gig. That sounded huge to me, but I didn’t want to wipe and reinstall Windows. I decided to go with a 35 gig (out of 100) partition for Windows.
I booted off of the gparted CD, and gave it the commands to remove all partitions (linux, linux swap, and two tiny partitions that came with the system that I’m not sure what are on them,) and then resize the Windows partition. Ugh. gparted couldn’t do it. The Windows partition was 1032 sectors in size, and gparted can only handle partitions that are 1024 (or less) sectors in size. Unfortunately, by the time it realized this, my Linux partitions were gone. It did that first since that was the order of instructions that I gave it.
Since I was using GRUB as my bootloader, and the GRUB configs were on the Linux partition, my system wouldn’t boot. I threw in the Ubuntu CD, and booted from it. I installed Ubuntu, so that it would install GRUB, and then allow me to boot the system. This went fine, but was a waste of about 25 minutes.
Once I was back in Windows, I fired up Partition Commander, which can handle those larger partition sizes. I told it to move and resize the Windows partition. This started crunching along, and then failed with some error number (don’t remember the number) that was totally useless to me. I was beginning to wonder how I was going to accomplish my goal.
I booted back into Windows to find that several DLLs had been mangled. I threw in my Windows CD, booted into rescue mode, and restored the DLLs. This allowed my system to boot back up, but there was a problem with the driver for my PCI-Express BUS, which I assume my video card connects to. I assume this because my video was not working properly. I was running 16 bit color in 640×480 resolution on my 17″ widescreen LCD. HUGE icons and text ensued.
I spent the next three hours trying to rescue Windows, but it was beyond hope. It was at this point that I decided to wipe everything. I booted off of the gparted CD again, and wiped all partitions. Then I created the three partitions that I needed (35 gig for Windows, 84 gig for Linux, and 1 gig for swap.)
The next step was to boot from the Windows CD and start the Windows install. I was nervous doing this because it was a CD that I burned from my laptop as part of the “create rescue CD” software that came with my Dell laptop. I did not have a serial number or anything like that anywhere. Fortunately, the software didn’t ask me for one. (I did find it a short bit later on the bottom of my laptop, though. Good to know that it’s there.)
The state of things right now is that Windows XP SP 2 is installed and patched up-to-date. I have a fairly decent list of things to install on Windows. I’ve gotten a few things off of the list, but the rest will come tonight after I get home.
Once I get Windows back to where I want it, the next step is to re-install Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) on the Linux partitions, and get all of that setup and configured. That will probably happen Wednesday night as we have a meeting with our doula Tuesday night.
As an aside… We have a print-server-in-a-box with network, and two parallel ports on it. It takes some funky Windows drivers to be able to use it. Kiara pointed out that I probably wouldn’t be able to use it if I went with pure Linux. She was right. However, a quick google for “linux netgear ps110″ lead me to a few pages that pointed out that the ps110 was an embedded Linux device running lpd. Hah! The funky Windows drivers were doing nothing more than translating Windows print commands to Linux print commands and talking to lpd. I tested things on my work laptop, and within a few minutes, I was able to print to the printer. It even sent the data over the network about 10 times faster than my Windows laptop. Schweet!
Hopefully the rest of my upgrade/install attempts go more smoothly than they did on Sunday.
