Better late?

All right, all right, I know that I am late on posting here. I do happen to have a decent excuse, though. Actually two of them. My first excuse was that my wife and I went on a mini vacation that was desperately needed by both of us. My second, and main excuse can be summed up in one word — Ubuntu. Or two words — Ubuntu 6.10.

I have spent over a month to get this operating system to run as it should (well, like the folks in the support forums say it should, anyway). And, of course, when I re-install it (now on about the 12th re-install) I forget that I really should download and use the updated .iso file. Nope, I just sit here, goofy grin on my face, as I watch over 200 meg of updates get downloaded to “update” the operating system. Just thank goodness that I have a fairly fast internet connection.

So, I have been trying to get an operating system hyped as one of the best to actually run on my computer. With a 3.2Ghz processor, 1gig of RAM, an entire 40gig hard drive allocated to Ubuntu and another 80gig drive allocated to Windows XP Home, I can’t tell why it shouldn’t just get up and run like the hype tells me it should.

I have even had to use my XP disc to run “fixmbr” because the reformat of the drive allocated to Ubuntu doesn’t touch the Master Boot Record (MBR) part of the hard drive. It was really interesting when I reformatted the drive and suddenly I have three Windows XP Home entries on the GRUB boot manager. That’s when I found that “fixmbr” is a friend. Weird as how I have to use a Windows program to clean out a Linux hard drive that was reformatted as a FAT32 drive.

But, I am not giving up. I know, in my heart, that this will work. It is frustrating. It is nerve-wracking. It is, at times, heart pounding. (Tell me that losing e-mail you just downloaded isn’t heart pounding!) I am, however, not going to let it get me down. I have enough time and effort invested to make this my “project de jour” for the next however many months it will take to tame this beast! And, tame it I will, mark my words! If I can tame DOS and Windows, I can surely tame Ubuntu!

Or, maybe someone will tell me to switch to Xandros or Freespire. I won’t harbor ill will towards them, I will merely smile and ask which version I should allocate my other empty 80gig hard drive to. Talk about a glutton for punishment, eh? Heh.

[tags]Ubuntu, re-install, fixmbr, grub[/tags]