So I’ve finally got round to installing some form of linux on my laptop.

I’ve chosen openSuSE 10.3, GNOME edition, because it’s functionality during my live CD test was very good on my, now getting-on-a-bit, laptop.

It’s a shame my laptops graphics card isn’t in the Xgl database; which as a result means I can’t use the “virtual box”, that really cool 3D desktop. Another problem is getting my laptops wireless card driver installed, its one of those Atheros built in ones; which in turn means I can’t browse the web (if your thinking I can use a direct ethernet connection to my network, then unfortunately I can’t because my laptop is in my room upstairs and my wired network resides only downstairs, with the router).

Overall I’m impressed, and it didn’t resize my Windows partition to some pathetically small amount – instead a fair 18.7GB, not bad considering its hard drive is 40GB.

This is in FreeSpire right, they’ve got Firefox, changed it to say Web Browser and have the cheek to change the default search engine to Windows Live Search. This is Windows search on Linux. I’ve never heard anything so silly.

I was absolutely disgusted. This is in FreeSpire – Linspire based Linux running in live mode on my laptop.

But things get worse. They’ve got Ubuntu 7.10, changed all the orangey bits to blue, changed the logo, changed from Gnome to KDE (which doesn’t matter because I like KDE).

Don’t worry though, things get even more worse. I can’t run it in normal graphics mode, so I have to run it in safe mode. Because of this, I get 1204×768 resolution on a screen thats resolution is 1280×800. I go to change it “K” > “Settings” > “Control Center” > “Perhiperals” > “Display” > “Administrator Mode” and the window is so small, I can’t even press the “Apply” button. So thats it. I’m stuck with 1204×768 until I install (which wont happen soon, and if I install it, I can change my X config)…

Thats it. FreeSpire Linux. Visually looks nice (apart from being pixelated), performs okay, and I like it (somewhat).

Yay! I sort of got Ubuntu to work. Well that is SORT of. Okay, so I managed to install it and that was it, with the help of a newish open source program called Wubi (nice name). At the moment, it only supports Ubuntu 7.04, Xubuntu and Kubuntu (can’t remember what versions, since it was well over an hour ago before posting this plus I’ve drank lots of non-diet coca cola), but damn you stupid screwed up graphics drivers and the damn screen went off as soon as the loading screen had finished its loading! I’ve searched Google but found nothing. My graphics drivers are VIA/SG3 UniChrome Pro IGP but the VIA website took me to the S3 (not SG3 though) website which took me to a different VIA website, I think it was VIArena, but anyway then it asked me to select operating systems so I did then it made me choose a driver catergory… what? Luckily while I was at the S3 site, I downloaded this thing that told me what one I was using but damn the drivers, mine wasn’t there. Typical, innit? I desprately need to figure out a way to either update my graphics drivers OR get Ubuntu to boot up in Safe Mode, then change the driver settings (because Freespire will only work when I choose “xdriver=vesa” under ‘Advanced Options’), but the only problem with Safe Mode is that the resolution is 800×600 and my screen is 1280×800.

Never mind, I will not give up on my quest to get atleast some sort of Linux installed and working. As they say in France, au revoir et venu encore!

Tags: ubuntu, wubi, via, sg3, s3, drivers, display

Whoooo! Now I got Ubuntu 7.04 working AFTER the loading screen, only in “Safe graphics mode” though. Same with Freespire but I have to boot from the options screen choosing the “xdriver=vesa” option which obviously means that my computer now only works using VESA drivers. I must say that Ubuntu 7.04 detects my wireless hardware (built in adapter) and can connect to my wireless network which is a nice improvement although it could do this before the interface is much better now. Plus I >really< like Freespire, if I could find a nice way to ‘safely’ partition my hard disk I would install it. Plus I like the one click installation system called CNR, just click the install button next to any of the 34,965 listings and give it about 30 seconds and its in your “Launch” menu (basically the Start menu in Windows, but its in the bottom left corner). Not forgetting that the taskbar (same in Windows) is more customizable and can hide in one click and is avaliable in four different sizes; tiny, small (my favourite), medium and large (about 1 quarter of the screen).

I recently found myself downloading a copy of the ReactOS platform. Ofcourse I did download the Live CD but wasn’t able to run it, because this stupid machine decided it didn’t want to after I deleted all of my partitions. I haven’t had chance to try it out on ‘the other machine’ but will do. Don’t think it’ll work because it didn’t in Parallels. It was only 22.[something I can't remember]MB, well it was an ISO but it was all safely zipped up. I thought that it was quite small for a operating system, because Freespire took several hours to download on a somewhat fast connection, but the actual ISO file is little more than a shocking 75MB.

So after all that kerfuffle of the live cd, I just downloaded the QEMU one, which was again very small, obviously because it was all zipped up. I extracted it and ran the “boot.bat” file. I must say how very fast QEMU was at emulating it, it didn’t lag at all and took less than 20 seconds to load up fully. So I started exploring, but soon realised that it was a huge work in progress. The main reason I downloaded was because its claimed that it has the ability to run EXE files. If you don’t know what they are, they’re executables, or programs for short. Those of you may know that I have made some software in the past, namely AMV Studio and AMV Studio Utilites (they’re both different programs) and I wanted to test them on they’re. One problem is that because it was emulating in QEMU that has no options, it automatically chose the wrong network adapter, my internal one for Parallels, not my Local Area or Wireless (but my LAN cable wasn’t plugged in at the time, only Wireless was connected), I couldn’t access the internet. I could hardly find the browser, since it wasn’t in the ‘Internet’ menu, what a minute, there wasn’t even an ‘Internet’ menu. I had to run the ReactOS Explorer program, which when I pressed the ‘Web’ button, prompted me to download some Mozilla ActiveX control thing.

To illustrate some problems I’ve had and what ReactOS is currently capable of doing, I compiled a small gallery with about 6 screenshots. To see it, visit http://www.callumhaywood.com/services/reactos/screenshots/.

As the title of this post describes; it wasn’t my shiny new nice shiny (its not a mistake I’ve put it twice, it really is shiny!) Ubuntu disk that was causing the problem, because I downloaded my copy of Freespire. It was 686MB, and it only took about half an hour (fast DSL plus GetRight, which I told to do the 4 part thingy). I booted it up, selected the ‘FreespireLive’ option, waited about 5 minutes for it to load and guess what… as soon as it had finished loading, my damn screen turned off! WHY IS IT DOING THIS TO ME! It never did it before, that was before I deleted all of my hard disk partitions, and then started again with the ‘XP Recovery Disk’…

You may have read in some previous post, that I had the same problem with my Ubuntu 7.04 disk. Both of them, since I ordered 3 just to be safe (2x Intel x86-based systems compatible disks and 1 AMD64 or EM64T-based systems compatible disk). Its now really beginning to bug me, since ALL of my Linux disks work on that other laptop (argh! Its running Windows Vista aswell)…

I even Google’d for updates to my GPU (graphics processing unit, for those of you who didn’t know ) and graphics card (c’mon, you gotta know what one of those is, no? Well thats what Google is for…) but have found nothing. One thing I did find was that by pressing my ‘FN+F11′, FN is short for function (only for laptops) and F11 is the function key next to F12 at the top of your keyboard – anyway, pressing those combinations turns my screen on and off. So I pressed it (obviously) and the screen turned on (this was after it turned on after Freespire had loaded), but no luck… no it didn’t turn off again but it came up light grey with vertical black lines. Why? I don’t know… So I just hit the power button for 5 seconds, and left it to boot as usual.

I’ll post any updates Don’t forget to post your comments if you’ve experienced the same or similar issues. (But please remember, that I’m only 13 years old)…

So I got my Ubuntu 7.04 disks through the post today. I was like “Wooo!”, until I booted them up. Everything went okay, the loading screen loaded, and some text saying “Starting hardware” where hardware was lots of pieces of hardware, then my screen turned off? A few moments longer, I heard the sound Ubuntu makes when it shows you the login screen, but still nothing on my screen. I decided to turn off by pressing the power button (don’t make a habit of this, it can and probably will break your hard disk after some time), and then tried my other trusty disk (I ordered 3, 2 x86 based ones and one x64 based one), on another machine, and guess what; it worked.

I decided to boot up Windows, as I do most of the time, and start Parallels Workstation (you know, the multi-os emulating program), so Parallels started emulating Ubuntu, no problems, until that was, death struck (not really death), and I encountered the dreaded “ACPI: Unable to Locate RSDP” message, and then, a few moments later, it said “Now loading…”, and then went blank, but the screen didn’t turn off. Another few minutes later the Ubuntu login screen actually appeared! I left it to login automatically as ‘ubuntu’, as it does, and then another few seconds later, it came up with “Your session has only lasted 10 seconds” and followed by lots of rubbish saying about if you’ve installed it could be an error. I pressed ‘OK’, since it was the only option, and it came up with the login screen, again, so I left it to login as Ubuntu, still same no luck.

I’ve checked this out with the ubuntuforums.org and no luck has appeared. How odd, and such a shame, since I want to install it on my machine and then I can update the graphics drivers that Ubuntu uses, since my screen resolution is 1280×800 and Ubuntu only seems to let me go up to 1024×768, even when I change it by pressing F4 on the loading screen.

Not too long ago, I made myself a Ubuntu Live CD. I like it, its kinda cool. One really huge big problem is that any changes you make, namely installing programs, changing themes, etc, will all be lost when you exit the CD – well I suppose thats the point in *Live CDs*, to evaluate, test, destory to smitherines (in cyberspace, yeh, don’t go destroying your disk ) – after all, as soon as you boot from it again, it’ll be just like the first time you installed it. Go ahead, install a linux virus, I suppose it will only affect you for that session. Of course, you can install it on a partition on your hard disk – if you do that then I strongly advise you not to *destroy to smitherines* or *install a virus*.