Ubuntu
Today I finally managed to create a boot disk for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) from the CD installer that is available here. My initial effort failed because I didn’t realise that I couldn’t just simply copy the downloaded ISO image to a DVD. Duh! The school computer technician explained to me, with a look of concern on his face, that I needed Nero Burning software to create a bootable disk. I didn’t have this software and didn’t particularly want to install it on my laptop just for this purpose. Not surprisingly, Windows Vista lacked any native support for burning ISO images but a quick search on the Internet revealed a site called TeraByteUnlimited where the necessary tool called BurnCDCC could be found. It was compatible with both Vista and XP.
My first attempt to burn the image to a DVD-R disk failed after the program complained that the default optimal speed setting was too fast. The program didn’t want to have anything to do with the disk after that so I found a 1.4Gb DVD-RW disk and chose the 2x DVD burning speed. No problems. Well, that’s not entirely true. The problems came later when I was wanting to install this operating system on an old PC that I had set up for the purpose. The boot process went well but before the desktop could load, the monitor went crazy saying that it couldn’t support the output. A week before I’d tried to install Windows XP on the same machine and encountered a similar problem, so it’s not Ubuntu, it’s the damn PC.
The weirdest thing is that Windows XP would load in Standard Mode but nothing else. In frustration, I took the PC to a computer repair shop, fearing that the video card needed replacing. The repair person assured me the video card was fine but the hard disk was full of bad sectors. Well, it was over 5 years old and it probably was full of bad sectors but that clearly wasn’t the problem. Anyway, I have a probably superfluous, brand new, shiny, 80Gb Western Digital hard disk to show for my visit. I should know by now that computer repair people generally don’t know anymore than I do. I remain keen to get Ubuntu fired up and connected to the Internet but clearly I have some hardware issues to resolve before that’s possible.
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