A newbie turns to Linux

Some readers -- you know who you are -- ridiculed me for still having Windows 98 when I included it in my project to fully connect a Win98/XP/Vista/Mac OS/Linux home Wi-Fi network.

A Computerworld editor cautioned against using it.

They were right.

I managed a couple of clumsy kludges in my project to make it kinda work, but Win 98 just doesn't cut it anymore.

So I'm installing Linux on my old Pentium 4 gray box machine.

I had been tinkering around with Ubuntu 8.10 and found it comfortable, functional and even -- dare I say it? -- fun!

No Ubuntu for you

 The old Win 98 PC has two hard drives, 60GB and 40GB. Win 98 is on the 60GB boot drive. I tried to install Ubuntu on the second drive, basically using the install-process defaults. It didn't work at all. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to boot correctly.

Upon boot-up, after teasing me with a brief Ubuntu screen, it flashed back to the terminal and gave me a message like this (taken from a blog post):

Starting up...
Loading, please wait...
usplash: Setting mode 1600x1200 failed
usplash: Using mode 1280x1024
Gave up waiting for root device. Common problems:
- Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)
- Check rootdelay= (did the system wait long enough?)
- Check root= (did the system wait for the right device?)
- Missing modules (cat /proc/modules; ls /dev)
ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/7f374ef3-be4b-4535-81b4-755d55e9a98b does not exist. Dr
opping to a shell!

BusyBox v1.10.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.2-1ubuntu6) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.

(initramfs)_

I had no idea what BusyBox was or what to do next, but typing "exit" continued the boot process, with a looonnnggg list of line commands scrolling by.

It actually worked OK after it finally booted up (and why would that happen?) but I wasn't going to go through that hassle every time, so I looked for help on the Web.

No answers on the Web

I found I had the same problem as a lot of other people, but no one knew how to solve it.

Apparently the boot process is looking for a hard disk with a certain ID and it's not finding it. I changed the boot order in the BIOS several times but nothing worked.

Various people presented various fixes. One common theme was that this problem only occurred after upgrading from a prior version of Ubuntu. Some thought it was a kernel problem. Some thought it was a BIOS problem. Some thought it was a hardware/motherboard problem. Nobody knew.

Some people solved the problem by tinkering with a line in a boot-up file called menu.lst. This configuration file has a "kernel" line looking something like this (taken from a blog post):

kernel  /vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic boot=UUID=349b7b5f-a9af-4f81-abb3-56bb54a72a70 ro quiet splash

And the solution that worked for many people was to add the string "all-generic-ide" to the end of that line.

For me, it made matters worse. I got an even longer stream of terminal messages scrolling up that just went on and on -- much worse than before.

I tried reinstalling. Then I tried reformatting the entire drive and reinstalling. Nothing worked.

Next up: openSUSE

So I tried openSUSE 11.1.

Now I was really fumbling around. It was totally new to me and didn't work like Ubuntu at all. I was comfortable with Ubuntu; I was lost with openSUSE.

In Ubuntu, when I couldn't play an .mp3 file, there were readily at hand instructions on how to go out and grab the appropriate software to make it work.

And Ubuntu found and connected to my wireless network instantly.

Everything just worked.

Trying to get openSUSE to play an .mp3 file was like being featured in the next Saw movie.

Now, listen carefully: I'm not disparaging openSUSE. I totally attribute the problems to my newbieness. I really don't need any more hate mail.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who has forgotten more about Linux than I'll ever know, has actually said openSUSE is his favorite operating system.

I think it's just not for me.

Problems galore

I was told by the Amarok music player that it couldn't play .mp3 files (proprietary license) and I had to go get and install the correct codec. That led me to download a .ymp file. But it wouldn't open up so I had to find the right "one-click-install" package (YaST Metapackage File) and figure out how to install it.

There were several instances like that where I was supposed to do something but I didn't know how to do it so I had to do a second thing to learn how to do that first thing but I couldn't do that second thing so I had to learn a third thing to do the second thing so I could do the first thing. And like that.

I wasn't alone.

Somehow I managed to achieve one-click-install capability for the .ymp files and opened up the codec package and got .mp3s to play.

Then it was networking. Ubuntu attached to my Wi-Fi network easily. OpenSUSE might have done the same thing, but it was on a machine connected directly to my FIOS router with an Ethernet cable.

I thought that would be an easier setup, but it was actually harder. It didn't recognize any network at all.

I downloaded every networking-related package I could find. That was more of a hassle. Some seemed to install by themselves while others didn't and I couldn't (in the hurry that I was) even find them to try to install them.

Network connectivity

I finally downloaded and installed Samba and I got some network capability. I couldn't just display a map of workgroup computers like I could with all the other OSs, so I had to go through a time-consuming process of manually connecting to the shares on each machine before I could see them as a group.

Again, there's probably an easier way to do this and experienced users are laughing and shaking their heads at my ineptness. But I'm approaching this as a newbie representative of many others at my same level of Linux proficiency.
 
The Linux community wants to share its hard work with others and get them to use this great OS, but it has to understand that not everyone has the time, ability or inclination for a lengthy ramp-up process. They want to install it and be on their way as quickly as possible. Some agree with me.
 
I don't think openSUSE and I are going to get along, so I'm going to give Fedora a shot.
 
 Stay tuned.