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Karmic Koala: Day 4

It's been four days since I installed UNR 9.10 and so far so good. I was able to try the Bluetooth and it works fine. I noticed that doing a Lock Screen by clicking the menu on the upper right corner isn't responsive. Doing a Ctrl+Alt+L works though. I will check on that if I have time. That's all I have for now.

Some more stuff I wan't to do:

• Create some semblance of a program for use with Python Twitter Tools I installed recently.
• I'd have to catch-up on learning Python to do the bullet point above.
• Or I can install TweetDeck and mosey on along.
• But doing bullet point 3 would defeat the purpose of adventure.
• Revert the desktop to the classic Ubuntu look. But I have taken a liking to the UNR look so I'll see.
  

Successful UNR 9.10 Install

After the failed install yesterday, I retraced the steps and redid the bootable USB creation. Sure enough, the installation USB booted flawlessly. Reading JfwHome's installation guide, I now have a running UNR 9.10 PC. I am now using it as I create this entry. Below I enumerate some observations from using it on first run.

First run observations:

• Bootup was more or less similar to the XP bootup. I haven't tried booting with boot booster enabled yet. Maybe later.
• Trackpad is a lot more responsive (including the right edge scrolling) that it was on XP.
• WiFi worked out of the box! I used to have nightmares getting this to work before.
• Most function keys work. Well, most that I use constantly.
• Bluetooth is showing on the taskbar. I will have to check if it can receive files from CP to PC as there have been reports that it doesn't.
• Screen brightness and contrast (and whatever else) is more or less similar to that when the machine was on XP.
• Sound works and the volume is similar to that of the XP installation. I still need to install codecs for MP3 and other proprietary sound formats.
• Video also works. I also need proprietary codecs for this.
• Video camera works using Cheese.

Thing(s) to do:

• As with previous installs, I can't view YouTube videos off of a fresh install - I need to install Adobe Flash.
• Run the updates
• Get more S/W like GIMP, Blender (or not) and other stuff.
• Learn how to revert to the default Ubuntu look from the current UNR look.
• Install the command-line Twitter API? Or the GO programming language?

I'm really happy with the successful installation. Even happier with the OS that has mostly configured everything correctly out-of-the-box. I am impressed with this as the previous 8.10 version gave me headaches most specifically with configuring WiFi. Today, just about a year later, the improvements are great. In a year's time, I don't know how great this free OS will be.

I MAY post the installation process I did if I can remember correctly. But, as always, Google is your friend.

Karmic Koala Install Attempt 001: FAIL

Earlier today (or rather late yesterday), I tried to install Karmic Koala UNR (a.k.a. UNR 9.10) and as half-expected, it failed to install.

Steps:

• Downloaded UNR 9.10 ISO from Ubuntu website.
• Burned image (ISO) to CD.
• Ran usb-creator.exe from burned CD to create a bootable USB.
• (Full of excitement after almost 2 hours of waiting for the bootable USB) Booted the target PC with USB as boot device.
• Selected the option to install UNR.

Problem:

• I get the error Can not mount /dev/loop1 on /cow.

Of course, with past experiences in installing this particular linux flavor, I was half-expecting an error. The forum posts seemed to good to be true. And so I go to Google, enter the error and got some diagnosis.

Diagnosis:

• When bootable USB was created with usb-creator.exe, I chose the first radio-button when I should have chosen the one with words "discard on shutdown, etc."

So now I'm redoing the usb-creator.exe part. And I also realized that it's way past 0100hrs so I need some sleep. Tomorrow, or later today, I will try again.

I hope it works this time around.

External link(s):
► http://www.ubuntu.com