A success story (relatively)
Yesterday, a disgruntled Vista user -- let's call him J -- complained that he only had 14 days left for Vista evaluation. (I don't know what he did, but somehow he screwed up Vista into thinking it was an evaluation copy, and he got it as a gift bundled with the laptop with no install CD.)
My immediate joking response on IRC was "Use Linux, damnit!" That's what I tend to do.
To my surprise, he took the advice seriously and was really interested in switching to Linux. So I offered to guide him through the process.
He immediately noted how many Linux distributions there were, and was lost. From what I understand, he went straight to linux.org, which is, really, fairly useless for this. I pointed him to Ubuntu and gave him a direct link to the download page.
While he was downloading the Ubuntu 8.04 ISO, I went away for about two hours. After I returned, he complained on IRC that he couldn't get it to work and was instead seeing what he described as "a DOS prompt". That was weird, I had previously told him to boot from the CD, and I thought he ran the Live CD. Instead, it turned out that he autoran the CD under Windows and used the "Demo" feature, which, of course, installed Wubi.
Now, I never used Wubi (by virtue of not having Windows anymore), so I told him to uninstall it and boot from the CD instead. And this is where the problems started. He reported seeing some "cable problem", then he booted again and took photos of the screen for me, then we meddled with BIOS settings, unsuccessfully. It took me a while to realize that the CD wasn't actually bootable. He burned it incorrectly.
He presumed that something went wrong with the Toshiba burner software that came with the laptop, and tried to unpack the ISO and burn the files. I told him it wouldn't work, but not before he wasted yet another CD. Finally, I pointed him to the wiki instructions, and this time, he burned the CD correctly with Infra Recorder. And booted. And was excited.
He then played with the Live CD for a while, but installed Ubuntu when I wasn't around. When I logged in today, he complained that he "lost" his Windows partition after installing Ubuntu. After some examination, it turned out that it wasn't really lost, but it wasn't automounted in Ubuntu.
And why? Because it was dirty.
So we had to mount it from the command line with ntfs-3g with the -o force option, then manually create a mountpoint under /media and fstab entry. Now it is automounted. But it's not the whole story...
When he finally accessed his Windows drive, he immediately tried launching Notepad++ by clicking the exe file in Nautilus (without notifying me first). To my surprise, it worked -- but it worked because he had previously installed Wine and forgot about it. Wine has become really transparent these days. I used this as an opportunity to teach him how to add a third-party repository with the Software Sources utility, so he could update to Wine 1.0. It would be much faster to do this from the command line, but I tried to keep its usage at minimum. I then pointed him to Geany as an alternative to Notepad++.
Luckily, in the software list he compiled to check for equivalents, he mostly listed free cross-platform software: Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, FileZilla, VBA, Audacity and Azureus. All of these were available in the repository, although he apparently opted to use Transmission (which was preinstalled) instead of Azureus.
He also looked for an MS Paint equivalent, and GNU Paint didn't satisfy him. I pointed him to KolourPaint, which he found better. At this point, I gave him a little lecture (all via IRC!) about GNOME and KDE, and GTK+ and Qt, and how they use different settings, icon themes and widget themes, and how QtCurve could help with the latter.
After I found out that he liked the Human widgets but (not being a fan of orange) changed the icon theme to "the first blue one he found" (Crux), I suggested trying QtCurve. I told him how to use Synaptic (previously, he only used the Add/Remove utility), and he installed qtcurve and kde-systemsettings, then tailored the theme to his preference. He was absolutely stunned by Ubuntu's customizability... although he would prefer a panel with multiple rows of icons and task switcher buttons, which is available in KDE but not GNOME.
So far, his impressions are very positive, but there are two drawbacks. The first is the unbootable Vista. As the Ubuntu installer didn't mount the NTFS partition, it also didn't create a bootloader entry for Vista. We used update-grub to autodetect it, but it didn't boot and furthermore turned the partition dirty again (forcing yet another forced mount from the command line). We'll be working on this.
The second is the wireless printer (Brother MFC-665CW). It wasn't automatically added to the list of printers. When he used the printer setup utility to autodetect it, it was added, but didn't print, and tasks sent to it were just instantly marked as done. He's one step away from installing the vendor-supplied proprietary drivers...
To summarize, what he particularly liked in Ubuntu so far was:
- The live CD system
- The vast package repository
- Customizability
What went wrong:
- He didn't know how to properly burn the CD. The download page doesn't contain instructions on that, and I had to search Google for them.
- He chose Wubi instead of booting from the live CD and doing a full install. And Wubi didn't work.
- The Vista partition didn't mount properly, and the installer ignored it. Since he had no Windows CD, he had to mount in forced mode, involving a not-so-user-friendly sequence of commands.
- Even after we got the partition to automount and wrote Vista into GRUB with update-grub, it still doesn't boot.
Simple how to to get Vista to boot:
You edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file with gedit and sudo via the command line (sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst), and you scroll to the end of the file.
You then add this at the very end:
# This is a divider, added to separate the menu items below from the Debian # ones.
title Other operating systems:
root
# This entry automatically added by the Debian installer for a non-linux OS # on /dev/sda1
title Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)
root (hd0,0)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1
This should do the trick. At boot-up, he presses Escape to see the menu, and selects his Vista.
This should work perfectly.
update-grub already did exactly that. GRUB runs the chain loader correctly, the problem is on the Vista side.
It might have been better to direct him towards Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu…
Why? GNOME Ubuntu is more polished, and Kubuntu is now in a weird transitional state — KDE3 is outdated while KDE4 isn’t that stable and feature-complete enough. I think GNOME is the best choice for a novice user like him (plus, it’s what I use).
Do you know if the user resized his Vista parition during the install? Sounds like you’ve run across the same issue I had when I installed Edgy on a Vista laptop and resized the parition, made Vista unbootable. Curious to know if this has been fixed lately, bug is still open I reported https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-ntfs/+bug/94690
To somewhat: I’ll ask him. Thanks for the tip.
One other thing would be to get a list of the partitions on the first hard disk (command prompt ‘fdisk -l /dev/sda’ or ‘fdisk -l /dev/hda’ and see if there is a ‘hidden’ partition besides the Vista /dev/hda0, Swap and Linux partitions. If there is, he may be able to launch a recovery system from the hidden partition. Sometimes this involves hitting ‘F8’ during post, or looking for a message and prompt for bios to kick off an alternate boot loader. Sometimes the recovery system just does an overwrite from included original files on the Windows partition.
The down side is that that may re-image the system as well. Which would cause problems with using Ubuntu. As would letting it ‘repair’ the boot partition.
If the recovery partition is there, it should have a way to burn a recovery CD as well.
All that said, there may not be a recovery partition either. It is just something to look for.
You need to try and run ntfsfix to clean Vista. That usually fixes it for me.
Some very interesting lessons learned here. Maybe Ubuntu.com should have a guide for Windows users moving over, helping them through the whole process and even including a live chat facility?
Thanks, we’ll try ntfsfix.
Ouch, it does seem like linux.org is quite a usability issue. linux.com seems a bit better, but still, their “download Linux” page is less that satisfactory. Who cares if it’s a .deb or .rpm based OS? Just list the top human-friendly ones.
Well its pretty good that a winnie user liked ubuntu pretty much fast. Good 2 see ubuntu rocking :D
“He was absolutely stunned by Ubuntu’s customizability… although he would prefer a panel with multiple rows of icons and task switcher buttons, which is available in KDE but not GNOME.”
To get multiple rows of task swticher buttons, just make the panel larger (right-click on an empty spot -> properties -> panel size), once there is enough space it’ll switch to two rows automatically. Multiple rows of icons is not possible with default gnome, but if I remember correctly, quick-lounge-applet (it’s in the repos) allows you to do that by just adding a new applet to the panel.
Remember that aving two rows means having to be more accurate when using the mouse to select something in the top row(and will thus end up being slower), because you can overshoot and select the wrong one, where on a single row the screen edge would stop you.
Heh, this is the “J” LucidFox was talking about… Hi all.
First off, let me explain that most of these issues were user-created. That is, in my eagerness to install Ubuntu, I missed a command somewhere along the way. Not really a big deal… I was fine with losing my old files (all recoverable or unimportant) – though this in turn was also buffered by just how much I liked Ubuntu – and, since it was my fault anyway… you get the idea. And the title is slightly misleading: I consider this a total success, if only for the fact that Ubuntu runs perfectly fine, and I like it. The losing Vista bit is secondary. :P
——
Anyway, to answer some questions here:
“Do you know if the user resized his Vista parition during the install?” I do not believe so. When I went to install, I recall selecting the option to repartition the existing hard drive free space, and to leave the old used space alone (if that makes any sense). I’m not sure if this is any indication of partition resizing, or lack thereof, but I am able to read/write all of the files on my old Vista drive through Ubuntu – nothing, really, appears to have even been touched.
“You need to try and run ntfsfix to clean Vista. That usually fixes it for me.” Will definitely be trying this once I get back to the laptop… and likely when I have LucidFox present to bug about inevitable problems. :P
“Well its pretty good that a winnie user liked ubuntu pretty much fast. Good 2 see ubuntu rocking :D” Heh. I too was actually surprised at the intuitiveness present in Ubuntu – I’d always heard that Linux anything meant you had to be knowledgeable of everything computers to get it to work. I mean, I know a fair bit about computers, but what I’d always heard describe went beyond what I was able to do. Good to see none of that was true. After the initial surprise wore off, I was continually impressed at the features available (especially the ease and number of Adding/Removing programs). To be fair, I have only had it installed for 2 days so far… I still need to tweak stuff and mess around a bit more before truly becoming comfortable, but I’ve had a good start.
“He was absolutely stunned by Ubuntu’s customizability… although he would prefer a panel with multiple rows of icons and task switcher buttons, which is available in KDE but not GNOME.” Yes, I was indeed quite stunned… I’d heard about how customizable/workable Linux was supposed to be, I just never thought it was as accessible as it is.
“To get multiple rows of task swticher buttons, just make the panel larger (right-click on an empty spot -> properties -> panel size), once there is enough space it’ll switch to two rows automatically. Multiple rows of icons is not possible with default gnome, but if I remember correctly, quick-lounge-applet (it’s in the repos) allows you to do that by just adding a new applet to the panel.” I’ll have to try this. I’m not entirely positive if I messed around with this setting or not, but I’ll look again.
“Remember that aving two rows means having to be more accurate when using the mouse to select something in the top row(and will thus end up being slower), because you can overshoot and select the wrong one, where on a single row the screen edge would stop you.” Two rows (actually, 3) is what I’ve been using for a long while now on XP/Vista, so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
——
Thanks to everyone who has been offering assistance or commenting (especially LucidFox – I wasn’t expecting a blog post about this, though, in retrospect, I should have).
Also note that’s I’m not as much of a complainer as I appear. :P
Regarding the Brother drivers, they are in multiverse. Try installing brother-cups-wrapper-extra (will install a few more dependencies), then configure the printer in Administration->Printing. That worked for me with a Brother DCP-310CN.
Emilio, thanks for the instructions. They worked great, and now the printer prints. Haven’t tried scanning yet, but that’s next on the list. As for the actual driver itself, I had to fudge it a little: I couldn’t locate the MFC-665CW driver, so I went to the MFC-685CW. Not sure the similarities besides the 685CW being the next step up, but my printer apparently accepted it, because I’m getting stuff to print.
Hi there.
Take a good look at the download page resulting from going through the one-click download. An example:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloading?release=desktop-lts&arch=i386&mirror=http%3A%2F%2Fmirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca%2Fubuntu-releases%2F&debug=&download-button=
There is a direct link to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto .
Helping someone install Ubuntu by phone makes knowing that HowTo inside-out an obligation (unfortunately).