Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 26 April 2008 12:02
Opinion and Analysis
Page 3 of 4
Once the computer had restarted, I was back at the Vista Boot Manager.
Here, I chose Ubuntu once more. But this time... the Ubuntu boot screen stayed on screen. There was no sign of GRUB or the BusyBox.
It looked like it was working! The Ubuntu orange bar went back and forth across the boot screen.
Then it started load from left to right. Soon after, a screen appeared, and Ubuntu was formatting the 8GB file as a partition (or at least it thought it was) and setting everything up.
This took a few minutes – but once it was complete, and the system rebooted.
The time, the resolution was clearly higher, and an orangy-brown screen was staring at me, with Ubuntu’s stylish Hardy Heron – and the installation of 8.04 was complete!
I was in! Ubuntu had finally, successfully, loaded onto my computer. I checked the resolution – it was at 1024x768. My sound card was working, my wireless was working.
I connected to wireless, and I was surfing the web! I opened up a Word document from a USB drive, which also flawlessly installed itself, and up came Open Office. I opened a PDF, and up came Ubuntu’s PDF viewer.
I tried playing an mp3 – but was told Ubuntu needed to get some new codecs. This it proceeded to do. But, I was looking at the ‘Example’ folder and, while it was getting the updates, I tried to play the video file that had Nelson Mandela in it.
The file started playing for a couple of seconds, behind one of the open windows – and then everything froze. Pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL did nothing. I gave it a few minutes to right itself, but nope. It had crashed. It was a bit disappointing.
So I rebooted the computer, and went back to Ubuntu. It loaded again normally, and everything seemed to be working. So I tried playing that video file again. Once more, it just froze. Oops!
So, did I cuss and curse and swear at Mark Shuttleworth for creating what appeared to be a Shuttleworthless operating system? Or did I calmly restart my computer... and try again? Please read onto page 4.
