Ubuntu: first stop on the road to Damascus

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 15 November 2007 21:51

Opinion and Analysis

As usual, the first thing to do was to reboot into the Windows partition and see if all was well. Strangely, the wireless keyboard was not getting activated on boot and would only work once one entered the BIOS and then exited - no changes were required. (A few days later, I realised that this could be happening because such devices were not enabled in the BIOS and enabling it corrected that problem.)

That apart, everything was fine; when Ubuntu was booted up, it connected to the internet with no prompting, using the DHCP server off the router which serves as Stan's entry point to the internet. An external hard drive, which Stan uses as a backup device, also showed through on the desktop.

What surprised me to some extent was the degree to which NTFS is now manageable from within a Linux system; it only took a short while before I was able to figure out how to put a shortcut on the desktop for gaining access to files and folders on the Windows partition. Only once before this have I seen anything approaching such compatibility - when testing Xandros, a few years ago.

The Ubuntu desktop looked much cleaner and clearer than the Windows desktop - even though I found both operating systems to be using the native resolution of the ViewSonic 22" LCD monitor which Stan uses - 1680 x 1050. And Ubuntu was certianly very zippy - though, with 4GB of RAM, that's what I had been expecting.

The laptop, sadly, didn't provide as much joy. It may be the hard drive itself or the controllers; the partitioning didn't go as expected and I deemed it prudent to attempt it on a later date once I had taken along a full copy of that excellent partitioning application, gParted, which can now be used from its own boot CD.

The printing didn't get resolved either; Stan's new HP LaserJet 3052 is connected to the Ubuntu/Windows PC and I needed to enable printing from a Windows PC in the next room. I used this guide , utilising the IP address of the Ubuntu PC at this point - http://<hostname>:631/printers/<printername> - instead of its hostname.

But, even though the Windows PC was able to see the printer, (step 7 in the guide) I was met with the unexpected next - a dialog box came up asking for selection of an internet port and instructions to enter the name and password of the user under which printing would take place.

I tried the Ubuntu user which Stan had logged in as, an anonymous user and then none at all - but all failed to move us beyond this point. My last experience with Samba was back in 2001 and, if I recall right, at this point Windows normally asks for a driver for the printer. One then inserts the CD that came with the printer and everything goes swimmingly thereafter. But that did not happen here.

I was foolish in some respects - I did not think of checking the logs on the Ubuntu PC to try and figure out what was happening. But by then I was quite tired - it was nearly 2pm, about four hours since we had begun the adventure, and I needed some sleep.

Stan's subsequent posts (1, 2, 3, 4 ) have told much more of the story; I need to go back one of these days to sort out the laptop and also the printing - and any suggestions from you, gentle reader, about the printing, would be most gratefully received. At the end of what was quite an adventure, I have one thing to say; just like the Terminator, I'll be back.