Ubuntu doesn't like Mondays

Typical Monday. Large backup of work from the weekend, large flood of kids coming in to claim summer reading prizes. Several book shipments were already on my desk or arrived during the day, but I finished the day caught up with those. Some still need spine labels but otherwise done.

All the other new machines are up and running, leaving the one that was earmarked for me. My idea was to reduce the size of the existing NTFS partition that came on it, and install Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE rather than Gnome or KDE) onto the space so freed up. That leaves me able to boot Windows if absolutely necessary for some reason, but running Linux by default on the lion's share of the 240G drive. This is a new Dell, with dual core processor, high speed NIC, etc. and two G of RAM. It should be able to handle anything, at least for the moment.

I started to think that Xubuntu couldn't handle it. Or at least, the installation scripts. Now I think the reputation the Ubuntu team have built for an easy install that autoconfigures is probably reasonably accurate. Certainly their LiveCD runs on anything I try it on, from 12 year old equipment to the latest I can get my paws on. So I booted that LiveCD and ran gparted to resize the main partition on the new drive without destroying the contents. This is something they always told us couldn't be done, but utilities have been around for a while now that do it without much fuss. Gparted did its magic for me, leaving 200G of unallocated space on the drive. I checked to make sure that Windows 7 still boots, and it does.

Then I moved to the Xubuntu install. Once it looked at the drive it started asking nebulous and vague questions about what I wanted to do. I told it to install itself into the free space on the drive. It allocated that space as an extended partition, and put a couple of slices in that, which seemed reasonable enough. Then it started copying files. At about 50% done it quit, telling me there was an unrecoverable error on the CD or else the drive had failed. I knew none of this could be true, but I checked it all out. No problems. Started over.

This time it went past the 50% mark and all the way to 97% done before announcing that "ubiquity" had crashed. I gather that ubiquity is the installation script, written in python. Now that's something that should never just crash with no reason, but that seems to be what it did. I was offered an option to report the crash and I said to go ahead. I expected they would formulate a report of the environment, the phase of the moon, or whatever, and ship it off via SMTP or FTP. No, the next thing I knew I was presented with a prompt to log into a bug reporting system. Now those things are designed for developers and help desks, not for end users. I could find no way around it and finally gave them my e-mail address. They insisted on sending a confirmation to my e-mail, which must then be responded to from the same machine as the one from which I started the sign-on process. Now there's a catch-22 for you. How am I to respond from a machine that still doesn't have a fully installed operating system? How am I supposed to receive their confirmation message there? Stupid, thoughtless, and pointless waste of time.

I tried once more, and doing everything the same way, on the third attempt the installation ran all the way to the end, leaving an installed system that even boots properly, with the option to switch to Windows 7 if one chooses (No, I don't choose.)

Ran the Ubuntu software management routines to find and update anything that had changed since the installation image was cut a month ago. They found 150M of material to download and install, which took a while but at least it all worked.

I then loaded the Firefox from the Ubuntu installation, and was pleased to note that it is the latest version, unlike what is being supplied by my other distributions. That's the sort of thing I expected and wanted from Ubuntu. Checked for Java, which is essential to many things I have to do, and no, they hadn't installed it. Clicked on the prompt to search for the missing plugin, but without expecting much because in most Linux distros that just leads to a failure message and advice that Java must be installed "manually." Nope. Ubuntu found a plug-in. Not the actual Java OJI, but good enough. It was a plug-in designed to isntall and invoke Java for you. After fighting (and finally failing) to get Java working with Firefox 3.6.6 on Wolvix, I gave up and backed down to 3.5.10, where it actually works. This plug-in, called "Iced Tea," by the way, did download and hook up Java so it works. I tested several ways, and all of them worked. This is an accomplishment in my view, because the Firefox developers somehow really screwed up Java on 3.6 and following versions. I thought not even god himself could get it to work. (It works on Windows of course, but I'm talking about Linux.)

Then I installed Adobe Reader, not because I like Adobe as I don't. You can't get by without a reliable PDF reader any more. Not that Adobe's own is that reliable, as they are now issuing updates and new releases a couple of times a week it seems. In fact, before the installation routine for Reader had completed, I already had a pop-up message on the desktop telling me that a "NEW" version of Adobe Reader was available. Sure enough, it reinstalled a newer version of itself immediately. So some things are even less stable than any release of Linux.