“Gnomes Now, Too” – Installing Ubuntu 9.10

Thursday, 6 PM: Start Torrenting Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” AMD64 Desktop CD ISO image and head off to gaming night.

Thursday, 10 PM: Finish burning CD, reboot, discover that the CD would just spin for a minute or two when “Try Ubuntu” was selected from its boot menu, then return you to the boot menu as though nothing had happened. Mutter darkly.

Sunday, 1:30 PM: Start Torrenting Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” AMD64 DVD ISO and spend the next several hours watching videos on the web. ETA of the image, 6 PM.

Sunday, 6 PM: Did we say 6 PM? We meant 9 PM.

Sunday, 9 PM: Grumble at the vagaries of a non-constant transfer speed and note that the new ETA is 2 AM Monday morning.

12:30 AM Monday: Surprise, we’re done early! Laugh bitterly at the idea that this is early.

Noon Monday: Put a few episodes of the S-Words podcast, just discovered, onto iPod so I can listen to it while installing.

2:30 PM: Get around to burning a DVD and reboot. LiveDVD looks good. Wireless network being uncooperative but there’s a history of that with Livedisc boots on this machine. Go ahead and push the install button. Hey, Freecell!

3:30 PM: Oh, hey, installer finished sometime in there. Red nine and three attendant cards to the black ten…

3:37 PM: Reboot onto the hard drive.

3:37:30 PM: The boot speed is certainly improved- AUGH, THE HORRIBLE FLICKERING! THE SCREEN WON’T STOP FLASHING THE LOGIN PROMPT, BUT IT’S EATING KEYSTROKES RANDOMLY SO I CAN’T ENTER MY PASSWORD! NO! WHY?!

4:42 PM: So if I boot to a root CLI and manually specify the PCI bus in the xorg.conf- oh, and explicitly lock out the Nvidia drivers- I can get X to boot at 640×480. Which looks mighty funny on my wide-aspect screen.

5:37 PM: Okay, so installing the Rev173 drivers instead of the 185 lets me boot X at the proper resolution with acceleration. Time to start installing needful software, not least Pidgin. I don’t like this Empathy thing, it’s ugly.

5:42 PM: “Ugly” wasn’t strong enough; it’s refusing to admit that some of my MSN contacts are online, including my girlfriend. I can neither talk to nor hear them.

6:22 PM: …wow, this release must have hit the download servers really hard… I’m getting transfer speeds of less than 8kb/s from the repos. Installing this stuff could take a while.

6:52 PM: The touchpad disables itself while I am typing? I think my touchpad-induced typo rate just went wayyyyy down.

6:56 PM: Mmmm wallpaper. Pretty.

8:51 PM: Okay, I have Pidgin installed and working. (Corollary: I totally drop-kicked Empathy off the nearest cliff into a spiked pit of electrified lava) I have AWN installed and working. …what do you mean “Evolution can’t minimize to the system tray”?

8:52 PM: What do you mean “You can’t import kmail e-mail to Evolution”?

8:53 PM: How come the transparent panel has these ugly full-opacity handles on it if it’s not the entire width of the screen?

8:54 PM: How come the auto-hiding panel reserves a couple pixels at the top of my screen to show the edge of itself when hidden, no matter what I do? Pass me another fun-size packet of M&Ms.

8:57 PM: Ooh, the AWN applets work properly now. Dual-pane Gnome Menu applet shiiiiny.

9:02 PM: You mean the Flash 10 plugin really does just install itself with one command now? Groovy!

11:26 PM: I just want Amarok 1.4, is that such a crime? Also, I’m starting to wonder just how hard the repositories got hit.

9:48 AM Tuesday: It wasn’t the repositories. My wireless driver options were- and I’m sure it was with the best of all possible intentions- altered. To the point where the only driver I have ‘works’- if 5 kb/s is defined as working.

11:24 AM Tuesday: Still trying to install build-essential so I can download and compile the wireless drivers I want. Trying not to think about how many hours it’s going to take to download the source code. Still trying to figure out if this counts as an upgrade (current thinking: Yes, if I could get these %*@& drivers working so I could work on installing Amarok). Trying not to think about how much Halloween candy I’ve eaten. All out of podcast episodes. Can’t download more until I have decent network speeds.

Someone pass me more M&Ms.