Holly @ Home

I had been meaning to dual-boot my laptop (currently factory installed with Vista) with Ubuntu. My friend had ordered the 9.10 Live CD version and as he wasn't in a hurry to do anything with it I asked to borrow it. I have installed Linux distributions of various kinds on various hardware over the last 10 years and I have to say none of them have been particularly pleasant experiences. Once things are up and running the experience is just fine, but the hoop jumping envolved to get there has always been less than ideal for me. And this latest escapade was no exception.Had I known what was to come I probably wouldn't have bothered.

I first booted from the live CD to see how it would cope with my hardware. I have a Compaq Presario CQ60 with an AMD Trurion so it's a 64bit system with an Nvidia graphics chipset. I was pleasantly surprised when it just worked and even my wireless network was detected and I was able to connect without having to drop to a terminal and cast archaic command line spells. Spurred on by this I double clicked the Install Ubuntu icon temptingly placed on the desktop and went through 7 breif steps after which the install process began. (I had already shrunk my Vista partition some weeks ago in anticipation of installing a Linux distro)

The install duely finished and prompted me to re-boot, which I did. The system was dilligent enough to eject the Live CD before restarting. Naturally Grub had been added to the MBR (Master Boot Record) and presented me with a list of OS's to boot from including my existing Vista insrallation and Vista recovery partition, all well and good. So I selected Ubuntu and pressed enter. After some time staring at the Ubuntu logo I was presented with a command line login not the graphical manager I was expexting. Also it was blinking in a decidely uncomforting way as if it were in some kind of tight loop. Sure enough any attempt to type in my username and password was impossible, with the keys occasionaly being registered but mostly ignored. After some conversation with my favoured guru on these matters we bootrf into Ubuntu's recovery mode and a sudo apt-get instrall nvidia-glx-173 and an edit of /etc/X11/xorg.conf later, we restarted X and I was able to login. All was bliss... Until I decided to boot Vista!

Vista refused to boot, shortly after the familiar green stripped progress bar of the Vista boot sequence, the screen just went black and an automatitc reboot ensued. This was not a welcome state of affairs. I chose to boot the Vista recovery partition, this worked and I ran the repair start-up errors option. This appeared to fix things by going back to an earlier restore point. But not for long. It appeared that whenever I  booted Ubuntu, Vista would refuse to boot afterwards. I finally managed to get around this problem by installing EasyBCD, a Vista friendly boot manager that enables you to re-write your MBR. That of course put paid to Grub. But EasyBCD boasts the ability to boot linux partitions too. But no amount of configuring seemed able to bring back Ubuntu. And in the end EasyBCD fought back and destroyed my MBR itself after having so helpfully repaired it before. Now things were serious. I had to download a Vista x64 recovery disk iso image and burn it to a spare CDR and use that to fix the MBR and get Vista back again.

Finally after much internet surfing, I re-installed Ubuntu. I chose to manually create partitions this time and at the end of the install wizard I chose advanced options and selected not to intsall Grub to my MBR but to the boot partition of Unbunto. I then rebooted into Vista and added a linux boot entry in EasyBCD pointing at that partion. And finally here we are typing this epilogue.

All I wanted to do was hack some Lisp! he he. I had tried various set-ups using Cygwin in Windows but none of them were satisfactory. Now that Ubuntu is finally up and running it was simple to select emacs, slime and sbcl in the package manager and get up and running in minutes. The bitter irony is not lost on me, I can tell you.

I just went to post on Twitter , I pressed update and the entire sight died. I hope It wasn't me