Installation 2(ish) and 3

My daughter takes after me in many ways - and the shiny new thing is one of them.  She saw her brother playing with a cool looking interface and wanted it for herself.

But she made a valid point.  She too inherited her laptop, this time from my wife, after we had it refreshed.  Over the year she had it, the boot time was getting longer and longer and I had done the usual stuff to attempt to improve it (disk clean up, de-fragment and registry fix) but nothing worked to enable the machine to boot in an acceptable time.  As such, she asked me to install Ubuntu on her machine.

I had a disc and a memory stick, so I thought I'd trial it for her.

Danger! Education Inbound!  One of the very attractive things about Ubuntu is the fact that once you've made this disc or memory stick, you can boot your machine from it to try out the operating system without committing to install it (the picture at the top of this entry).  If you're happy with it you can then get this disc/memory stick to either remove your old operating system and install Ubuntu, or form a dual-boot - where it installs Ubuntu on your hard drive and the next time you boot your machine, it asks you which operating system you want to use.

So in went the disc, on went the power and up came the operating system...  With all the colours wrong, rasters across the screen and no visible mouse cursor other that a block of faint grey pixels in the form of a mangled square.

My first thought was that there must be something wrong with the display settings and after finding the appropriate dialogue box with a near invisible mouse cursor (and that took some time I can tell you) I discovered that there were no options that I could make.

Again, I pestered my wife's cousin to see if he knew anything that I was doing wrong and even put a post up on the AskUbuntu help pages.  There was a thought that it could be outdated video drivers, which I refreshed, but no difference.  So at that time, I elected to park that installation and try it on my machine.  (NB I checked AskUbuntu as I complied this entry and found a reply that said that they encountered this in the past, but when they installed it, there were no issues.  I'll give that a go and report back what happens.)

Ubuntu worked fine on my machine, so I decided to bite the bullet and dual-boot my laptop.  Then I was presented with a raft of options.  I already knew that I was going to be committed to this operating system, so when I was asked how much space I wanted to devote to it I decided that I wouldn't go with the default space allocations, but decided to split my drive in half.  I have to state that this was a completely uneducated decision, one purely based on faith.

Potentially this was a mistake, as I'm certain I did something wrong with the installation.  After finding the correct setting in Windows 7 that enables you to make a decision on what operating system to use (they've hidden that away and unless you change it, the computer will never give you the option and automatically load Windows) and what I saw wasn't what I expected.  All of the screenshots I had seen simply showed 2 options: either load Ubuntu, or load Windows.

You can see from the picture what I get.  I'm supposed to be a geek, but I haven't any idea what most of these options mean - but what I have discovered by trial and error is the bottom one enables me to boot Windows.  That said, both environments operate exactly as I expected them to, so the error is only cosmetic.

Warning! Question Incoming! If anyone out there knows what I did wrong, or indeed how I can fix it so that I only have 2 options, I would love to hear from you.

What staggered me though, was the speed at which the system booted.  I even demonstrated the difference to a couple that came round for dinner one night - and they're as geeky as me.  As a benchmark test, I decided to fire up the machine from a cold start, (ie starting with the PC turned off) log on, open a browser and enter Google+.  In Windows 7 it took 1 minute 54 seconds - and my guests thought that was rather good.  Then we headed off down the Ubuntu route, using the exact same routine. 58 Seconds!

Considering that most of the time I use a computer it's simply to access the net, or write a document, that's probably the main reason that I find myself selecting Ubuntu rather than Windows (when I might as well go and make a cup of coffee while I wait - a gross exaggeration, I know - but waiting 2 twice as long for the operating system to load feels like an age).

So there I am.  I'm using Ubuntu, but what does the interface feel like and what it like trying to get software for it?  I guess I've set the topic for my next entry...