OS Chasing
Some people are storm chasers, chasing after spectacular storms for photographs, thrills or science. Chasing storms can be a long and uneventful process of driving around to find the storm, punctuated by brief, thrilling and dangerous encounters with the storm itself.
I have jumped out of a plane (with a parachute), but driving into a tornado is past my comfort level. As a computer geek though, I do find myself occasionally chasing after trouble of another sort, new operating systems. I get the itch to try an OS I've never used before and I end up slogging away for hours to get it up and running. This meant a lot of bricked computers, as I didn't always prepare for each new OS, I just let it fly. From my Apple IIGS growing up to PCs in college, I've had a remarkable ability to foul up computers by doing a sloppy OS install.
Along the way I learned a way few lessons about installing a new OS, perhaps best summarized in four rules:
- Use a virtual machine to test out operating systems
- See Rule #1
- OK, if you really want to ignore the first 2 rules, back up your data first!
- Have another working computer around to use for looking up answers online if you get stuck
Rule #2 has a special place in my heart, as I had a bad habit of fragging my PC in college trying to install esoteric variants of Linux or things like BeOS. So, I was thrilled when virtualization software became mainstream and I could hack away at a new OS without harming anything else.
My latest target for installing and messing around with is Ubuntu 7.04. I've tried a few of the earlier versions and heard the latest one was definitely worth a look. Further illustrating my desire to break my own rules, I spent a decent amount of time thinking about making Ubuntu the third option in a triple boot setup with OS X and Vista on my Macbook.
I jettisoned this idea, but, just to keep the record complete and accurate, I did try the Live CD out on my Macbook.I quickly got a kernel panic (kind of a more benevolent version of the blue screen of death) due to a problem with the IO-APIC. The kernel panic kindly recommended the right incantation to utter to get around the problem, and I moved on. Ubuntu found most everything, but this was getting irrelevant since I was going to be using a virtual machine anyway.
In the spirit of trying new things, I decided to use a virtualization product I didn't have much experience with, innotek's VirtualBox. VirtualBox was great. It was very easy to use and seems snappy enough. By the end of the afternoon, I had a nice install of Ubuntu and was pretty happy about it.
Before I was victorious, I did encounter some issues along the way. So in the spirit of rule #4 and meeting my quota of words for this blog post, here is a brief outline of what I did:
- Created a new fixed size 8GB virtual machine in VirtualBox, selected Linux 2.6 as the OS type
- Went to the settings of the virtual machine and mounted the CDROM drive and USB
- Started the virtual machine with the Ubuntu CD in the drive
- The automatic partition utility kept failing, so I went to manual mode and created a 6 GB ext3 partition mounted on \, then a 2 GB swap partition
- After that the install went smoothly and I took a snapshot (with VirtualBox) of my progress once I logged in successfully
- I got all the available updates from the update manager, rebooted, another snapshot
- My resolution was capped out at 1024 x 768 so I installed the "Guest Additions" the VirtualBox provides by mounting the provided iso file, going to the terminal, navigating to the cdrom and "sudo sh ./VBoxLinuxAdditions"
- I rebooted and still could not bump my resolution, although the other features of the Guest Additions were working, so I took another snapshot
- After some looking online, I edited my xorg.conf (basically a graphics config file), "sudo nano xorg.conf" in the /etc/X11 directory
- I added "1280 x 1024" in the display settings area, in front of the other listed resolutions
- Another reboot and this time x crashed, obviously not pleased with my modifications
- After some more research online, I tried to reconfigure the graphics by running "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg"
- Within the reconfigure utility, I selected vboxvideo (VirtualBox's video driver) as my video driver and 1280 x 1024 as the max resolution
- Another reboot and I had 1280 x 1024. I quickly took another snapshot and thought I was done, instead I realized something was missing, my mouse pointer! I could move the mouse around and by context sensitive help windows figure out where my mouse was, but I could not see it
- I reverted back to my previous snapshot and was relieved to see my mouse reappear
- I tried "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg" again, thinking that maybe I missed something the first time
- I did not and once again x was crashing. So I used the CTRL-ALT-F1 combination to get to a terminal and used diff to compare my old xorg.conf file to the new one. Problem solved, as I found the the reconfigure utility had changed my mouse device from "vboxmouse" to "mouse". I switched it back, rebooted and had my 1280 x 1024 and my mouse pointed. Another snapshot and I was really done