Ubuntu for me

Eva's laptop has been acting up for sometime now. I finally decided to get right of windows, and install Ubuntu. Well... Not quite, I still have windows. Err.. Not yet.
I have left a 40 GB partition open for windows and I'll probably reinstall WinXP on that partition.

Anyways, I downloaded Ubuntu. It took me 9 hours! Nope I'm not joking. I lost 2 hours of download when the connection to a mirror at Singapore was lost. So, the download had to be restarted with a mirror in Oz and that took 7 hours.

I finally burnt it on a CD and got started. Everything was done with the greatest of ease. 30 mins later, I had the laptop up and running. But sadly, I couldn't connect to Gooze's Wireless connection. I tried using Ubuntu's inbuilt wireless configuration tool but that didn't work.

So, I tried to configure it manually by using iwconfig. That too didn't get wireless up and finally I had to do a bit of googling. It turned out that I need to use wpa_supplicant as the router was configured with WPA and not WEP.

I just followed the HOWTO and voila! its time for another blog entry.

Other than the WPA part, everything else was really smooth and cool. Its the fastest Linux install I have ever done. My first one was a Slackware installation over an UMSDOS partition and that just screwed up entire Win98 installation. So, it was a RH5.0 that I installed and cleaned out my Win98. After a few years, I reinstalled Windows in a separate partitions. Here I am, 10 years later, with just Linux on my m/c and no WinXP. A full circle!