Ubuntu

A few things have changed since I last posted. I have moved up in the world. I downloaded Ubuntu 7.04 and tried to install it to the USB drive. It worked but this time I get Err=2 instead of Err=1. I suspect now that this is hardware related. This would be extremely coincidental if it were to occur despite media checks, multiple ISO burns to CD and DVD and various install methods. My hardware testing on other computers wasn't that rigorous and I will re-install it and have one more go at running it at school of the USB. (Would be really really nice if it worked.)

While trying to get it to work I did try just using the Ubuntu installer and installing to the flash drive but just without a swap partition so as to improve the life of the usb. However that seems to decompress the packages that are otherwise compressed on the live version. It says that it needs at least 2gb to work. With 4Gb and 8Gb USB sticks on the market this is not beyond the realms of possibility and would alleviate the need for casper to make the live usb persistent (which is the technique used by the main tutorail I have been using at http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/02/12/usb-ubuntu-tutorial-for-linux-users/ )

With that all said and done I am waiting to find a good mirror to get my hands on Fedora 7 (released today). I have in the meantime installed Ubuntu and all is going well. I have to say that everything just works or is easily installed by "follow the prompts" installers. In fact I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy it was to get the Totem player to run mp3 files and open other public domain formats.

I was able to access my main hard drive which has Vista on it (NTFS) and get my music off it and start playing it. That was great. I was however unable to actually save or modify anything on the Vista partition though but I don't really care just as long as I can get my important files off with minimal effort. In fact it is quite good that it doesn't let me modify the NTFS partition because knowing me I would probably stuff it up.