Banish the Damn Command Line!

Go to any Linux forum, and ask someone how to accomplish something, and some well-intentioned but utterly moronic science geek will spew out an answer that the person asking will quickly brush aside as useless.

Why is the answer useless?

Because the user wanted to push a button, click with the mouse, drag and drop, and get a result quickly. However, the typical Linux expert is a computer science nerd who thinks a graphical interface is for children, so he thinks he is being helpful by teaching us all how to use the command line and type in complicated commands that look like code out of a Hollywood movie.

Every someone writes in response to a new Ubuntu user, "That's easily done. Just open a terminal and..." the glazed over lack of interest on the part of the target audience is almost audible through the network cable.

Guys: NO COMMAND LINE. NONE. EVER. NADA. If you have to drop to the command line in an OS, the OS is doomed to being used by scientists and programmers only. The goal for Ubuntu is to reach a wider audience: Your grandparents, small children, artists, and people who DO NOT LIKE COMPUTERS.

Everything must be accessible via the GUI. It should be possible to run Ubuntu with total effectiveness without even knowing what a terminal window is.

If you think the terminal window must be opened to solve a problem, you are missing the point. The need to even have a terminal window IS THE PROBLEM.

Eliminate it and banish it to the background. Experts will always be able to find it and configure it to be reachable. The rest of us refuse to use it, as we get paid to work on things other than our computer.

Software Installation Must be Simplified in Ubuntu

This morning I went over to The How To Geek to read the How To Geek's instructions for installing Adobe Reader for Ubuntu. Why anyone would ask how to do this or care, I don't really know . That's why I was browsing the aforementioned article - to find out what advantages it has over the built-in PDF reader that Ubuntu comes with. It turns out it has none, and that there is no reason to install Adobe's product in Ubuntu.

What struck me were the comments (I left one as well). The people who had read the article and tried to follow its directions were met with all manner of ill-fated experiences attempting to do something as simple as install very mainstream software on their supposedly user-friendly Linux PC's.

Ubuntu must be enhanced to handle downloading and installing free software. The current method is aimed at techies, uses unfriendly terminology, is scattered into different places in the operating system, and leaves the user confused and intimidated if they do not work in the technology sector.

For Ubuntu acceptance to become more widespread, this needs to be addressed.

The problem:

1. Users was to download and install software on their Ubuntu PC's
2. There are multiple locations in the menus to try for this (applications | add/removed... Synaptic Package Manager)
3. Software can be installed without using either of the above menu items
4. How to uninstall software from the system is unclear
5. Software cannot simply be found on web sites and easily installed as in Windows by ordinary users
6. Some software installs require command line usage (the command line must be banished and hidden away somewhere dark and infrequently visited before true usability is achieved)

The solution:

1. Handle downloads like archives (automatically open up an install/uninstall handler when someone downloads a file
2. Get rid of the concept of "repositories" and never use the unfriendly word "repository" again. It sounds like a government warehouse and ordinary users will never go so far as to mess with these
3. Remove the item "Synaptic Package Manager" and never display such a thing to users again. Automate everything behind the scenes and instead only show "installed software"
4. Develop a service to detect software being installed by the user which triggers a helper program to track all installed files and config changes to undo them later and place a helpful, friendly item in the Add/Remove menu
5. Find a single place to install software (program files in Windows) where it goes. I put all of mine in /opt when given the choice. Why is some there and some in other places? Because some idiot scientist had some lofty reason for it. That scientist needs to be banished - Ubuntu is not for scientists.

Making software installation easier and more friendly is a key obstacle to Ubuntu adoption. Until users can click links, download files, click the icons, and see software install automatically guided to the right locations and uninstall with a single click, Ubuntu will remain unfriendly Linux that the average PC user will fear.

Fix it.

Understanding the Ubuntu Filesystem

In Windows you have your C:\ drive. That's where everything is. C:\windows\ is where the files that drive your operating system live. C:\Documents and Settings\Users\your login\ is where the files specific to you live at such as My Documents, Desktop, and Local Settings.

Why the hell does Windows call your hard drive C:\? I'll tell you. It's because back in the early days, there were no hard drives. You would turn on your Apple IIe or Commodore 64 (what I grew up with) and the operating system was built into the hardware. When you wanted to load a program, you had to attach either a cassette tape player or a floppy disk drive which used 5.25" floppy disks. Back then they were actually floppy, too.

If you wrote a program or document you wanted to save, you had to insert a floppy disk or an audio cassette, and you had to type a command like SAVE , 8 "Document". Then you went and had dinner and watched two TV shows while your document saved for an hour.

Since those drives were your first drives, they were lettered with A:\. Then the IBM personal computer came along and inside it was a very small hard drive. It was the third drive, behind the tape recorder and the floppy disk drive. Thus, it is called "C:\" and your CD/DVD drive is called D:\... everything else is lettered E, F, G, etc.

In fact, in Windows you can letter your drives anything you want.

But did you know that you can also create virtual drives? That you can have both C:\ and D:\ on the same piece of hard disk drive hardware? You can. That's because you can partition your drive. Most people use one large partition on their drives, so each drive gets one letter, but you don't have to do that. You can have multiples.

Unix, and therefore Linux, is far more graceful in handling things, and if you learn the system, you will come to understand that it is not necessary to have A drives, B drives, and the like.

Linux has root. Root is called /. The slash is forward instead of backward. Root is where everything starts on a filesystem or "host."

/ is the beginning of everything - the folder that all other folders are in. If you think about it, it makes sense to use a forward slash. When you use text to describe folders inside folders, the forward slashes look more obvious:

/
/etc
/opt
/home
/sbin
/var
/mount
/media
/bin

The nice forward slashes show how everything spills down from above.

When you attach a new hard disk, you "mount" it in the filesystem. That means that you tell your operating system, when it boots up, to use that hardware to put a certain part of the filesystem on it. You can mount pieces of the filesystem to hardware anywhere you want.

For example, you can have two hard drives, and everything goes on one drive, and then /home and everything below it goes on the other. The possibilities are endless and allow a system administrator to use 50 hards drive and spread a single host across them all by attaching various directories to each hard drive.

Theoretically, you could just keep doing this forever.

So, what the heck are those directories in Ubuntu Linux, anyway?

/home - this is the equivalent of Windows' "Documents and Settings." It contains your documents, and all of the individual settings for you for any program on your computer. Those settings are usually in hidden folders - hidden folders have a . at the beginning of the filename like this: .name

/opt - this is a good place to tell software to install when you run any sort of installer outside of the Ubuntu add/remove function or synaptic package manager.

You know what? If you are a beginner, you really don't need to know where anything else is. It all installs and uninstalls automagically using the built in menu items. Most people who use Windows don't know where anything is outside of My Documents, and it is perfectly reasonable that plenty of people will use Linux without giving a crap how it works. So, that's it.

And, by default, you aren't allowed to modify anything outside of your /home directory anyway.

Ubuntu 7.10 even puts a folder for your home directory on the desktop. Isn't that sweet? That way you won't lose it. :-)

No File Extensions in Ubuntu Linux

One of the big differences between Linux and Windows is how files are named. Windows references the last part of the file name - filename.doc, filename.xls, filename.txt to determine what kind of file it is. If you change that ending, the operating system changes the way it views the file and what kind of program it loads to view it.

Linux doesn't do that. File names have nothing to do with what kind of file you are looking at in Linux. Unlike Windows, you can successfully name text files "To do list" without any file name extension at the end, and the operating system will treat the text file as a text file. In fact, you can put .txt at the end like in Windows, if you like. You can also try changing the extension to .jpg (an image format), and the operating system will still treat the file like a text file.

Linux doesn't care about those file extensions.

Some Linux applications care, however. The Gimp, the famous free Photoshop Look-alike that comes free with almost every Linux distribution anywhere, saves files using extensions. Change the extension in the program, and The Gimp saves the file as a different type of file.

I find it liberating to not have to change file extensions to get my operating system to use a file correctly. No more pop-up windows that say "You have changed the extension on your file. If you do this, Windows might not be able to display it properly. Are you sure?"

Yes, I'm sure. Change my extension to .linux on everything. :-)

Email in Linux

One word: Gmail.

If you are using any sort of program at all on your home computer to manage your email, you are making a mistake, imo. Gmail is the ultimate email software.

Advantages:

• Email is stored forever (I've only used 5% of my 6 gigs)
• Email is stored remotely (no backing up - no archiving - no lost messages)
• Email is available from any networked computer
• Great spam filters
• The ability to label email as it comes in

Disadvantages:

• Your stupid company might block Gmail at the office and stop you from reaching it

Gmail is the best way to go when it comes to managing personal email. I know very few if any people who use a home PC who really require a to-do list, calendaring, and email in a client application that resembles Microsoft Outlook. Why bother with any of that when IT experts use Gmail and solve all of their problems easily?

How to Get Wiggly Windows in Ubuntu Linux

Ever seen the Windows in Linux wiggling about and other cool effects in one of those videos on YouTube? Try this one:



The Linux desktop effects leave MAC and Windows varieties in the dust.

Wondering how to do that? It's easy if you download Ubuntu 7.10 or higher. Just right click on the desktop. Choose the table labeled "Visual Effects" and amp up the settings to set up custom effects. If you have any sort of decent video card of recent variety, your desktop will be pleasantly wiggly, swirly, and springy in no time.

Windows and MAC users: Sorry. No wiggling or other special effects for you. You're stuck with your default configurations.

Make Fonts Look Nice in Ubuntu Linux

After much tweaking, I finally figured out a very simple way to make fonts in Linux look just like they did in windows. Linux has poor support for Fonts in the default installation. I don't know why this is, and I won't bother you with a long rant about it. It needs to be fixed, imo, but that's how it is.

How to fix:

Go to the top menu bar and click on SYSTEM | PREFERENCES | APPEARANCE.

Click on the fonts tab.

Select the radio button for "Subpixel Smoothing" if you have an LCD like I do (most people do these days).

Then click on the details button and select NO HINTING or HINTING NONE.

That will smooth them out just like Windows Cleartype.

Next, you can also install a package that contains fonts that are just like those in Windows.

Go to APPLICATIONS | ADD/REMOVE....

Search on MS Core Fonts. Select it for installation, and install. Done. Now you have Verdana, Arial, and other common Microsoft fonts on your linux installation, and your display of Web pages should improve dramatically.

Back in the days when I was running earlier Linux distributions, I used to have a devil of a time with fonts in Linux. They looked like crap, web pages would display too large of text here, too small there, and it was always too blurry or too pixelated. They have truly improved things in Linux to a professional level where fonts are concerned.

Uninstall the Extra Fonts in Ubuntu Linux

When you install Ubuntu Linux and fire up an application that uses fonts like OpenOffice.org, you might notice a lot of fonts that don't seem to do very much. For some reason, the developers of Ubuntu install a lot of non-English language fonts by default.

To get rid of these fonts, go to the top menu bar and click on SYSTEM | PREFERENCES | SYNAPTIC PACKAGE MANAGER.

Search on "ttf".

Find the fonts for various languages that are installed, click on the green box, and mark them for complete removal.

That will get rid of the fonts that English speakers typically have no interest in and de-clutter the font menus in Gimp and OpenOffice.org.

Watch DVD's in Ubuntu Linux

Surprisingly, one of the things that Ubuntu Linux does better than Windows is play DVD movies. After installing Ubuntu, I went to the Add/Remove item on the applications menu, and I installed the restricted add-ons. This gave me full DVD movie playback ability.

I popped a DVD in the drive, and Linux fired up a player and I was watching movies in full screen instantly. Unlike Windows, the movie was not choppy and did not choke intermittently. It played just like it was on the DVD player on my TV set.

It has longer irritated me that I have this beautiful 24" LCD monitor on my PC with surround sound speakers and yet could not watch a DVD movie either in Windows XP or Vista.

In Linux, it works great!

Some might ask why you have to install a package - why doesn't Ubuntu Linux come with drivers for DVD's built in? Well, because Linux is given away for free and all of the software in it is open source, any drivers or programs that are "closed" must be installed by the user separately for legal reasons.

Ubuntu Linux builders would be helping out new users dramatically by including a nice icon on the desktop that you could double click to launch an applet to install typically desired closed source support programs like video card drivers, DVD support, and MP3 playback and burning capability. Instead, new users typically go to Google and search on "Ubuntu play MP3's" and read postings in a forum somewhere or articles like this one to figure out what to do.

Too Many Bad Linux Media Players

Houston, we have a problem. The problem is that there are no less than 10 media players for Linux, and every one of them sucks. That's right. They suck.

Linux die-hards will respond to that by saying "Why don't you write a media player then?" There are two reasons I won't write a media player. For one, I am not a programmer, so I can't. The other reason is that there is no reason to create media player no. 11 which also sucks.

The current crop of media players for Linux have one thing in common: most of them do not have an equalizer. The one that does sport a nice equalizer is a copy of a program that was popular for Windows 95 which has an interface more suited to managing 5 music files rather than 5,000.

What's up with the lack of equalizers? The writers of these media players say that equalizer functions should live in the sound system of the operating system, not on the media player. Funny - every stinking Windows media player out there has an equalizer in the application, not the operating system. The guys who write the sound system move pretty slow and are held up by lack of industry cooperation. They can't even get the years-old X-fi sound cards working in Linux yet.

The other problem with Linux media players is the lack of a decent user interface. Has anyone out there used CompizFusion anytime recently to switch applications? That nifty graphical changer is reminiscent of another really cool interface - the iPhone. The iPhone and iTouch have an awesome graphical browser for media.

So does Windows Media Center.

Yet Linux media players are basically lists of text in boxes - 20th Century technology.

Linux developers, we need a decent media player. Some requirements:

1. The media player needs a really cool 3-D interface to flip through albums.
2. How about some very soothing beeps when you click on albums and songs
3. The cool 3-D interface needs to be theme-able so that we can design new color schemes for it
4. The 3-D interface should be usable both full screen and windowed
5. The 3-D interface should allow several types of motion for albums - horizontal, vertical, free-for-all, flipping, and they should spin in a circle like a jukebox.
6. Throw in an equalizer
7. I should be able to hook up any mp3 player or ipod to my PC and have this media player interface with it
8. The media player should have audio and data cd/DVD burning built in.

A really, really cool media player for Linux would be very nice right now. Having a cool media player is apparently enough to drive up sales on a ridiculously over-priced, under-powered telephone and make it the technological sensation of the century. Quick! Hurry! Before they fix Vista and Linux fever starts to die down, serve up Ubuntu with a media player that makes the iPhone look like an unconfigurable piece of junk!

Linux and Hardware Sometimes Don't Mix

One of the hardest lessons I have learned about Linux is that Linux is often not compatible with your hardware. Windows is developed by a mega-corporation which dedicates a rather large portion of its empire to writing drivers to detect and properly run your hardware. That corporation also spends considerable energy developing relationships with hardware manufacturers so that they work to keep their hardware compatible with Windows. Windows does a great job of seeing and working with your hardware like disk drives, scanners, keyboards, mice, monitors, motherboards, video cards, sound cards, printers, fax machines, modems, routers, cameras, usb flash memory keys, and other gizmos like blackberries and palm OS pda's. This makes installation and running of Windows with your hardware pretty easy.

Sure, some people have trouble, but the vast, vast majority of the billions of people who use billions of Windows installations simply run it and never worry about buying hardware and making it work. Usually, they just attach the hardware, turn on the PC, and it says, "Finding hardware. All good. Work now."

But, being compatible with so much hardware comes at a price. Windows is very bloated with all of that compatibility, and because all of the compatibility lives in the operating system, Windows is a complex web of spaghetti code that is a pain in the ass to maintain and difficult to debug.

The MAC OS has a different approach. It, like Linux, is based on Unix at its core, but the MAC OS is written to only work with specific hardware - a very narrow list of hardware sold by only one company for the most part. As a result, if you buy a MAC, your stuck with that hardware, and the vendor knows it and charges a premium for it. Windows' strength is hardware compatibility. MAC's strength is stability and ease of use on limited hardware.

My Ubuntu Linux installation is somewhere in the unhappy middle. Unlike the MAC OS, Linux has to work with non-proprietary hardware on PCs which are all custom built and have millions of permutations. Unlike Windows, Linux is built and tested by... well, by a bunch of amateurs doing the best they can to use the connectivity of the Internet to allow them to operate as if they were a software team in a big company.

But they aren't.

Mostly, they are a bunch of really smart people who are scientists, technicians, and computer brainiacs (people who would laugh their heads off at my resume). They aren't dumb, but their greatest strength, their open freedom and individuality, is also their greatest weakness. Like our free and open society, they have to live with compromise and the chaos it causes.

Let's face it: Mussolini made the trains run on time. With Linux, most, but not all trains run on time, but they are free to ride. With a MAC, all the trains run on time, but there is only one train, and it costs a fortune to ride. With Windows, the trains run on time, but they are expensive to ride on. As price comes down, so does reliability and quality.

Linux is a pretty sweet deal - it's free - and it does a lot of things really well. But, recognizing hardware is not one of them.

Let's look at two examples, and then let's look at root cause. Two pieces of hardware I own would not work at all.

1. My scanner
2. My sound card

The scanner was a Microtek scanner. It came with a cool CD with drivers on it - for Windows. No drivers for Linux. The company that made it doesn't provide any Linux support. Linux itself doesn't support scanners. There is a program that Linux comes with called SANE which acts like a scanner driver for many different scanners. Unfortunately, SANE doesn't support scanners made by companies that refuse to share how their scanners work with the SANE developers. So, my scanner wouldn't work with Linux, and no matter what anyone does who works on Linux, it never will, because the guys who made the scanner think their $29 scanner is some sort of state secret.

My sound card was also a no-go. I owned a cheap version of the Creative Soundblaster X-Fi soundcard. Linux couldn't do anything with it because the folks at Creative do not make a Linux driver, and they also will not open up their soundcard workings to the Linux folks to allow them to make their own. So, it's another state secret.

Here's how I solved my problem:

1. I went to the SANE web site and picked a cheapo scanner (Canon LIDE25) that costs $49 at Fry's Electronics, then I bought one
2. I bought an Audigy 2 soundcard (top of the line three years ago) and put the X-Fi on the shelf.
   

Problem solved. Sound works - scanning works.

Here's the thing, though. They work, but there are degrees of working. I get sound from my PC, and I can scan photos. However, many of the functions of these two devices are not available to me. I don't have the cool Windows driver that let's me tweak the sound my soundcard makes to have more echo or activate the nifty 3d sound that games use. I can use it to hear sounds - that's it. The scanner is the same - I can scan pictures and documents, but the nifty character recognition software is non-existent, and the tweaks I can make using SANE are rather limited as well.

Both devices would be fully, full-on functional in Windows. In Linux, they are handicapped.

My video card, an Nividia 8500, is not handicapped. Nvidia does a good job of building Linux drivers that work really well and making them freely available and easy to get and install.

My motherboard works OK. The networking works as expected, it finds all of my ram, and Linux, after I moved my hard drive cables, found the hard drives better than Windows had - no additional driver CD's or floppies were needed to get the SATA II drive working. My burner/CD player/DVD player also works pretty well.

My printer, an Epson R340, works OK - it prints, but most of the options are not available. I can't tell it to print to different specialty types of paper. It just prints now the same way no matter what I put in there. I can't control much of it at all. Here's the thing, though. In Windows, I never used any of that fancy schmancy junk anyway.

My monitor works fine. My keyboard works well.

My mouse - not so good. Left and right click works OK. The mousewheel works OK. But the back and forward buttons do not work. And, hardware control isn't really an operating system thing in Linux. Linux sort of dumps hardware support on the software applications. For example, the scanner is supported by SANE and GIMP, the scanner driver and the image editing software. The mouse is driven by whatever software you are using at the time.

To get the mouse back and forward buttons to work, you have to work on your web browser. Otherwise, they are dead to you. No special CD comes with any mouse with Linux drivers on it.

Not yet.

So, my computer is usable, but rather than being a limousine ride of posh luxury as it is in a plug-and-play Windows world, it's more like living in the year 1999 where hardware is concerned. It's not bad (back then, Linux couldn't recognize or use a video card without me compiling source code to build my own driver), but it ain't as good as Vista, XP, or Windows 2000.

The important thing to remember is that it does MOSTLY work, and nothing critical fails to respond, and above all else, LINUX IS FREE.

Goodbye Vista, Hello Ubuntu! (part 2)

After I had installed Ubuntu, I was able to successfully use it to browse the web, check gmail, and do some other things that my previous Linux experiences in past years would have led me to believe required the command line or compiling software. No more.

Linux was even able to read and write to my Windows Vista partition. I played mp3's that were stored there, and I viewed pictures I had there.

Until the day when, probably due to resizing the partition or writing to it from Linux, the Vista installation just up and died and would not boot any longer.

I'm pretty sure Linux caused this, but I decided I was bored with my PC experience, so I took a plunge and decided to go 100% Linux.

I stuck the install CD in the drive and booted from it and fired up Linux - copying every document and file from "My Documents" to /home/shark/ on my Linux partition. After that, I used a program called a partition editor that comes free with Linux to delete the Windows partition, move the Linux partition, and make a second huge 200GB partition on my drive.

I then moved my /home directory structure there. That's a neat thing about a Unix based operating system. The filesystem (structure of folders and files) doesn't use those goofy drive letters like c:\ for partitions on your hard disk. It makes them invisible, and you just attach a slash to them anywhere you like.

So, / is the root directory, and it is on your root partition. /home/ can be on another partition while /opt /etc /bin and other directories stay back on the previous one - and you can't tell. They just look like folders and files on one giant hard drive.

So, I was stuck with Linux as my only operating system.

As a result, I began to really feel the burn of leaving Windows behind. I will tell those stories here. While I believe the move to have been fun and entertaining, and my PC is pretty much as functional as it was before, and even does a few things better than it did, it hasn't all been positive, and I think it's important to get that balanced perspective.

Just to start off, though, let's look at some popular myths that I call The Linux Lies:

• Linux can play your Windows software using a free program called Wine
• Linux has free office software called OpenOffice.org that is as good as MS Office and completely compatible with it
• Linux is more efficient than Windows
• Linux has awesome hardware compatibility and the beauty of open source is that anyone can write a driver
• Linux is more stable than Windows and it crashes less
  
• Linux is "more powerful" than Windows

Lies. All lies. And the people that tell these lies are liars. They lie because they have an agenda. And when you call them on their lies, these lying liars will tell you that everything you experience is unique to you because you are too stupid to use Linux the right way. But they are lying when they say that, because they lie.

The truth is that Linux does a few things better than Windows, and it does quite a few things a hell of a lot worse. Sometimes there is a good explanation that makes sense as to why Linux sucks compares to Windows, and sometimes Linux does just crash because it isn't as cool as the religious zealots claim it is.

Overall, I'm sticking with Linux. I have enough technical ability to weather through the worst of it, my home PC is not mission critical and I back up frequently allowing me to do a re-install without having an anxiety attack. I'm fairly skilled at searching Google for answers and finding the right ones, and I enjoy fiddling with my PC (a little - not a lot). I built the one that I am using by purchasing the parts separately and putting it all together myself... which is also why I had the SATA cables plugged into ports 1 and 2 instead of 5 and 6.

Following articles will cover my experiences with Linux that have been adventures, but don't let me scare you away from it. Linux is a lot of fun, and I think it is plenty good enough for a free operating system with free software throughout.

Goodbye Vista, Hello Ubuntu!

"I just made the switch! And I couldn't be happier! All is right with the world, and Linux is far better than Windows ever was! I don't miss anything, and Linux is awesomely superior in all ways! Upgrading to Linux was a snap. I just popped a CD in my PC, and it installed itself!"

Yeah, right.

Here's the real story of what happened.

I decided I was bored with my PC and very disappointed with Windows Vista. I had installed Vista back in September 2007, and I found it to be VERY SLOW at simple operations like copying files. If I wanted to move files from my USB key to my hard drive (how I back up my files from work my company tries to auto-delete using a script such as my outlook personal folders), I would insert the key, and then I would select the files and move them to my hard drive. Ten years later, the files were copied, and I had watched an episode of House, Bones, and The Reaper by the time it was done.

I knew I wanted to go back to XP, but Vista is just so darned pretty! Using Vista was like dating a horribly self-centered and beautiful woman: It was easy on the eyes, but all it did was TAKE TAKE TAKE.

I decided to explore my options and grab one of those Live CD's that lets you run Linux straight off the CD without actually installing it to see how you like it.

After 30 mins, I had downloaded the 740 MB download and burned it to a CD. I actually had to burn three CD's:

1. Vista auto-burns as a read/write filesystem instead of a normal data CD, so I threw this one in the trash.
2. I thought I had told Vista not to do that again, but it did it anyway. CD #2 also met its maker in the trash can.
3. I finally got this one right.

I then rebooted my PC, holding down the DEL key to get into the BIOS. I made sure that my CMOS was configured to boot from a CD, and then I saved my settings and the system restarted.

Upon rebooting, I realized the CD was not in the tray, so I pushed the restart button as soon as I saw the stupid Vista logo popping up.

Then I finally saw the Ubuntu logo when my computer booted. THERE IT WAS! IT'S WORKING!!!

Nope. It bombed out halfway through and gave me a terrible error.

(initramfs) ata3.0 failed to set xfermode errors

I searched for about 4 hours before I finally found a useful posting that told me what was happening when my PC was trying to boot up and use Ubuntu Linux. It turns out that my SATA II hard drive in my PC that I built myself was plugged into slot 1. My cheap motherboard apparently rides an IDE and a SATA signal piggyback with each other. Windows Vista doesn't care and handles it fine, but Linux pukes out on me. I opened up the PC case, and I unplugged my hard drive cable from slot 1 and put it into slot 5. I moved the DVD writer plug from slot 2 to slot 6.

Reboot.

Success!

I took a look around inside Ubuntu Linux, liked what I saw, and decided I would set it up to dual boot.

More in the next posting...

.........................

Links from this article:

• The Ubuntu Home Page
• The Ubuntu download page for the Live CD (which is also the install CD)
• The solution I found to my boot issue