Experiment 2 - Day 1

Computer is a model c100 of the 3000 series of lenovo thinkpad, pretty standard stuff, nothing overly out of the ordinary here...

Well, a little bit more about the process,

1. Started late due to car troubles (yes, car comes first... computer second... barely)
2. CD Rom on Laptop not useable (Died at the motherboard not willing to through my new laptop at this endevour... yet).
3. Laptop doesn't boot up to USB Stick, (CRAP!)
4. Installed an In-Filesystem version (took forever to install but oh well - we are seeing some light, I hope to remedy this by partitioning off the drives and finishing the process into a fresh install)

Steps taken so far (please note, as steps happen I write them down, some commentary is basically entered as it happens and I think it).

1. Backed up system (yeah, if this fails, windows needs to get back as is... of course I am not entirely certain how I am going to do that, but will figure it out as we go).


2. freed up some disk space on my 70 gig drive, had less then 8 gigs free (so I am hard on my computers, doesn't make me a bad guy, does it?).


3. Installed Ubuntu 8.10 onto system using In-Filesystem, rebooted into Ubuntu OS. (screen blanked out and freaked me out to start with, thank God it was only the screen saver). System literally took about 2 hours to install and configure itself (tick, tock, tick, tock). The process basically downloaded itself from the internet (regardless that I had a complete version in a virtual CD-Rom drive), a 700 mb file and then took approximately 15 - 20 minutes to configure itself. This doesn't seem like a bad situation, but what if the computer didn't have a reliable internet connection, it should have used the CD as its "guide" saving a little over 1 1/2 hours. At this point, I am hoping that I will be able to f*ck with it and try to delete the NTFS partition and then create the full installation using the entire hard drive, not just 8 gigs.
4. Rebooted again, choosing Ubuntu one more time, it seems to get stuck for a few minutes trying to boot up, yes, it is making me concerned, but I can wait it out for a little bit.
5. Activating Swapfile swap took literally 2 minutes, now that is slow...
6. Thank you, Ubuntu Logon Screen is now here, and I seem to be in.
7. sound works nicely, and my usb drives show up and my battery capacity pops up stating 30% which means, yeah I know, ITS OLD! remember kids, I am cheap on experiments.
8. Lets see, no network off the top, it doesn't seem to see my network (which is secured) or my neighbors network that isn't secured... time to invesitigate. --- Aha, the wireless card isn't found... Wahoo, now I gotta get that going... good thing I took that quick course to explain what to do next... thank goodness it did find my wired network card or else I would be screwed... I plug in my network cable and.... Nothing... wired is not showing an IP Address, nor do I have a connection to the internet. But I do have a kewler desktop with a fine wiggle...
9. I do a hardware testing to see if there is something wrong, first thing it wants to do is connect to the launchpad via the internet, then it starts to work, some preliminary screen tests, then a mouse test, now a video test, so on and so on... I find my network controller... it sounds right, (Realtek Semiconductor, PCI Express Transceiver and a broadcom corp BCM4311) so I say Yes, this is right. then it asks if I am connected to the internet... hmm, three choices, yes, no and skip, it sees that I am not connected, and yet asks this question.... I don't know, I say yes, no or skip, it asks me to type something on the keyboard... no help there. finish the "wizard" and then it wants to send my report to Launchpad via the internet that it couldn't find... wow, real intuitive. Exit that program.
10. ok, I think I screwed with it, I deleted something that had a MAC address, and then tried to add it again, unfortunately, it didn't want to re-add easily, so being a windows guy, time to reboot and hope it finds it again while rebooting, perhaps it won't take 2 minutes on the swapfile. (no such luck... Activating swapfile swap... 2 minutes later....)
11. login, and check the network again. (hey, the sound raise and lower shortcuts work as well as the mute button, exciting.) And the network is still dead... the Auto etho0 did come back (thank God for small favors) but I still have no IP address on the Wired, and the wireless is counter-intuitive.
12. Time to relax for a minute... Applications - Games - Tetravex, yeah, I have a high score of a minute thirty... Hit new Game, now I have an exactly same high score... new game, new game, new game. seems that hitting the new game button doesn't actually clear the old game before seeing if I won. hmmm, I think I found a bit of a bug. if I had internet connection on that computer, I would report it... maybe tomorrow, I am done for now.