I haven’t really missed my PC much. It’s been off for about two months now and my MacBook Air does everything I need to do on a computer (and it has Mac OS X). My PC ran Ubuntu 8.04 and I used to use it as an all-in-one gateway, firewall, and transparent proxy which connected directly to my DSL router using PPPOE. Then one day, it decided it didn’t feel like working anymore and after a power outage, it didn’t boot into the OS. I think I got used to the new-found silence in my room and that’s why I didn’t really care about sorting it out for so long.

No biggie really, I just setup my Telkom Billion router up as the default gateway. Brilliant router by-the-way, the only Telkom router that I think is actually worth purchasing. Anyways, I did intend to restore my PC eventually. So today I downloaded the latest beta of Ubuntu’s Jaunty Jackelope (version 9.04) and wrote it to my USB flash disk to do a USB-install. I had to download the alternate CD version because that gives you advanced options like upgrading your current setup or installing a fresh system and configuring your partitions yourself.

I downloaded UNetbootin for Windows and wrote the ISO image to my USB flash drive (Mac OS X is a bit fussy when it comes to writing iso9660 images to a block USB device). Everything seemed to go well and my PC booted straight into the installer and started doing its thing. Then… it tried to detect the CD-ROM drive and failed (obviously) since there is nothing inside it. Really bad foresight on the Ubuntu install team to not get this working right. After much googling, it seems this problem is pertinent to the alternate CD version of the distro and the normal LiveCD installer works no problem on a USB flash disk.

There have been patches and work-arounds to get the alternate version working using a USB disk but that really shouldn’t be the case. I’ve even tried mounting the ISO from an external hard-drive to /cdrom and that works… up to a point until it complains about not knowing which release it is.

Eventually I gave up and wrote the damn ISO to CD and booted off that. It installed perfectly (as it should) and afterwards when it tried to reboot for the first time, it just… stalled. My guess is that it can’t find the bootloader on my first hard drive (this PC has four drives) so I’m going to attempt a rescue. Back to square one.

My faith in desktop Linux has diminished over the past few years. I used to consider myself a huge open source advocate. But after using and enjoying Mac OS X for the past two years, I can’t say I’d ever switch back to Linux for the deskop. It is however still my Number #1 choice as a Server OS as I favor it’s speed, simplicity and usability. But in a desktop environment… it’s just not as easy or as pretty as Mac OS X.

Tags: linux, Mac OS X, ubuntu, usb, usb boot disk