Missives from the 6th Floor

Due to my desire to use an existing RAID+LVM configuration, I'm using the "alternate" install CD, which means a return to the early 90's, and a text-based install interface.

The hardware detection step went fine, it detected my disks, and even saw that there were RAID partitions on them, but didn't offer me the option to use them as RAID devices.

After a bit of googling (glad I had a second machine), I discovered that selecting "Configure RAID" would load the appropriate kernel modules and re-scan the device. Sure enough, it then noticed that there were volume managed volumes on said devices, but didn't offer to start them. One more iteration (choosing "Configure LVM") noticed the three volume groups, started them, and returned me to the partitioning screen where I could indicate which groups I wanted used for which file systems.

The interface wasn't exactly intuitive, but it does seem to have done the right thing - allowing me to preserve my /home and /scratch filesystems, while formatting the root and /boot portions of the drive.

The one very disconcerting message was the installer insisting that the partition table, and subsequently the RAID configuration, had changed between steps and requiring me to allow it to write these (non)changes to disk before continuing.

Since I hadn't changed anything, I had to take it on faith that the write would either not happen, or be non-destructive. We'll find out if my faith was misplaced when the install completes.

Seems the Ubuntu guys could take a few lessons from the Fedora/RedHat graphical installer with respect to keeping the common case simple while enabling more advanced operations. It seems unnecessary to throw the friendly install experience out with the bath water just to gain the benefits of some data redundancy.

19:45PM a steady stream of packages being prepared and configured... The install shows at 65%.

19:55 The install detected my WinXP install and advised me about where to install the bootloader. That's sorta nice. Package installation is complete, rebooting.

19:55 Well that's not awesome - No graphics, and selecting any of the offered boot configs (which don't include the Windows install it detected) produces "Error 15: File Not Found"... Let's see what that "Rescue a Broken System" option does.

20:00 Well, problem #1 is that the /boot file system is empty. As in, has no files on it. As in, what the hell? Ah, no, not empty, just not mounted, as the output of mount(1) indicates.

20:13 First guess, after inspecting the system a bit, is that grub was misconfigured - it was pointing at the first partition on the first disk, which actually holds the WindowsXP install that I mentioned was detected by the installer (but wasn't added to the GRUB menu). Runing grub-update, and rebooting to see what happens.

20:14 Still get the ugly menu (would a little color kill you guys?) but selecting the first Ubuntu kernel option produced a boot screen, so that's a step in the right direction. It's now checking my file systems, which isn't really necessary, but certainly doesn't hurt anything.

20:15 Uh-oh, blank screen. I'm guessing something about my dual monitor setup is confusing the X server. Let's see if the old three-finger salute will get me back to a GRUB prompt, so I can boot single user... The score so far, Fedora 2 - Ubuntu 0.

20:20 Next problem. Booting single user presented me with a nice menu of options, one of which was "root - drop to a root shell" - unfortunately, the arrow keys didn't move around the menu, so after filling the screen with control characters, trying to type "root", I gave up and hit return, and I'm back at a blank screen again. Lovely.

20:22 rebooting without the "quiet" and "splash" options (but still with "single") got me to a menu that worked, and I'm at a root shell. Attempting to start networking ($ cd /etc/init.d ; ./networking start ) complains "Ignoring unknown interface eth1=eth1". This is just all kinds of awesome.

20:26 the /etc/network/interfaces file had auto eth1, but the line "iface eth1 inet dhcp" was commented out. So now I have networking. Going to try an aptitude upgrade and then see if I can figure out how to enable the proprietary nvidia driver from the command line. In the mean time, I'll take a peak at the X log and see if I can tell what went sideways.

20:36 updates are applied, rebooting to see if any of said updates made things "just work."

20:37 Nope - same blank screen. I'm pretty sure the problem is my relatively new card (a GeForce 9600GT) arguing with the opensource nvidia driver. Starting to consider a stop-loss plan that involves installing Fedora 9 if I don't get this sorted out in the next couple attempts.

20:40 Installed the nvidia drivers, which claims to have succeeded. Let's see if that lets the X server start. ... survey says ... nope. Reboot again.

20:50 Ok, I have display (on one monitor). The magic seems to have been to reconfigure the xserver package, and then run the nvidia-xconfig to configure the driver. I'm guessing that the gui tool does all this, but sorta requires you to be able to get to the gui.

20:52 Next problem - the uid on my homedir doesn't match the uid of the account created for me during the install. No problem. Change to a a different terminal, login, and move my old homedir out of the way. Probably not a bad idea anyway, since god knows how the various things that have put settings in there will get along with the transition from Fedora to Ubuntu.

21:00 Got dual screens configured, rebooted and ended up in X without any hand-holding.

I'm going to call the system "working" at this point, but damn was that an unpleasant process. I haven't had that many things go wrong in years.