After starting with Ubuntu 8.?? a few years ago, I had setup everything the way I wanted it over an extended period of time. Then, I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.?? using the upgrade method within Ubuntu. That is when the problems started. Simple things like starting the computer became troublesome, because some program would hang and make it impossible to make it to the desktop without killing the window manager and forcing it to restart.
Recently I decided to start over and install Ubuntu 10.04 on a separate hard drive and see how well I could setup everything again.
The install procedure:
1) create a usb drive bootable with the image of Ubuntu 10.04
2) disconnect all other hard drives except for the one I wanted to install Ubuntu 10.04 on. This is important as the installer does not make it easy to tell it which drive is the one I am booting from, and I find that using the startup selector in bios is much easier than trying to configure a boot loader. (As a side note I have successfully had 3 separate operating systems on separate hard drives and never once had difficulties picking which one to start up. However, the one time I tried to configure a boot loader, I had spent days trying it to work correctly. So, for me this is easier.)
3) Using the live image, I used shred on the hard disk. Shred is a utility that makes it impossible to recover previous data that may have been on the drive.
sudo shred -v -zn2 /dev/sda
That will write random numbers twice and finish by writing zeros. The zeros are supposed to cover up using shred, but I saw that the device id was also being rewritten by zero's so it becomes pretty clear that the drive had shred used on it. So I decided that finishing with random numbers may in fact be better. Use something like
sudo shred -v -n2 /dev/sda
(Note if using sudo is annoying we can always use
sudo -i
Just make sure to exit before closing the console. It appears that not exiting first may make it possible to access root.)
4) install using the usb. Choose install instead of preview/test. Choosing standard partitions resulted in no choice to modify what the default is as could be done in previous installs. The advanced option did allow for custom but it did not provide any help in getting started. Previously it would give you a good starting point to work from if you wanted to change some options.
In short, I am a bit disappointed in the changes made to the installer. Although, it worked correctly without errors so that is a huge plus and I am willing to accept a few lost features to avoid having lots of problems. As it did provide an advanced option, I will accept that they do allow for customization. So, I really don't mind the way it turned out.
Installation complete....
And, everything works. Well, not everything. I need to install a number of programs to get back to where I can do work.
Installing basic programs to be productive, in the next post.
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