What a pain in the ass. I’ve been working on this every night. I was finally able to get get Ubuntu installed on this PC by the method using Knoppix as described before. But I forget to add a regular user, (since root can’t log into gdm), and I still have some issues to work out with grub.

When the PC boots up, I get the grub menu, but it is like it doesn’t see the menu1st file. I don’t know if I missed a step or fumble-fingered something, but I can type in the various things to get it to boot up at the grub menu:

grub> root (hd0,0)

grub> kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1

grub> initrd /initrd.img

grub> boot

And it boots up fine. Regardless, I am upgrading Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.10 so it’s taking some time to update all the various packages. I have to make this newbie-proof since when I give this to my bro-in-law he’s a complete linux-newbie. Plus this has to pass the wife-approval-factor.

I was able to score an eval PCI wireless card for this project. Ubuntu sees it, but since I have a hardwire, I haven’t spent much time in trying to get it working. I’ll post more details about the card when I get a little further down this road.

But it is going well considering. I feel like I got a chance to get back into Linux after being away for a while. So it has been a fun and good experience.