This must be the end, because we seem to have got there

[desperance]

So when I lived in England, I was a Linux-user from the late nineties on; and for the last five years or so a very happy Ubuntu user. The thing about Ubuntu was that it just worked. On machines where other Linux distros fell down, or fell apart? Ubuntu worked. It gave me wifi on a Sony Vaio laptop, without blinking; it laughed at curious video cards and proprietary technologies. It just, yeah. Worked.

And then I came to the States, and bought an HP machine much like the one I'd been using for the last couple of years in the UK: nothing fancy, nothing too new. And... um. Nope. Ubuntu couldn't work with that, no way. Didn't like the video card; wouldn't show me anything but a blank screen.

The internet said that this happens, it's a problem in the kernel, here's a work-around. I worked around it, and got a display up. The world's ugliest display, a bog-standard VESA driver. Okay, I could work with that until I downloaded a proprietary driver - but to do that? Got to make the wifi work.

Wifi wouldn't work. Until I downloaded the right driver on the Laptop of Heavenly Perfection (which is running Ubuntu with no trouble, remember) and schlepped it across on a memory stick, to make the wifi work.

Wifi wouldn't work. Oh, the driver was fine - but Ubuntu wouldn't recognise the password. The proper, correct password. It just couldn't catch it. According to the internets, it's a known problem; there were many solutions offered. None of them worked.

I kind of gave up at that point*, until m'friend'n'web-guru durham_rambler drew my attention to these clever devices - I don't know what to call them: I own them, but I still don't know what to call them - which plug into the electric circuit and through ethernet cables to the router and the computer, and thus give you effectively a wired network. And - yeah. At that end, there's a Mac. At this end, there's a Windows/Linux dual boot. No software, no drivers; no problem. It just works.

And once I'd got a working internet connection, I thought I was sorted. Installed the latest Ubuntu, and - aaargh. It wouldn't boot. For some reason, it's not writing to a boot loader; everything's there on the hard disk, but the boot loader doesn't see it.

I went forward, to the alpha release of the next iteration; same problem.

I went backward, to an earlier iteration from two years ago - and yay. It installed side by side with all the others, and wrote a boot loader for them all.

So now I can rewrite the boot loader for the newest version, and make it run; I can download the latest proprietary drivers, and make it pretty; I can set up my preferred office suite and my favourite email client, and I need never use Windows again.

I can wear my Linux geek T-shirt with pride, at last. And as it happens, I am.


*Why yes, I did try half a dozen other distros. Nothing worked. It was my curse; I was accursed.