Install report (Fujitsu Lifebook S6210)

[Mary Gardiner]

There seem to be a number of models around with this name. This
particular one has a Centrino 1.6GHz CPU, a DVD/CD+RW drive, a memory
stick reader, and a 13"-odd screen with the normal aspect ratio (I'm
told if you don't have the normal aspect ratio, true evilness is
required to get X to work at the correct resolution).

I'll lead with failures:

 1. This laptop has a memory stick slot, but nothing shows up in
 /var/log/messages or in Nautilus when I insert a known good memory stick.

 2. The desktop icons and icons in Nautilus are all blank pieces of paper,
 which I take it means "no icon for this".

 3. No shocks here but: the wireless card (Centrino, 0000:01:0d.0 Network
 controller: Intel Corp. Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG (rev 05)) doesn't work.
 Looking forward to trying the new test kernels in a minute...
 
Firstly, (on Andrew Bennetts's advice, I'm not afraid to shift blame) I
tried the daily CD from http://wiki.no-name-yet.com/Archive rather than
the current testing CD (7). I think this was the 20040831 CD? We
downloaded it at about 9am 20040901 New York time :)

Andrew was eyeing this install all the way through, so it isn't a true
Ubuntu virgin install. I've installed Debian on a couple of machines,
dating back to potato, so I probably could have made it through though,
even if this daily won't install completely (see below).

No problems launching the installer, except for figuring out how to get
this machine to boot from CD (special boot menu on F12, which is a nice
idea). The zebra stripes at the beginning of the installer are kind of
funky.

I don't have DHCP at the moment, so unlike in every other report, I did
get to choose a name for the computer ("sourdust") when I manually
configured the IP address.

Again, unlike everyone else, I decided not to let Ubuntu have my entire
hard drive. The laptop came with XP Professional, which the salesperson
was very excited about. I don't want to use Windows, but I decided to
leave the 2GB recovery partition at the end of the drive in place in
case I ever change my mind.

The new partition interface is nicer than fdisk by a long way without
scarificing power I need, although I sort of struggled to see the
"delete this partition" option. I recall it wasn't entirely obvious how
to set a swap partition either, but at any time you're only one menu
option away and an exhaustive search is feasible. Most people who get
to this step are probably partitioning veterans anyway.

Base system installed OK, reboot time. It ejects the CD for me, but I
was literally installing this with the laptop on my lap and the open
drive was jabbing me so I didn't wait to get the "no CD in drive" error,
I put it straight back in as soon as the system booted (no trouble with
booting either).

A few more questions about timezone and such. Then apt is running,
installing some things.

I see laptop-something and mdsomething are installing and then I get a
failure message saying that some packages could not be installed and
telling me to retry or exit with a potentially unstable system. There's
no way to find out which packages it means. The box tells me I could "go
back" to the select and install packages step.

Other people have noted that asking people to "go back" to a step they
never went through is odd. The striking thing in my case is the name of
the step I was asked to go back to. It is the *system*, not I, which
selects and installs packages. I am taken back to the install menu,
which is sitting on the "select and install" step. If I select this, I'm
*still* not asked to select any packages, it just immediately retries
installing (and fails). So it's a bit odd using the word "select" in
this context, since there doesn't seem to be any way to do an actual
selection. The selection is hidden and is only exposed by this one word.

Anyway, obviously releases won't have this failure so this is an
exceptional install path.

elmo told Andrew on IRC that a couple of the evolution packages were
failing in this daily and that I should exit and use aptitude to install
the ubuntu-desktop task.

I configured postfix first, a few dialog boxes there that might confuse
people I guess ("smarthost"?).

Then I exiting and was dumped at the console. Forgot for a second that
"root" is disabled, eventually login as "mary" and run aptitude. I'm an
aptitude veteran, but I've never used the tasks, and it seems weird that
you can't search for "ubuntu-desktop" (strictly, you can search, it just
doesn't find anything). Down down down to tasks, select ubuntu-desktop,
install it.

dpkg takes a while to do this, and the screen goes blank during the
process. Of course, I'm outside the installer now, so I don't know if
this would have happened without the failure. I pressed Space (Space is
my Any Key) to bring it back to life, Andrew points out that that's
dangerous if dpkg is asking a question (although at least you'd get the
default answer).

YAY X installers don't ask me any questions. I've never been much good
at sync-rates, or even resolutions.

Eventually the installs finish, I think without asking me anything at
all. I don't know what the installer would do now, so I just reboot, it
seems like the easiest way to get everything to start up since gdm
didn't start after it was installed.

After reboot, lots of startup gumf, nothing of interest, finally...
screen goes black. *hold breath*

YAY gdm starts at seemingly sane resolution. I've been using GNOME 2.6 for a
while and there's only two comments so far: while epiphany is gone from the
menu, it seems like it is still the GNOME default browser set in "Preferred
Applications"; and sudo asks me for my password every single time I use it on
the command line. I can kind of appreciate why this might be good (far more
consistent than being asked 'randomly' -- ie after 15 minutes) but I'm not used
to it. There's always "sudo -s" though.

-Mary