I'd like to introduce myself and ask newbie questions

[Joseph Areeda]

Greetings all,

I am retired from a career in software development and medical
research.  I've been using Unix since 1983 (at least that's the first
comment in my .cshrc file) and Ubuntu for about a year.  I like Ubuntu
and would like to give back a little by participating in QA and perhaps
a bit of coding.

I've been reading Wiki's and this mailing list, signed up for the mentor
thing, but that seems slow moving, so let's try this list.  I need some
help or focus to get started.

I've read that testing on a virtual machine is not as good as a hardware
install, but it seems to a good place to start with an alpha release,
especially one like Natty which has extensive UI changes.
I thought I'd start with VirtualBox and load my favorite packages and
get the feel of it before I loaded it onto hardware but I can't seem to
get it to load.  I'm running 10.04 LTS (Linux jsa 2.6.32-29-generic
#58-Ubuntu SMP Fri Feb 11 20:52:10 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux) on a
laptop (I5 4Gb) and a desktop (AMD Phenom X6 16GB).  I downloaded the
latest Vbox from Oracle (4.04).  I use zsync to update a few times over
the last week, they all behave the same.

The install iso boots but never makes it past the first screen
"Preparing to Install Ubuntu", attached is the VM log, if anyone can see
what I'm missing I'd appreciate it.

I can run Meerkat (Linux meerkat 2.6.35-27-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Tue
Feb 22 20:25:29 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux) in a VM with the same
settings.  I've tried a bunch of different ones and both 32 and 64 bit
versions.

Booting from a USB stick on a real machine (Phenom II x6) was worse. 
Problem mounting Sr0 after I tried to install.

CD worked a bit better, it at least gave me an error message:
"ubi-partman failed with exit code 141.  Further information may be
found in /var/log/syslog.  Do you want to try running this step again
before continuing..." I could try it with the live CD on this system.  I
may

Being a tenacious SOB, I tried vbox again.  This time instead of install
I did try Ubuntu.  Everything seemed to work, internet, a few programs. 
So I ran gparted and formatted the virtual disk, then checked it then
installed from the desktop icon.  This time it went through and installed.

So I guess I'll just play in vbox for a while and see what happens but
I'd appreciate any advice how to proceed more effectively.

Joe

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