Ubuntu Take 2.

The Ubuntu installation I was spoke about in a recent post was actually on a friend's computer. He wanted me to install linux for him and I thought I would experiment at his expense :) The experiment was short lived. Ubuntu was uninstalled and trusty old Fedora Core was installed over it.

Not many people have nice things to say about Fedora. I am not too fond of some of it's oddities either. CD burning for example drives me up the wall. All said and done though; Fedora is still my favorite distro..

Ubuntu on the other hand deserves a second chance. Now it's being installed as a guest OS under Qemu. The first attempt didn't meet with much success, the live CD got stuck half way through the boot process. That's probably because it wasn't given enough memory. With memory set to 256Mb, the CD did boot and the installer did start up. Perhaps I should have used the alternative installer that doesn't need the OS to boot up.

Since the installation is on a disk image rather than on the disk itself, I chose automatic partitioning. Unlike Fedora, the Ubuntu installer doesn't give you much of a chance to pick and choose what to install and it's really slow.

I kept a close eye on the installer to see if it would ask me for the root password. It does not. I find it astonishing. Spare me the baloney about how I should never login as root. I know all that, but If I want to login as root, I want to login as root, no one has the right to take away that right.

On this absurd system you have to do everything with with sudo and you can do everything without having to enter a password for root. Well sometimes it does ask you for a password and then you have to enter your own password!!

Network was set up with TUN/TAP, but even before that was completed there was a system alert telling me that updated packages are available? how did it do that? surely not with DHCP even though my router supports DHCP, I don't think Qemu guests can lease an IP from it.