Canonical - Don't Make Me Think!
So I bought my daughter a cheap little netbook a few months back, and downloaded an image of Ubuntu Netbook Remix (9.04) and copied it to a USB stick (dead simple, just using 'dd' on my Macbook Air to copy the image to the USB stick), plugged it into the Netbook and booted it up.
Wow! It was fantastic, a really great little OS, and amazingly everything seemed to 'just work' including the built in webcam, the wifi, audio etc. Linux has certainly come a long way in out-of-the-box- usability. However after a while noticed a very odd problem with the mouse pointer seeming to stop working. Well the pointer move about, but when you hovered over something it didn't notice and clicking didn't work. You could click on an app to launch it, but then you couldn't click anything in that app. Killing X so that gdm or whatever it is restarted X and logging back in seemed to fix it. A bit annoying.
So I thought with the release of the latest and greatest Ubuntu (9.10) I thought I'd try that. Now, I don't want to upgrade the current installation via the software update tool, as I want to check everything still works. I want to book a USB stick and run it in 'live' mode and just make sure all is OK.
Should be easy right? Go to the main site to get the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix and selected a mirror and downloaded the image. Thinking I knew what I was doing (same as last time right?) I just copied the file to the USB stick using dd and stuck it into the netbook to boot it. No joy. The USB stick was ignored and it booted from hard disk. I double checked the boot options and it seemed all OK with the USB stick listed first. Still no joy.
After a bit of ferreting around online I realised that the file I'd downloaded was an .iso not an .img file. ISOs are images specifically designed for CDs. IMG files are designed to burn to USB stick. It was 15 years since I cut my teeth on BSD Unix and can reboot and rebuilt a server on the other side of the world with nothing more than a serial cable and some chewing gum. Yet I can't tell you the difference between an ISO and an IMG file. Probably something to do with boot sectors.
So I went back to the site above and saw the great big step 2. 'Create your UNR flash drive'. Ahh.. so I should have read the instructions in the first place (I'm a geek, what do you expect?!). Ahh problem. There are instructions for Linux and those for Windows. But nothing for OSX. Bummer. So I followed a link to the detailed manual instructions and they seemed a bit incomplete and contradictory. I wasn't sure if they were applicable to this version of Ubuntu or not as they kept referring to past versions in the notes. The comments all then had about a dozen different other ways to try and skin the same cat.
The basic process seems to be:
- Download the ISO file
- Mount the ISO file
- Format a USB stick to FAT
- Download some other files from online and copy to the stick
- Use 'syslinux' to install a boot record on the stick
- Make the stick partition bootable in fdisk
- Copy over all of the files from the mounted ISO to the USB stick (different comments gave different instructions as to exactly which and where).
- Rename some of the files on the USB stick.
- Unmount USB stick, put in netbook, boot and install.
But could I get it to work?! No. A few times I got the Ubuntu
installer screen at which I could select my language and keyboard
layout, but then after that - Nothing. Just hung. Probably looking for
some files I didn't have.
So... an open question to Canonical and the Ubuntu people in general:
Why the hell do you distribute the image for Ubuntu Netbook Remix as an ISO?! 99.9% of Netbooks don't have CD-ROM drives. 99.9% of people who try to download it to use it will need to create a bootable USB stick using either the programs you point to for Windows or Linux, or manually for other OSes. WHY NOT JUST DISTRIBUTE A .IMG FILE IN THE FIRST PLACE?!
THAT IS WHAT YOU DID WITH THE LAST RELEASE AND IT WORKED GREAT. WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME THINK?!
