A New Install (6.10)!

I decided while I'm working on stuff over Spring Break that I'll try installing Ubuntu again. Right now it's up to version 6.10, although 7.4 is supposed to come out next month. Nowadays, the Ubuntu download is a LiveCD, meaning you put it in your CD drive and restart your computer and it boots up off the Cd. This also lets you know how well you're hardware is supported before you install.

Well, since I've got a new laptop, and so does Kelly for her new job, I now have an old unused laptop. It's a Gateway Solo 1450, Pentium III, with about 512 MB RAM. Booting up with the LiveCD, all the laptop hardware appeared to be supported except for my PCMCIA wireless card. The LCD displays at near full resolution (1024x768) and sound even works. But the wireless card will take a bit of work. A quick search of the web indicates that linux drivers don't exist, and proprietary drivers must be used. I'll talk about this in a future post.

Once I was satisfied that Ubuntu would play well with my laptop hardware, I clicked on the install icon on the desktop (making sure it was connected to my home wired network). At this point I haven't had to use the terminal or enter text commands at all. Every major software program or control setting are available on the desktop menus. This seems alot more user friendly than in the past. The first few screens of the installer asked for all the pertinent information (language, keyboard setup, time zone, etc.). There was a small hiccup at first when the time zone screen popped up. I selected Arizona time, but the time shown was 3:59 rather than 12:59. So I clicked the "set time" button and changed it. But this caused the installer to freeze. Since I'm a newbie, I don't know how to kill frozen programs in linux yet, so I just logged out of Ubuntu and logged back in. Running the installer again, the correct time was automatically adjusted. I think I just needed for the CD to run. A LiveCD session runs pretty slowly sometimes. Anyways, once that was out of the way the rest of the install went fine.

Once finished, I needed to restart the laptop. I took out the CD and booted from the hard drive. After a few minutes the Ubuntu login screen popped up and I signed in with my new username and password. ... "Incorrect username or password. Use the correct case." ... It appears I have locked myself out of my own computer. I'm pretty sure I know the correct username and password, but they just wont work. Luckily, there's a workaround, using the LiveCD. Once booted from the CD, I had to mount my hard drive. Some of the following commands require a "sudo" in front. First make a directory for it.

cd /mnt
mkdir /mnt/hda1

Then I can load up the hard drive (hda1)

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1

Then set that new directory as your home directory

chroot /mnt/hda1

Within the new directory, check the list of users (they each have home directories)

cd /mnt/hda1/home
ls

Since I have only one user, this just listed "bdegreg". So I knew my username was in there, but what about my password? Searching online, I discovered that a passwords file exists.

cd /mnt/hda1/etc
gedit passwd

This opened the password file. My entry was at the bottom:

bdegreg:x:1000:1000:Brad De Gregorio,,,:/home/bdegreg:/bin/bash

Unfortunately, the "x" after my names means the password is hidden. But I can always change it.

passwd bdegreg

This prompted me for a new password, and I chose a very simple one for now. After that, I was able to log in as myself for the very first time.