After dual-booting Windows and Ubuntu a couple of weeks ago and getting a successful install running well, I decided to install Wine and see what performance of Windows programs was like under linux. Surely enough, the install runs great and I manage to install Steam and download a couple of games and begin playing. I then decide I wish to go back into Windows and finish up a couple of things only to find that my Windows install is non-bootable. What it turns out has happened is Wine has installed itself onto C:\ (when I specifically told it H:\) and nuked my whole Windows install. So naturally, I’ve lost all my data that was on my Windows NTFS partition. Being my lazy self, I decided to stick with Ubuntu and save myself the hassle of reinstalling Windows and all the software and drivers. I got all my hardware working under Ubuntu (printers, keyboard/mouse, webcam, microphone etc.) which was great.
So all was going smoothly until I wanted to resize a couple of partitions as I had no intention of keeping the Ubuntu partition (and Ubuntu along with it, of course) installed, so I only gave it 15gig of space or so. I opened up gparted (Gnome Partition Editor) and selected the partitions to be resized and set them to resize, all went to plan. I then reboot into Ubuntu, only to find GRUB (the boot loader) is spitting errors at me like it’s just eaten something rather vile. I decide to see if I can fix the error to no avail, so I decided to do a clean install of Ubuntu. So once more, I open up gparted, erase my partitions and boot into the Ubuntu Live CD which also acts as an installer. The install goes well with a few slight hiccups. I reconfigure all my hardware, my internet connection etc and decide to install my graphics drivers for my nVidia card using software called envy. I downloaded the .deb package and GDebi tells me I need to install missing dependencies (one being build-essential). Now everybody knows that one things leads to another, and it’s no different in this situation. I downloaded the debian package for build-essential and it has a dependency, libc6. libc6 needs libc6-devel. libc6-devel needs glibc. At this point I’m asking myself ‘Why the hell must everything be coded in C and require all these damn packages which should come standard with Ubuntu anyway?’. I went ahead with the install of libc6, until the install dies and spits me some error saying it needs another dependency, glibc. Glibc was available from gnu.org and needed to be compiled. So I download the gz archive (~16mb) and extract, change directory into the directory I extracted it in and tried to run ./configure. It tells me that the configuration must be done outside of the base directory. I had no idea as to which files to copy into a new directory to compile the damn thing, so I was stuck with a whole lotta broken dependencies and things nagging me to install updates. I then try to rectify the situation by using apt-get, but I need libc6 to use apt-get. I then try to change directory, I need libc6 to use the ‘cd’ command. It turns out libc6 is required for almost every damn command! And ironically, it turns out that GDebi wouldn’t install libc6 because it was already installed. So why is it giving me errors if it’s already installed? I didn’t want to try to fix it or find out, so once more, format and clean install.
So, 2 fresh installs of Ubuntu later, here I am writing this post after configuring everything yet again. Why bother? you may ask. The simple answer is: Screw going back to Windows and installing everything. Ubuntu certainly kicks Windows’ ass in installation times and everything else for that matter even if it does require more configuration depending on your setup.
Long Live Linux!
Au revoir.
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