Given that I occasionally use Unix at work, I figured it was about time I set Linux up on my home computer. Ubuntu has one of the best reputations as an easy-to-use distro, so it was my natural choice to try first.
I first tried several months ago on my old system, using Ubuntu 7.04 and the live cd. I was impressed by how it just found everything when booting from the live cd, all device drivers etc, everything just "worked". Until I came to install it.
My old machine had quite a complex hard drive arrangement. Primary drive (C: in windows) was SATA1. Other drives in the system included an identical drive in the SATA2 port, and a pair of IDE drives. I was installing Ubuntu to the slave IDE drive, which was an old and hard used drive, so I wanted to keep my newer SATA drive as my primary boot device. And could I find out where to put the bootloader? No. Was anyone at the Ubuntu forum any help? No. In fact, the appointed newbie-helping person that replied to my thread was so spectacularly unhelpful that I had to restrain myself from getting sarcastic in response to one-line unhelpful posts that sounded like I was expected to know everything. So I gave up. Nobody could tell me what drive to install the bootloader to, or how to figure out which sata drive gets assigned to what under Linux, and so on. So I mentally told them to foxtrot oscar and decided to leave it until Ubuntu can guide the user through an installation.
Fast forward to now, and I thought I'd give it a go on my new system (see system spec drop down on the left). Now I'm using Ubuntu 7.10, and figured that with a simplified hard drive arrangement (all on sata) it would be much better.
Oh dear. It went from bad to worse. Now Ubuntu doesn't even boot without prompting me about its' safe graphical mode. What, a GeForce 5900 can natively run Ubuntu, but an 8800GT can't? But I guess that's nothing compared to the way it then just hangs. I read up about removing the quiet and splash boot options, and now I can see what's going on. It hangs everytime when running local boot scripts, after acknowledging the safe graphics mode. Well, that's some superb coding right there. Doesn't matter what graphical options I set or don't set, it hangs. So I boot into safe graphical mode from the splash menu and manage to get the Ubuntu desktop.
Great! Let's install then! Not so great. I'm installing Ubuntu to some spare space on my third sata drive - (sdc) as far as Ubuntu is concerned. My main Windows drive (Cis sda1 on device sda. This is the drive I boot from, and want to continue booting from, so I tell the bootloader to install on sda instead of sdc. And after patiently waiting for all the linux files to be copied across, it decides to inform me of a fatal error that the bootloader cannot install on sda. That's it. No troubleshooting, no support, no explanation. Just back to the live cd desktop. How useful.
That was last week, and I've just tried again tonight, this time with the 64-bit version. Exactly the same thing happened. Won't boot without using safe mode, and won't install the bootloader.
Is it just me? Is there something blindingly obvious that I'm doing wrong, or is Ubuntu really this s***? Even bloody Windows Me could install better than this. I thought Ubuntu was supposed to be simple. I'm not even a complete newbie - as I mentioned I use (but not configure) unix at work from time to time, so I understand the file structures and mount points and suchlike. I've seen the power of Linux and want it running on my home system, but not at the expense of going bald with the frustration and hair-pulling that installing it seems to entail.
Sorry for the rant, is there anything I can try to get this thing to work?


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is sda1 on device sda. This is the drive I boot from, and want to continue booting from, so I tell the bootloader to install on sda instead of sdc. And after patiently waiting for all the linux files to be copied across, it decides to inform me of a fatal error that the bootloader cannot install on sda. That's it. No troubleshooting, no support, no explanation. Just back to the live cd desktop. How useful.
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Yep, I'd sure like to see the raw grub fail messages - it might not mean much but it's a helluva lot more useful than a meaningless message. And more to the point, why is grub failing to install? Is it really that hard to stick it on the boot drive rather than the Ubuntu installation drive? I'd have thought that a lot of people trying out Ubuntu/Linux would install it on a secondary drive and want to keep their original drive as boot/master/Windows/whatever you want to call it. Appreciate the info about the graphics card drivers - that explains the inability to boot straight to desktop with the 8800gt.
But I'll sit down when I have the time and learn about the X Windows system and how to fix things. It's quite a learning curve, but at least it's a curve rather than a cliff now that I have a Linux installation up and running that I can muck about with to my heart's content. 

