Having recently upgraded my pc (the only original parts left are the case, case fan, one hard drive and the DVD player/writer) Uncle Bill has decided that I am stealing the food out of the mouths of his and Melinda's children to the tune of a OEM copy of XP Home Basic. Having spotted my crime of having put new bits in a 6 year old PC Uncle Bill killed my computer.
No problem I thought, I'll install some flavour of Linux to get me up and running.
A few minutes of wibbling around on the laptop and I've got a bootable usb with the latest distro of Ubuntu (it's the Narwhal release - I had to go for it really) and we're set. Stick it in the PC, change BIOS settings so the PC will boot off the USB and away we go.
Everything looks promising, it looks like we're getting somewhere until.... weird black and white patterns all over the screen. OK thinks I, maybe this is something to do with the graphics card not being supported. 5 minutes later, graphics card out and the monitor plumbed in to the motherboard we try again.
All looks promising, the live disk is up and running and after a few attempts we seem to have installed Natty Narwhal on the virgin, new SATA drive. Reboot to load up from the hard drive and all seems to go fine until the monitor goes blank and tells me "Mode not supported". A google suggest that there is an option for booting to a safe mode so I can fix the problem but so far none of these suggestions has got me into a safe mode.
No worries thinks I - Ubuntu isn't the only game in town so I get my trusty USB stick and load it up with the shiniest version of Fedora instead. Feeling optimistic the graphics card goes back in and off we go. So far so good.
No problems this time, the live USB fires up straight off and we're feeling optimistic. I click on the handy install icon, click through a few screens until the bit where we decide where to install Fedora. We're scanning drives and we wait......and we wait......and we wait......make a cup of tea.....wait. Ok lets restart - exactly the same until we get to the same point - same again. Next time round we choose the option for installing in weird non-standard set-ups, just in case.
This looks promising, Fedora picks up on all the drives, identifies all the partitions on the old drive, surely it doesn't need to scan anything - it's seen it all already. Choose to install on the new drive (overwriting the Ubuntu install) - here we go. And we watch the little round time passing icon, and we wait, and wait, and wait.
So no joy there either. I won't let it beat me, there's plenty of distros left and I've got a whole weekend ahead to swear at the computer so I will get it working. But lets be honest this isn't a slick user experience.
I'm not a "computer" person but for a decade or so I've been the one keeping the computers working at the small business I work for so I understand at least some of the basics. I've moved on from Windows 98 & Me to a mix of XP, Vista and Server 2003, at home I've got various flavours of XP and VISTA so I'm familiar with the evils of Microsoft but no problem they have put in my way has been this irratating.
This isn't meant to be doing down Linux - I can see its inherent good and I will be sticking with it (unless I can persuade my BiL to fix me up with a free copy of Windows 7, which I'm pretty confident will install without fuss). It's more of a plea of understanding from those who don't seem to understand why people may have complaints about the Linux experience.