Kids’ Doc in Jos

My life this week was dominated more than usual by computer issues. On Monday I went to the SIM office to pick up Barb and was surprised to discover that the three used GoBook laptop computers I had ordered exactly a year ago had arrived. They’d been shipped from the US in November, but in some shipping boxes that were somehow lost and not rediscovered for a few months. I’d been anxious to try them out because they were fairly inexpensive, being several years old, but of very durable construction (drop them, stand on them, spray them with water) which should be suited for work here. Unless you’re computer minded, the summary of the rest of this blog is that I spent a lot of hours getting them working (installing Windows & Linux), partly because I just couldn’t give up on getting Linux installed. That it, the rest is just technical detail (David, you can read the rest!)

Next week (which the clock says has already started), I need to get back to the reality, starting with reading and commenting on the research project proposal of one of our residents.

I started working on them Monday night and have now clocked 35 hours, some of which was well spent, a lot of trial and error, and the last three days a really frustrating mess of trying to install Ubuntu Linux. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that the computers came with blank hard drives, no CD-ROM drives, no installation software like drivers, a BIOS that can only boot from a floppy or hard drive, and no obvious way to get to the hard drives.

I went through my dwindling supply of aging floppy disks and found only a single one (later, one other) that could be formatted without errors. I’ll spare you the other details, but the bottom line is that once I discovered USB flash drive and CD-ROM drives for DOS, and made a boot disk with that precious floppy, it didn’t take long to install the Windows 98 files, run setup.exe, and have Win98 up and running. [Why Win98, you ask? Because the computers came with Win98 COA license stickers.] I probably should have stopped there, but I didn’t. Instead I went on to try to install Linux.

Ah, that was another story entirely. Now, a couple weeks earlier I had been amazed when I saw how Ubuntu installed itself so easily from a CD. If there is a way to install it reliably and easily without a (bootable) CD drive, I have yet to find it. I found quite a few explanations but most didn’t quite work.

First, I went for a network install. This meant identifying the network card type and address, making a boot disk at ROM-o-matic.net. Then install and configure DHCP and TFTP servers on Luke’s desktop running Ubuntu. A whole bunch of instructions that meant nothing much to me. A bunch of hours later, I was startled to see the boot screen appear on the laptop–it worked! Yes, but it would only install Ubuntu from the network, not from the hard drive of either computer. And with our Internet connection, that would be quite difficult.

OK, I started working on approaches to install from the hard drive. The suggestions for that involve installing boot loaders and coaxing them to run the initial installation from hard drive. Another bunch of hours later and I was surprised to see that working. Ah, problem solved? No, the installer refused to install from anywhere other than the CD-ROM and, unfortunately, I could not convince it that the CD-ROM was the right one. Maybe there’s a way to trick the program into seeing the CD-ROM image as an actual drive, but I didn’t find it.

Ultimately, I gave up and went back to the network install. It actually worked and started downloading files from the Internet. Amazingly, among the first files were ones that will scan local hard drives and CD-ROMs looking for installation images! So after downloading those, the rest of the install didn’t actually require much downloading. It still took over an hour to install.

So two hours ago I finally got Ubuntu (actually, Xubuntu) up and running on one of the three laptops. It works fine, but the font looks splotchy (even with aliasing etc.) so probably the driver is not quite the right one, and I don’t see an easy “install a new display driver” button. Oh well.

========> Bottom line

It will be nice to have Linux on these machines, maybe, as they’ll be easier to work with on the network and will be more resistant to the usual tampering by users (installing programs and viruses, etc). Still, their main use will be web browsing (our patient database is web-based), and Firefox works just fine on Win98 (with better font display than I have at the moment on Xubuntu). For all the time it’s taken, I sure hope that the added “durability” and security of Linux will be worth the trouble. Now, why can’t someone make a simple “setup.exe” for Ubuntu?

(Actually, there is an automated installation program, instlux, that seems very simple and may work great, except that it didn’t work on my laptop with Win98, and would probably have still run into the problem of the installer not liking my CD-ROM. But if you have to install SUSE or Ubuntu without using a CD-ROM or network, it looks as if instlux is what you should try first. See Ubuntu Installation from Windows.)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 12:56 am and is filed under Computer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.