Episode: 155
Title: HPR0155: Installing Xubuntu
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0155/hpr0155.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 12:30:03

---

This is made by
Hi, welcome to this episode of HackPublic Radio. I'm Zook and I'm going to be talking about
installing Zubuntu. I'm going to try and do several of these. What I intend to do is to
get MiniZook to try installing both Windows and Zubuntu and actually compare and contrast
and see what he thinks which ones easier to use. He's nine, he's got very little computer
experience at all. In fact, he uses Macs at school. That's about it. So I think that
has been an interesting thing to see because I'm a little biased here, I think Linux is
way easier to install than Windows. But we'll see and see what he thinks and hopefully
get a fairly unbiased opinion. Now, I should first point out apologies if you can hear
a cat me out in the background. Our cat's in heat and she's just meowing non-stop, absolutely
non-stop. I have shutter out of the room but she's loud. Anyway, I've been having some
pulse audio problems as I have mentioned before due top grading from Breeze and so on.
So I decided I was going to reinstall Zubuntu. Now, my DVD writer had died so I was having
some issues just backing up so I can back up everything like I wanted to. So what I did
is I decided to install Zubuntu over my Windows partition. I mean, I didn't play many
games anyway and that's the only thing I did in Windows. Okay, except for that last
hacker public radio episode here, I know but that's because I couldn't record it because
of the pulse audio problems. So I downloaded the low CD and it was a little odd. It paused
in the middle and I had to sort of pause and restart the download but, you know, I
know, I should have been using a torrent so I'm really sorry Mark shot to work. I owe
some bandwidth. I had to copy the ISO via the thumb drive to the wife's PC to burn the
ISO though because of the whole CD issues. The boot of the CD and installed whilst running
Zubuntu on the live CD. Selected manual installation, of course. Overroading the Windows partition
during a separate home directory which I didn't do before but should have. I left the
time current install alone so I can copy over the other files. The Zubuntu low CD even
recognised the existing install and offered to copy some settings over although I didn't
as I was going to do that manually and ignore the files problems I no longer run. I've
mentioned before I've installed and uninstalled so many things. There are a bunch of extra files
around I just don't need anymore so I decided it would be easier just to copy over what
I needed. I let it install and I wasn't asked a single other question. Unlike Windows
which has a billion questions every time you install. At least it did last time I installed
which is a while ago. At the end of it Zubuntu asked if I wanted to reboot and finish the
low session I was running. It ejected the CD and told me to remove the CD and hit enter
to reboot. I didn't remove the CD because it's a laptop and the CD tray doesn't automatically
go in you have to push it in and I figured I could do that whilst Zubuntu is booting
anyway I'm not as well multitask but it sat there and didn't do anything and I did try
a couple of times and got a little worried that I managed to crash it. But then I figured
it might be triggering on actually closing the CD tray so I did actually remove the CD
and push the tray back in and hit enter and it worked. That does make sense at the desktop
you've got to force the people not to boot from the CD not quite sure you can necessarily
confirm that yes this is a laptop and the CD tray will not retract back in and therefore
we don't need to check with the CD so I'm not so worried about that I understand why
they did that. It reboots in the grub menu popped up and it even had my old install there
which is a very nice touch. I mean windows with your install that it just wipes everything
out any other old version of windows anything it's just gone when you're installed. So I boot
up and I get to see the XDM for the first time my old Ubuntu install was although was
running except CE still had the GDM and in fact at one point I have both GDM and KDM
running that's another story and thanks Dave Yates for fixing that I have me fix that.
I login and of course the internet wasn't working I had expected that because I've disabled
DHCP on my router or router if you will and I'm running assigned IP addresses. I load
Firefox upload YouTube, try to install Flash I get asked if I want to enable the multiverse
and get password and of course hey I call it passworded I don't know what the official
phrase for that is when it pops up and asks you for your password if you get ID or
card it it's always just dud on the end so card it ID passworded seems to make sense
for me. So I got passworded on there as expected. I was asked if I hate freedom when I replied
yes please install Flash and it downloads and YouTube working great sound everything
really ran up get update and app to get upgrade and it does a few things open SSH I think
was being the main one. I went to check the Nvidia driver see what was going on there and
software driver lists it which was one of the problems I had before it kind of sometimes
was kind of wasn't because of the whole upgrading thing. Click on it install it needs
to restart of course app gets finished that needs to reboot so I do that but not before
enabling the Broadcom wireless card yeah it's long story it's yeah laptop didn't realize
how much finishing Broadcom drivers would be and I don't use wireless that much anyway even
if I did have access to it because I most of the time you know they have crap security
on it and I don't have a server at home to be able to SSH through or anything so I generally
don't use wireless. Anyway reboot look back in more updates for available kernel updates
it looks like so fair enough I installed my favorite apps as well as mentioned in the
previous HPR episode I downloaded Flok which by the way can someone in the Ubuntu team
actually put that in the repost please that'd be really cool thank you. I want to copy
my Flok settings over and I don't actually have the other partition mounted which was not
a huge deal quick Google search and quick talk to a few people and I see fix that Etsy
F-stab used the partition ID now instead of whatever it was before which I can't remember
because it's one of those things you set it up when you sort the PC out and then you
forget the whole damn thing but I found the UUID by doing a mount and comparing it to
the dev slash disk slash by UID to see what was missing from F-stab probably a simpler
way of doing that that's the way I did it out of that to F-stab and do a mount dash
A to install everything automatically there we go and then set up a link to slash media
slash old which bounces to the other one that's the mount point so I now know what's going
on. The time is set wrong although I think I know why I had the time set correctly originally
and it took the time because it says I'm eight hours behind the UK that's when the
batter is it took eight hours off what my computer clock said but the computer clock was set
to the right time so I'm now 16 hours behind the UK because it's eight of the eight amp so
that makes sense kind of change it with the terminal and suddenly remember I can actually set
it up automatically again it's one of these things you say click on internet time and I couldn't
remember how to do that off-hand side and that's why to do this but I fixed that later
all my programs are now installed so I decided to reboot for the kernel updates reboot
log back in copy Thunderbird and my iMap files over and it fails because I did the recent login
with my actual name and I decided to change the login to ZOKE for no real reason at all really
so the old files that are trying to connect to the iMap server under a non-existent username
no big deal change that for ZOKE and it works brilliantly I now have a working iMap server running
straight away by copying the files over windows would never do anything like this because the whole
horrible registry stuff and I really don't want to get it started on the registry of the registry
was horrible idea horrible horrible horrible horrible and where used to work you know we were a
window shop but we never used the registry we used any files because you can slap the any file
on server and then if you need to change it you can just log in and change it yourself you don't
need to log into the 5000 machines old however many it were at work and change the registry
in every single one you just change well it's not quite one file because it's multiple service
but you can get one file pushed out onto all the service and there you go
anyway I dug around the menu and found the time date setting application settings time and date
after unlock it of course changed the configuration to internet time with us passwords and installs
ntp must point out an error here now it does not update the screen so the time date still says manual
but if you close and reopen it it does actually see internet time service
minor thing but there we go I changed the language to support to British English
yet it got it wrong I've got a us laptop I'm in the us it's us keyboard but I want British English
proper English on it don't get me started in British English because you know the world
speak Welsh well actually most of them speak English now but they have Welsh as well as national
languages not just British English because yeah and there's also Gaelic and we won't go into that
so change it to a proper English there we go I mean it's a bunch of it have to be psychic to
realise this so I'm not bashing anything for that and then I set up a few themes like the window
manager theme to be small screen because I don't like title wise take up half the speaking screen
all it is is a couple of little buttons and the name of what I'm running which I can normally tell
by what it looks like anyway so I really don't care about having task bars that big at all you
know five pixels wide probably great as long as I know where to click but that's basically I've
got pretty much everything back up and running really simply and if I've got any issues for
anything I can just reboot into my old partition so I think it's fantastic I really enjoy this
I'm sure a lot of other districts are very similar for the whole update because
yeah they're all based on a very similar thing so but this is really cool this is why I love
Linux you know I mean if you reinstall windows you have to sit there for weeks afterwards trying to
copy stuff out dig out the original CDs of everything I didn't need to do that at all I copied
it from one partition to the other and download everything off the internet don't have to dig out
a single disk I don't have to type in any smacking 74 digit random hex serial numbers for anything
it just install copy stuff over and there we go it's a line map server running instantly
don't need to worry about any of it well that's it hope you enjoyed me going on about subuntu
and how much fun I'm having with it thank you very much for listening I've been zoke and you've
been listening to Hacker Public Radio thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio
HPR is sponsored by caro.net so head on over to CAR0.18 for all of us to meet