Or how I tried, failed and eventually gave up installing Ubuntu on my notebook.
An update, yes!
Ever since I installed Ubuntu on Afi’s desktop I had been meaning to do the same on my notebook. Now that my notebook is almost a year old and its warranty about to expire, I thought that it was as good a time as any to finally do it. Windows 8, and now Windows 8.1, is fine but every morning I still get annoyed at looking at Afi already reading and replying her emails on her Ubuntu desktop while I wait for Windows to load.
From the beginning, I knew that installing Ubuntu on my notebook would not be as straightforward as installing it on the desktop previously. The source of the complication is the new, “secure” way Windows 8 handles the way the computer starts. Making things more complicated, it also appears that different notebook manufacturers configure the system differently. I installed the conservative, “long-term support” Ubuntu 12.04 on Afi’s desktop but after some reading around, I decided to install the latest version 13.10 on the notebook. By choosing the latest release I was hoping that any hardware incompatibility issues to have been addressed.
True enough, installation was quite a breeze. I had Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 13.10 on my notebook, YAY! However the next morning, the notebook while running Ubuntu would not connect to the university wireless network. It kept asking for my password again and again. The university IT people tried to help, but eventually simply told me that the network does not support Linux, or at least Ubuntu. I was very disappointed, as the very reason I installed Ubuntu was so that I could get online quicker. Now I couldn’t connect at all!
Turning online for a solution, I finally discovered that there was actually a known problem in the previous version 13.04 of Ubuntu, carried over to the latest version 13.10, when connecting to wireless networks as configured at the university. There are some workarounds suggested but none worked for me. My Ubuntu experiment had turned into a disaster. As a last resort, I even replaced Ubuntu 13.10 with 12.04 on the notebook, but then it failed to load at all.
I finally decided that the whole affair, which from the beginning was totally beyond my admittedly very limited technical comfort zone, was taking too much time I could not spare. So I deleted my Ubuntu partition, fixed the master boot record, and restored my Inspiron 7420 into a full Windows 8.1 machine.
Thus ended my Ubuntu experiment. For now. Perhaps later I will find the time to learn more about the whole thing and try it again, or even try a different Linux distribution.
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Monday, November 04, 2013
More Chicken Pox
It’s official: October was chicken pox month!
Just as Afi was recovering, Omar started to show symptoms. He came home from day care two weeks ago vigorously scratching some spots on his neck. There were more spots on his body too. At the clinic, the locum doctor told us that evening that it was too early to tell if it was chicken pox. By the next day, however, it was unmistakable.
Perhaps due to the prescribed antiviral medication and his earlier vaccination, Omar’s chicken pox was really mild and mostly confined to the area around his neck. He didn’t show any sign of discomfort at all but thoroughly enjoyed his week-long home quarantine. Between his toys (jigsaw puzzles, Duplo bricks and figures) and favourite movie (Finding Nemo), he was fully occupied. Omar being Omar, I actually had to make him take his daily nap. The only drama was when he cried as I applied calamine lotion on his body after every shower. When asked, he said that he didn’t miss his friends but he did say that he missed his grandparents.
As the doctor predicted, the chicken pox was gone after only five days, but we kept Omar home for a whole week just to be safe.
Then, just as Omar recovered, we found spots on Imran’s chest and back. We were hoping that he would be protected from the disease by antibodies in Afi’s breast milk but evidently it wasn’t the case. Unlike Omar, Imran developed spots all over his body. Perhaps due to his lack of vaccination, the chicken pox certainly appeared more severe than Omar’s. The varicella vaccine is only offered to babies above twelve months old. Imran also showed signs of discomfort by being more clingy than usual, demanding more frequent feeds and having interrupted sleeps. It was heartbreaking for both of us, but there simply wasn’t much we could do than giving him his medication on time, applying calamine lotion, and praying for a speedy recovery.
Most of the time, though, Imran remained as active and curious as usual. He seemed most comfortable after his baths, which we gave him a few times a day. He began to feel better after the third day, and the chicken pox disappeared within a week.
So there it was, our three weeks with chicken pox.
Thankfully, I was spared. I had chicken pox before, so long ago I’m not even sure it was during primary or secondary school. We learned that it is actually more dangerous for those who have had chicken pox previously to be exposed again as adults to the varicella virus. The virus from the previous encounter could have remained dormant in sensory ganglia, only to reemerge as the more painful shingles.
The frustrating part in all this is when Afi told the staff at the nursery that Omar was not coming due to chicken pox, they laughed while saying that they had expected it. They saw that Omar was scratching on Friday and didn’t say anything to us when we picked him up. Even when some of his classmates were already absent from chicken pox since Thursday. And when Afi asked around, she found out that children had been going absent from chicken pox for about a month. They should have notified all parents the moment one child contracted the disease!
Get your children vaccinated. Get yourself vaccinated too if you have never had chicken pox before. Chicken pox vaccination is standard in some countries but not in Malaysia so you may have to pay for the vaccination yourself, but it will save you a lot of trouble.
Just as Afi was recovering, Omar started to show symptoms. He came home from day care two weeks ago vigorously scratching some spots on his neck. There were more spots on his body too. At the clinic, the locum doctor told us that evening that it was too early to tell if it was chicken pox. By the next day, however, it was unmistakable.
Perhaps due to the prescribed antiviral medication and his earlier vaccination, Omar’s chicken pox was really mild and mostly confined to the area around his neck. He didn’t show any sign of discomfort at all but thoroughly enjoyed his week-long home quarantine. Between his toys (jigsaw puzzles, Duplo bricks and figures) and favourite movie (Finding Nemo), he was fully occupied. Omar being Omar, I actually had to make him take his daily nap. The only drama was when he cried as I applied calamine lotion on his body after every shower. When asked, he said that he didn’t miss his friends but he did say that he missed his grandparents.
As the doctor predicted, the chicken pox was gone after only five days, but we kept Omar home for a whole week just to be safe.
Then, just as Omar recovered, we found spots on Imran’s chest and back. We were hoping that he would be protected from the disease by antibodies in Afi’s breast milk but evidently it wasn’t the case. Unlike Omar, Imran developed spots all over his body. Perhaps due to his lack of vaccination, the chicken pox certainly appeared more severe than Omar’s. The varicella vaccine is only offered to babies above twelve months old. Imran also showed signs of discomfort by being more clingy than usual, demanding more frequent feeds and having interrupted sleeps. It was heartbreaking for both of us, but there simply wasn’t much we could do than giving him his medication on time, applying calamine lotion, and praying for a speedy recovery.
Most of the time, though, Imran remained as active and curious as usual. He seemed most comfortable after his baths, which we gave him a few times a day. He began to feel better after the third day, and the chicken pox disappeared within a week.
So there it was, our three weeks with chicken pox.
Thankfully, I was spared. I had chicken pox before, so long ago I’m not even sure it was during primary or secondary school. We learned that it is actually more dangerous for those who have had chicken pox previously to be exposed again as adults to the varicella virus. The virus from the previous encounter could have remained dormant in sensory ganglia, only to reemerge as the more painful shingles.
The frustrating part in all this is when Afi told the staff at the nursery that Omar was not coming due to chicken pox, they laughed while saying that they had expected it. They saw that Omar was scratching on Friday and didn’t say anything to us when we picked him up. Even when some of his classmates were already absent from chicken pox since Thursday. And when Afi asked around, she found out that children had been going absent from chicken pox for about a month. They should have notified all parents the moment one child contracted the disease!
Get your children vaccinated. Get yourself vaccinated too if you have never had chicken pox before. Chicken pox vaccination is standard in some countries but not in Malaysia so you may have to pay for the vaccination yourself, but it will save you a lot of trouble.
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