My Ubuntu Experiment

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.