Kyle said today: “You would have a great future in QA.”
He has no idea.
We got the new machines for our labs. They got here this morning. One of the people upstairs mentioned to me that there was some guy hanging around outside our labs with a bunch of new computer boxes on a cart. I said something to Terry about it and he got all irritated, saying that he had just talked to the building manager, Len, and Len had said that the shipping people would get back to us. When we got upstairs, Terry says, “What the hell are you doing to me… I just talked to Len, he said you would call.” “I did call,” the guy says. “What… like five minutes ago?” “From Hannah Hall.” (Hannah Hall is the building attached to our building. Meaning less than 5 minutes ago.) Heh.
Short story goes that we have a lab full of crap machines. And by crap I mean… There are 9 of them in our office right now that are completely dead, and we had to move a bunch of them around just so 20 working machines could be in the same room. We need something like 40. Anyway, we got funding from the head of Computer Science, and we ordered 43 new machines. Tah dah. This leaves an extra for me.
So. The machines came prepackaged with Windows. We had talked previously about getting clean machines, but either that wasn’t possible with this company, or they just forgot when placing the order. Either way, Windows. I logged into Windows initially, which, annoyingly, required the initial setup. I got into Windows, poked around a little bit at general information. I verified that the machine came with recovery and driver discs (in case, for whatever reason, we needed it to be Windows), and decided to blast it.
Here’s where it gets fun.
I burned a new Ubuntu 5.04 i386 iso. The installation starts fine. “Configuring network for DHCP” section informs you that “This may take a while.” I had to assume an hour wasn’t what they meant by a while. I tried twice more, and it hung at the same place both times. I couldn’t cancel it with ctrl+c or get to the console with crtl+alt+F2. The network connection itself was fine, or at least in some basic sense, because I had booted the machine into Windows and it worked. So the next step was to boot into Knoppix and see if Linux was seeing the network at all. No network. So I opened a terminal and entered lspci.
lspci: /usr/share/misc/pci.ids: read: Input/output error
This impressed even the Koppix-Fu-Master Kyle. There was some talk about there being some problems with the most recent Knoppix kernel, so Kyle suggested I obtain a copy of 3.6 and try that instead.
In the midst of all of this, I was considering putting in a PCI NIC. The new machines are slim form, and we don’t have appropriate NICs. My solution of course, was to edit the regular card to fit. There happened to be some bolt cutters in the office, and I used those to trim the metal bracket on the end of the card. Perfect fit! I’m good.
In goes the network cable, and in goes Knoppix. Lo and behold… Network connectivity. So, out comes Knoppix and in goes Hoary.
And it hangs. Still no skipping or access to the console.
Okay…
So I decide to try Ubuntu 4.10: Warty Warthog. Warty installed just fine. So I got that setup and prepared to upgrade to Hoary. First, I opened up a terminal window and entered:
sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
I changed every instance of warty to hoary and saved. Then:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
It ran through some things and then said that it hadn’t updated anything. I tried again, same thing. I ran apt-setup and when it gave me errors when trying to verify the sources list. I realised that, once again, I had no network connection. I ran sudo dhclient eth0, sudo mii-tool eth0 and ifconfig, none of which worked.
So, ready to give up, I gave it one last ditch effort, and changed the network cable from the PCI NIC to the onboard NIC.
Network.
….
Ok, whatever. So I ran apt-setup and then ran the upgrade.
Finally.