This is the sad tale of my Ubuntu installation adventure. I’ll start at the beginning, which is What I want to do. What I want to do is to run Google Chrome. The browser. That’s all. You may be wondering why I don’t just use the Windows XP64 tower that’s sitting next to this tower. Or, you might suggest I use the Windows 7 machine, that already has Chrome loaded on it, and is sitting right behind me.
The Windows XP64 machine must be shut down by clicking the special don’t install any updates link. Updates cause bad things to happen to that machine, so I think it’s better not to use it, because one of these days, I’m going to click the wrong button. The Windows 7 machine is used by my daughter and she isn’t especially happy to share it. Also, the mouse is on the wrong side. And I don’t like the mouse.
There’s also a web-based service I can use to run Chrome, but it’s kind of slow and it’s harder to read the screens. If you configure it in the wrong order, as I do, it’s a bit of a bother to work with.
While these may seem like superficial reasons, they are all I have and I’m sticking with them.
At my feet was a mini tower that hadn’t been turned on in months. It seemed like I could just put Ubuntu on the mini tower and then I could run Chrome. Plus Ubuntu has a nice GUI. I installed Ubuntu on my Mom’s laptop, and set it up for dialup with very little difficulty. This is primarily because it was a few years ago and I’ve forgotten all but the the fact that installing Ubuntu itself was easy.
Therefore, I decided to install Ubuntu on the mini tower, assuming it would not take much effort.
The following list is a collection of the keywords associated with my Ubuntu installation adventure. I’m listing them without any context because they are just like oats in a bowl. A soup of words that have little meaning other than frustration. I poured them into Google, which ladled out additional vegetables and broth, some of which splashed on the carpet.
- serial8250: too much work for irq11
- noapic pci=routeirq
- Can’t boot from USB
- SYSLINUX 3.11
- Unetbootin
- Universal USB Installer
- mount network file system
- edd=on
- modem
- AT keyboard
After stirring all these terms, feeding them into Google, serving them on the command line, using the Windows 7 machine to prepare a series of USB recipes which were then offered to the mini tower, the answer was clear.
Ubuntu will not run on that computer
I don’t give up easily, but I also don’t enjoy struggling in a sea of confusion. My goal wasn’t to become an Ubuntu expert. I didn’t want to learn all the nuances of the mini tower. All I wanted was Chrome.
Finally, after stewing for about 8 to 16 hours (accuracy isn’t really important here), it dawned on me that I was wasting my time. So I tried a different version of Ubuntu which also didn’t work, but didn’t work differently. I tried a few different flavors of Linux, including openSUSE (didn’t work), Mint (didn’t work), and … I’ve forgotten the rest. It was just bad. Bad, bad, bad.
I noticed that Fedora was offered in the utilities that so kindly created the USB sticks, so I picked it. This was a thoughtful choice, since Fedora is explicitly listed on Google’s Chrome page.
It worked RIGHT AWAY
The desktop has great fireworks, and it worked. Chrome installed without issue and runs fine.
I also wanted to use Firefox 17. That worked, too. And Opera 12.11. No problem there either.
Life is good.
If you’re having trouble installing Ubuntu (or any other version of Linux) and you don’t really have to use it, pick something different and try that. There’s no sense struggling to make something work when there are many great Linux distributions and versions available.
This computer is CentOS. I’ve been working to build Chromium, but after I can’t remember how many steps, I forgot where I was. I have many MB of files here, probably enough to finish the build and install, but I don’t have the foggiest idea where I left off.