Today during the day, the first experiment with the African Linux was conducted. It served as a vivid illustration of the fact that you cannot install operating systems without beer :) Problem statement: install Kubuntu on a virtual machine. Purpose: evaluate the installation process, anticipate subtleties in order to account for them when installing on a real machine.
Procedure.
Introduction. The Kubuntu disc I have (7.04 for i386) is a live distribution. Booting it gives you a KDE desktop with a lone “Install” icon sitting on it. I loaded it on my long-suffering computer (750 MHz), allocating 180 MB of RAM to the virtual machine. It booted with noticeable lag. No reaction to clicking the aforementioned icon was observed. The obvious conclusion: “can’t hear without legs”… The experiment was moved to a 1600 MHz processor with 256 megabytes allocated. Still with the same lag (slow hard drive), but at least there was a reaction now. The graphical installer launches (hooray) and walks through six steps. 1. Language selection (for installation and system). Chose Ukrainian. 2. Keyboard layout selection. Fairly broad. Chose the national layout. 3. Time zone selection — UTC+2. 4. A choice between two options — install automatically to the entire drive or partition it manually. Chose manually. 5. The partitioning process itself. Reminds me of the FreeBSD graphical partition editor, to which a partition bar from PartitionMagic was added. (Right now, while writing this, it hit me — why on earth didn’t you take screenshots, huh?). 6. The question “Are you sure? All data on the hard drive……..”. With a firm index finger (why worry — it’s a virtual machine after all) I click “Yeah, sure”.
And for three hours I watch the progress bar with rotating messages:
- “formatting /”
- “formatting /tmp”
- “formatting /usr”
- “formatting /home”
- “formatting swap”
- “copying files…”
My patience lasted only until 25%. After which the installation was brutally terminated and Conclusions:
- neither a 4000 rpm hard drive nor a 750 MHz processor is an acceptable testbed for modern operating systems
- the installation process may have been slowed down by the fact that it ran inside X, however, in my opinion, there was still way too much lag. Comparing it to FreeBSD 5.2 and 6.2, which installed on a virtual machine within an hour.
- the absence of component selection is a significant downside. Nobody asked me whether I wanted to install (for example) OpenOffice, and I was never told what was actually being installed.
Grade: a weak three out of five. I plan to retake the exam using the advantages of both machines (the MHz/MB of one and the GB of the other), again on a virtual machine. Because my attitude toward this Linux distro was seriously shaken today and letting it loose on a real machine is still a bit scary.