Pass with caution!

Erratum _- see http://blog.sudev.in/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=49

I just brought a new HP Tx1000 Pavillion laptop. As most of the laptops come with one or the other Windows operating system, so did this with Vista edition. I work with Linux most of the time and so right from the start I was off working on ways to run this machine under my favourite operating system.

Installation:

I wanted to try the latest offering of Ubuntu 7.04 on this but to my first horror the system refused to load from installer CD with default options. A few minutes on google prompted me to pass on the option “vgahi” at loader screen by pressing F6 key and writing the following:

linux vgahi noapic acpi=off

I have not done research yet on what “vgahi” parameter does but apparently this is needed for wide screen high resoltion viewing. Later I discovered the setting “vga=771″ works better. The other two parameters allow booting laptops without auto-power control.
Well this worked and I had the liveCD graphical environment in front of me. Now the next step is to actually install Ubuntu. Clicking on disk partition icon I was presented with choice of either deleting or resizing the windows partition that had taken over the entire 160gb of hard disk space. However the resizing did not work. So I rebooted the laptop in to Windows Vista and used disk partitioning utility there to “shrink” the partition to 80gb and leaving 80gb of hard disk free for my Ubuntu install.

I must mention at this time that why I did not want to remove Vista altogether at this point of time is to see which hardware needs what drivers. This is useful in later helping solve some of the problems that you may face due to linux drivers not being available for some hardware.

Now it was back to booting Ubuntu and passing on special parameters again by pressing F6 at the first splash screen. This time I straight away pressed on “install” icon and got the installer started. This also asks for partitioning scheme and if you want to continue dual booting you need to have the second partition as “/boot” with boot flag set on. For the rest you can pretty much define what ever scheme you need. Of course personally I would advise set the third partition as “/home” and allocate enough space here. I always do this so that if I have to do a reinstall I do not have to worry about my data getting over written. rest of the installation went on with just click of few buttons and adding information about creating first user account.If you are connected to the internet while install is going on the installer will also set up repositories and at the end prompt you for reboot. That is just about it.

Next i will write about getting all hardware to work. Click here to see Part – II

I have often heard people saying “If you can drive in India, you can drive anywhere”. How true.Imagine driving on highway and you have a cyclist coming right against you. Why? He was trying to be on the “right side” only in the wrong lane! Poor cyclist is going to suffer most of the time. But imagine this was a scooter? Tractor? Car? Truck? Bullock cart?

This is almost daily occurrence on the great Indian highways and I do not have any statistics on how may lives are lost, or even worse people maimed for life, due to this singularly stupid habit. And yet there is not once single piece of legislation dealing with this. This should rate at par with intent to murder.

NHAI is doing a wonderful job of making faster and smoother highways but this is not going to bring down fatalities. On the contrary.

Even after three years my hair stand up with fright when I recall a “near miss” coming down the excellent divided highway from Chandigarh to New Delhi at night. In the fast lane I was behind a bus, with safe distance between us, that was over taking a convoy of truck in the slow lane. All of a sudden more by intuition I saw some reflected light under the chassis of the bus and I took an evasive action towards left between two trucks, not a safe thing to do. Next moment I saw the bus crash headlong in to a three wheeler with predictably sad results.

Did the three wheeler driver not understand that he was risking his and his passengers life with such stupid and extremely dangerous life? Did the passengers not realise the danger? Yes, the bus driver was blamed but was he really the culprit here? And for me, what really made me dive left? Or I would also have been part of the pile up with potentially horrible results.

Thank god this guy had his weak headlight which prompted me. What about stupid fools who drive without any lights, front or rear?

Share your stories and near escapes here.