From fascination to illumination

Ok, its an exciting, liberating time. Nokia’s Maemo along with Intel brings MeeGo; JoliCloud rises as an alternative to Chrome OS infact even earlier than the much anticipated cloud OS from Google. Samsung relaases Galaxy Tab while JooJoo faced demise. Apple’s iPad sales continue to carry out and Ubuntu makes some radical strategic directions for its very popular linux distro.

Unity is the new shell for GNOME and I find it pretty decent for my netbook. I wanted a faster OS for my Toshiba NB200 but not at the loss of functionality. After trying out EasyPeasy and Jolicloud, I decided to give Ubuntu Unity a real try. (They are good but too restricted, kinda dumbing down my netbook…)

First the installaiton..

Created a USB boot installer using.

5 Minutes later, booted the device from the USB, ran Ubuntu LiveCD and chose to try Ubuntu. While trying, I decided to install Ubuntu and clicked on the associated link. A really kool feature about linux is that you can install the OS while running the LiveCD in parallel, that I did.

But to my surprise, it took exceedingly long time to install. After nearly 2 hours, setup finishes and reboots.

But no UBUNTU, BOOHOOHOO….

Got the notorious INITRAMFS ALERT! /dev/sdb1 (for you it could be different) not found.

Tried many things out:

1. Edited the GRUB entry and changed the /dev/sdb1 to its associated UUID (of course had to run LiveCD again to get access to this installation).

2. Changed the rootdelay just incase but didnt budge

3. Ran LiveCD again, mounted my instance to the current file system and did this:

sudo mount mkdir /mnt/newroot

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/newroot

sudo mount –bind /proc /mnt/newroot/proc

sudo mount –bind /sys /mnt/newroot/sys

sudo mount –bind /dev /mnt/newroot/dev

and then..

sudo chroot /mnt/newroot /bin/bash

I needed the /bin/bash since I was chrooting from LiveCD

I restarted but still no Ubuntu. Finally, checked my BIOS SATA entry. It was set to AHCI, had to change it to RAID but in Toshiba shipped BIOS, there is either AHCI or Compatability mode which didnt work for me.

Final solution:

Applied Step 3. Then,

edited /etc/initramfs-tools/modules

added the entries:

sd_mod

and

scsi_mod

saved the file and ran:

sudo update-initramfs -u -k all

(since I have only one kernel, thats why -k all, otherwise choose this option wisely)

Then everything worked fine and I started writing this blog.

Ofcourse I also installed additional packages, and stuff. Unity is kool for my netbook.

Hope you enjoy it too!

PS: Don’t Listen to people complaining about bugs, surprises and different ways to do things, change is inevitable and Ubuntu Unity 10.10 is a pretty decent start for bigger, better things to come! Me Thinks…