[YLUG] password entry and keyboard country settings

[Mike Cloaked]

 On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 4:11 PM, Alex Armani <alex.armani at rocketmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Mike, it's all fixed now. Thankyou so much for your help. On Ubuntu we,
> or rather, I, advise to boot off a dvd. The USB install fails, unless you
> use use the dvd you have created as the source for the usb ie not the .iso
> image file. So unplug everything like usb you don't need. I have to be
> carefull here as my bluetooth dongle is in my usb hub with another webcam,
> usb keyboard & usb mouse & USB DVD Writer etc. Reboot. Enter bios password.
> Boot off the dvd, and then wait.
>
> And here's the most important bit.
>
>
It is ages since I installed any linux distribution other than arch!  I
used to use Fedora until a few years ago. Arch is one of those distros that
you need to read the arch wiki and understand the steps you need to do the
install, and it installs a base set of packages only, and then you have to
install whichever other packages you want yourself (or using a script which
is what I do). On arch you have various ways to set the install going -
from DVD, USB key, pixi and network etc.  If you are interested the arch
wiki has an excellent guide for beginners.  However it also means you can
configure the machine to have only the packages you want so you can make it
super slimmed down for small machines or very comprehensive for more
capable machines.  But it does force you to research before doing things.
It is definitely not a beginners distro - and there is no real
sit-back-and-wait-for-it to complete - the base install is very fast indeed
and the rest is up to the user!

The main reason I moved to arch was that it's a rolling update distro - so
you are always right up to date with everything. There is no need to ever
re-install but there are small interventions needed occasionally when new
packages are updated.  However all my systems were only installed once on
each machine and then updated only ever since.  It is nice to get the
latest kernels very soon after Linus signs them off, and also nice to get
updated packages very quickly after there is any security vulnerability
notified in CVEs.

However I know that it is quite nice to be able to boot up an install iso
and click a few selections for key parameters and let it go and do
eveything without the need to intervene - but the price paid is the need to
re-install (and re-configure) every year or so.

There used to be an issue with installs on Fedora when there was a usb key
plugged in that used to slightly frustrate me and I don't know if it
relates to the way Ubuntu has a similar issue with that - but in Fedora the
problem was that the boot files would be written by default to the drive
mapped first so if a usb key was already plugged in when running the
install then the boot files were written to the usb drive instead of the
internal hard drive (though that could be changed manually as a parameter
during the install if you knew where to look!). Maybe that has been fixed
in the last couple of years but I never followed that up once I moved to
arch.  These days I have almost all my machines booting with UEFI which is
actually a much neater and cleaner boot system once you have understood the
way it works - but of course you need UEFI capable motherboards/laptops. It
is fast - generally of order 10 seconds to boot to the login screen from
cold start for modern machines at least in my case it is.

Anyway glad to hear you have the install working well now for your Ubuntu
system.


-- 
mike c
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