NZEYIMANA Emery Fabrice

Yes Ubuntu Desktop 7.04 has been very useful for my children but when I tried to upgrade today to the latest 7.10 (gutsy), it appeared time consuming. It’s like when I was configuring a shared EPSON multi-function printer.

• 5 hours process (the initial download was very fast less than 10 minutes at 2.2MBps)
• Too many questions (like REPLACE this or that file, …, blah blah blah)
• It hanged once and had to restart the computer and the upgrade process

If I had known (it is not mentioned on the Ubuntu website), I would have completely erased the machine (after backing up the important files) and done a fresh install. I am sure it would have taken less than 30 minutes.

I still love it because my children no longer download and install all the junkies that pop-up on the screen. Yes, I told them that they should read first whatever comes on the screen before clicking but they probably have no time to read all those confusing stuff that come up while using this or that site.
My children computer now runs on Ubuntu Desktop 7.04

I was tired of having to visit the computer many times a week to correct any problems it might have. I have installed all possible tools but still some sites trick the children to installing things that contain dangerous stuff. OK, I have told them how one should read every message before clicking on related buttons but still, some spyware manage to get installed especially when they are in a hurry.

I have tried to have them use a non-admin account but some games stopped working. So, they needed a computer that works. I decided to give a try to Ubuntu Desktop (I installed 7.04 Feisty Fawn) and it works fine so far. The install was straight forward and very quick. My daughter told me that she finds the interface nice and not different from the one she was used to.

It was even a nice way to explain that a COMPUTER and WINDOWS are two different things (not only because they do two different tasks, but because they are independent from one another). It’s a way to introduce them to democracy showing that there are different options.

Actually, it’s somebody else who installed it. It’s a family member who was on vacation here and she had never installed an operating system (even windows) before.

After 48 sleepless hours, I finally managed to mount a partition formatted using UFS (the native FreeBSD filesystem).

My configuration is:

HDA: 6 GB (This is where I installed Ubuntu: has partitions hda1, hda2, hda5)
HDC: 80 GB (This is my second hard disk: has one partition hdc1 with UFS)

[code]root@server:/# cat /proc/partitions

[/code]
Here is how I did it:

1. I created a mount point /home/myfiles
[code]root@server:/#mkdir /home/myfiles[/code]
2. I run the command [code]root@server:/#mount -r -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/hdc1 /home/myfiles[/code]

I can now read my files by going to /home/myfiles !

In case you want the drive to be remounted at reboot time, then you will have to edit the /etc/fstab file to add the mount information at the end of the file

[code]/dev/hdc1 /home/myfiles ufs auto,ro,ufstype=ufs2 0 0[/code]

Until now, it seems impossible to mount the drive in write mode. Some articles talk of re-compiling the kernel for write support.

The install was fast and painless.

I have configured it to be a LAMP in less than 20 minutes (have not counted though).