Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Lose

Sometimes you just lose, lose, lose, which is the kind of day I have had today. It started out with the stupidity of Windows Update. After that I thought it would be interesting to look at the new release of Linpus Lite 1.7. My only previous experience with Linpus was quite some time ago on a very early netbook system, and I wasn't impressed with it, so I wanted to see if they have improved it significantly. The release announcement sounds very promising, but of course they always do. I downloaded the ISO, burned it to a CD-R, and installed it on my Samsung N150 Plus. The N150 is a classic netbook, with an Intel Atom CPU, so it should be very much the type of system that Linpus is targeted for. Unfortunately that didn't work out very well. There was no indication of trouble during the installation, but when I tried to boot the installed system it wouldn't work, it just kept cycling back to the boot screen. Grrr.

When I gave up on that, I decided to have another look at the latest Ubuntu 12.04 daily build. Now fair is fair, and this is pre-release software so there are absolutely no guarantees that it will install or run properly yet. But they have made a couple of alpha/beta releases already, so it has been installed by quite a few people and it is generally shaping up and stabilizing by this time. Not for me, unfortunately. The installer (ubiquity) crashes when it gets to the disk partitioning step, apparently it doesn't like the large number of paritions I have. I tried on several different systems, and got the same crash every time. Grrr.

So, some days it just doesn't pay to even try. After three strikes I was out, I put away the computers and went off in search of some other form of entertainment. I hope that your Sunday has been more rewarding and/or productive than mine.

jw 18/3/2012