Starting out on the Open Source fever, I installed Mandriva, Suse and finally have settled with Ubuntu after two days of fighting over which distribution to go with. But Ubuntu doesn’t ask a lot of questions during install, about what to install and where to install grub etc.
After installing Ubuntu, I saw that it had not even install gcc libraries but had installed the gcc compiler. Also, the default operating system to boot into was ‘Ubuntu’ instead of Windows XP. As I and my friends use the same machine and they have no liking to Linux, I needed Windows to boot first. During the installation, I was not provided the option to choose.
I wanted to change the default boot option in grub. I had to edit the ‘menu.lst’ file located in /boot/grub manually. It does not allow to edit as the permissions for the only user was denied. The concept of ‘root’ user was not there, as I was not requested for the creation of a root user. I just created a user, and ubuntu assigns super user privilege to this user.
To switch users, the ‘sudo’ command was to be used instead of ‘su’.
Finally, all set and working. Still to install ruby, mysql, python, vlc.
Raasukutty's 
Leave a comment