No, that’s not a typo. At least half (the Ubuntu half) of my primary computer is “pouting” right now. The upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 was a tad rough, so I thought I’d put off the upgrade to 9.04. After all, it was working… OK (pretty darned well in fact). But. Yeh, you guessed it. I caught the bug and initiated the upgrade process.
Fragged my Ubuntu install. AFTER the upgrade “finished” the update manager warned me (AFTERWARDS!) that some packages had not installed correctly. Oopsie. Yep, my first really, really unstable Linux box is now on that “side” of a dual boot machine.
So… fortunately, I’ve been saving my data off in a couple of ways and have easy access to it on an external drive. The programs I can always just reinstall… and tweak and reconfigure and fiddle with, etc., until they’re the way I want ’em again. Notaproblem, really. Heck, I might just bag it on Ubuntu 9.04 on this machine and install an alternate Linux designed for more media-intensive computing. We’ll see. (LinuxMCE with add-ons, perhaps?)
Meanwhile, back on the Win7 side of the box, I’ve been having fairly good luck with the original, official, Windows 7 beta, 7.00. But the release candidate’s been out for a few days now–released to the general public today, though “developers” have had their hands on it longer–and I started downloading the 3.1GB DVD image about 15 minutes ago. About three quarters done now, and that means…
Back up this side of the dual boot. No, not a full backup, just a “files and settings” transfer to nail down my documents libraries and settings. No email backup, because I’m using Thunderbird Portable so each “side” of the dual boot “sees” the same thing. Handy. Oh, the “Easy Transfer” utility will miss my Opera profile, but backing that up and reimporting it is a snap. One folder and bob’s your uncle.
Soooo… what time I have to spare over the next few days will be devoted to:
Making sure everything I want from the Ubuntu side is backed up (only about a gig or so not currently shuffled off–that’s pretty good for me. :-)). *Mostly “Check”*
Back up what I want from the Win7b side. *Check* (ET utility saving that data now and Opera profile saved already)
Print the license keys for the Win7 RC.
Burn the Win7 DVD.
Do a clean install of the Win7 RC.
Import files and settings and reinstall all my applications in Win7.
Hunt down the Linux distro I want, burn the ISO and install it.
Why both? Well, frankly, because after nine months of almost exclusive daily use of Ubuntu on this machine, I found it fit almost all my needs almost perfectly (save for my gripes about updates and upgrades and just a couple of very small issues with apps I really, really wanted working perfectly under WINE). Then, after gaining a sense that perhaps Windows 7 wasn’t going to be the grinding pain in the neck (substitute a much lower part of human anatomy for more accurate wording–*heh*) that Vista has been, I decided to test it out on this same machine.
I was pleasantly surprised. I have only a very few small issues with apps and some small pains with computer management “the Win7 way” but overall, it’s running neck and neck with Ubuntu on ease of use and–until this last “upgrade” to Ubuntu 9.04–it’s close to Ubuntu in stability, even surpassing it now that the 9.04 upgrade has fragged that “side” of the computer. So now, at the very least, I’m going to keep Win7 around in order to be on top of the curve for early adopters who may call on me for help with the OS’s few quirks. And yeh, I have a “spare” XP on hand to try out the XP mode that is available for use on the advanced Win7 SKUs and on systems that have processors that handle virtualization natively (this computer qualifies).
So, for the foreseeable future, once I get these little niggling details worked out, this box will remain a dual boot box. I’ll probably “live” on the Linux side most of the time, but Win7 is certainly good enough to win a fulltime install on a new HTPC build I hope to do soon.
Update: tried the “easy way”–a “non-destructive clean install” with the Win7 RC and… *feh* Failed three times, so I’ll just have to wipe the drive and install. No biggie, since the “fails” brought to my attention a folder with 2GB of data I’d NOT yet backed up–some files recovered from Lovely Daughter’s dead Vaio notebook. Burned that stuff off and now I’m ready to do the install. All I have to do now is find the time. *heh* Note: this Win7RC is good until June 1, 2010, though it will begin shutting down after two hours’ use in March of 2010. I’ll probably have purchased a couple of copies/licenses by then, though… and be on Ubuntu 10.04 or whatever I might choose to supplant it on “the other side” of this machine. (Yeh, I do expect this dual core comp to still be useful then. :-)) TTFN!
Still just commenting on my own post. *heh*
Took a bit over 30 minutes to do a “nondestructive clean install” of the Win7RC. Of course, that doesn’t count the time I’ll need to spend reinstalling apps, but at least everything was simply shuffled off to a newly-created Windows.old folder instead of being wiped out, as a pre-Vista clean install would have done. Yeh, yeh, I know I could have left things mostly undestructed in XP and previous versions by installing in a differently-named folder, but it would not have been as clean nor would it have worked as well (some really dumb apps–including some Me$$y$oft apps–simply expect to find the OS in a certain place and will NOT work properly if Windows isn’t there).
Some things work differently to the Win7 beta. Most better, some… notso. Just another learning curve, notsosteep. One maybe good thing: this version of Windows Media Center does at least work.