very painful install experience

[pkiula]

hi, hope someone can help. sorry for my poor english.

i downloaded kubuntu, made iso cd. then ran it on my dell latitude. it works, and looks nice. but it did not recognize my wireless network card. (windows xp was using my network without any problem!)

anyway i want to install kubuntu. so i click on the "install" icon on the desktop. it starts the process, i wait for a long time until 80% then suddenly the whole window disappears and i am back to desktop. nothing happened.

i restarted. it tells me remove disk and press enter. so i do that. but when i press enter it tells me "error loading operating system".

what!!!! i want kubuntu to be the ONLY operating system. so in my install process i had indicate that "Take all hard disk". (Guided: use entire disk)

so why this error? i have logged in twice by now and when i do the install, it starts and then disappears. what is happeneing? why is this so complex? why can kubuntu just not follow my instruction to "use entire disk"

please tell what is next step. thank you! seems i can only use from cd, and without cd the system does not start because windows is also now gone, i think. this is ok, but i want kubuntu to work from my own pc!

thank you.

[dibl]

Re: very painful install experience

First guess would be a bad ISO file or a bad burn of the CD.

Check the md5sum on your downloaded ISO with the one for that version in the folder where you got the ISO. I don't know what burner you are using, but they usually have a md5sum checking capability for ISO images. Otherwise if you are in Windows there is a md5sum utility that you can get from the Internet.

Second issue is the quality of the CD burn. Most Linux distros are very "picky" because they use compression technology to pack as much into the 700MB as possible. So you need to set the burn speed to 4X.

Finally, some folks have reported problems with some blank CD media. So if everything looks perfect and it still won't boot or run the installation, you might want to try a different brand of media.

If you are pretty confident that you want to go ahead with the installation, I recommend the Alternate Install CD -- it gives you a little more flexibility and visibility on the installation.

Hope this helps -- good luck!

[myxal]

Re: very painful install experience

If you are not in windows, there's a "check CD integrity" (or something in that sense) option when you boot the CD. Try that.

[pkiula]

Re: very painful install experience

thanks for the fast answering. the cd is fine i think. the checksum was fine. i used the winmd5sum tool to check it.

anyway now i have finally just kept on doing it again and again and i think kubuntu is installed. i mean i can boot without cd. i think this is "solved" as for installation matter?

but i still dont have wireless. how can i do setup wireless and start on the internet on this machine??

thank you for thoughts.

[basilray]

Re: very painful install experience

Did you reformat your drive before you started?

I had some issues with setup as well because I need to have WinXP on my machine too. You may need to manually set partitions and such. Look at getting your hands on either a disk partitioner or the Alternate Install CD.

That cured all my ailments!

[Princey]

Re: very painful install experience

We'd need to know what wireless card that your Laptop is using. If you don't know off your head, could you go to kmenu--->system---->konsole and type in

sudo lspci

for us please? It will ask you for your password. Type it in (note, you won't see the password you're typing. Never mind, that's just how it is in linux . It's a security measure. Just type it and hit the enter key).

Using the mouse, highlight the information it spits out, right click on it and chose copy. Paste it back here so we can help you out.