I don’t really know why I waited until so late in the day – or early in the morning – to do it (at least in part it was because I was meeting a friend for late dinner at 8:00), but about a year after installing Xandros on an old Compaq box and never getting back to it, I decided to dump Xandros and install Ubuntu in it’s place.
Getting the WET54G wireless bridge set up last weekend was a three-hour process, and also a subject for another day. For now, the most important tip is that the machine you’re using to set it up needs to be set to an address on the 192.168.1.0 network. If you want to set the bridge up by hand instead of using the “Quick Setup” disk, you need to use your browser to connect to 192.168.1.226. UserId and Password are both “Admin” (they’re CaSe seNsitIVe by the way).
I don’t have any great amount of experience with any Linux distribution (or with Linux at all really), but I’ve been wanting to add Linux to my pool of knowledge for a while. There wasn’t any one powerful reason to switch distributions, except that a year ago I couldn’t get an updated version of Firefox to install on Xandros (in fact, I even managed to wipe out the old version) and when I used the Xandros management software to do an update this evening, the most recent version was 1.5. (Current version for Windows is 2.0.0.11.)
For all I know, installing the most recent of Xandros would have given me the current Firefox and maybe the ability to run SETI@Home too, but Ubuntu’s been getting a lot of buzz recently and since I’m a newbie, I’m going to want to be find help easily. If I’m going to install a new distribution, I may as well go with the crowd for now. (Please don’t leave me a zillion comments saying, “Oh, you should have used distro-X instead, it’s much easier. I’m sure each distribution has its own particular charms. I’m happy enough for now.)
My first ever boot from a live CD was an interesting experience. I’d already set the machine to boot from CD, so after switching it on, all I had to do was reboot and let it go. My CD drive is a bit noisy and for a while it sounded like there was a cow mooing in the spare bedroom.
Once the system came up, I was presented with about seven different menu choices. After a few dubious experiments with the memory test and such, I finally chose the default Setup/Install option and let it fly.
When the system stopped mooing again (I may need to rename that machine to “Bossy”; too bad it’s not a Gateway. 🙂 ) my screen was divided into vertical sections divided by flashing/jumping/irritating lines. After playing with the menu bar at the top of the page, I found the “Resolution” tool under preferences and dropped both the resolution and the refresh rate by one notch each, this made the CRT much happier and no doubt saved me from a migraine.
The screen I was presented with turned out to be a functional Linux desktop. A working email client, Firefox 2.0.something, Open Office, and even a few games. (It has Suduko — Dad will enjoy discovering that.) Along with the menu at the top (all the basic system utilities), there were two icons on the desktop. I’m not really sure what to make of the “Examples” folder, though the musical clips were nice enough. After poking around for a bit, I double-clicked the “Install” icon.
The installation program seems simple enough. Seven prompts for things like your time zone, how much of the hard drive to use for Linux, and information for the main user account and then the system starts whirring away, writing stuff to the hard drive so it will run faster. (The Live CD is a nice idea, but aside from the mooing, it’s slow.)
The install is still running, probably due to the age of the hardware as much as anything else (PIII with 256 MB of RAM and a 120 GB drive) so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to find out how it all went. I’m a little concerned that the main user account created during the install is going to turn out to be running with administrative privileges, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it (At least I know enough to be concerned about that sort of stuff).
In the meantime, I’m going to let Bossy keep mooing while I go and get some sleep.
Category Archives: Tech
Articles relating to a variety of technical themes. Dividing by Zero is not defined, so this fits in as well as anything else does.
IP Test Blocks
These IP network blocks were set aside for private use (for testing networks) and don’t appear on any (properly configured) public network. This makes them ideal for use on home networks or internal corporate LANs *.
Class A: 10.0.0.0 (Up to 16,581,373 individual IP addresses)
Class B: 172.16.0.0 (Up to 65,023 individual IP addresses)
Class C: 192.168.0.0 through 192.168.255.0 (Up to 255 individual addresses.)
The Class C block is actually a set of 255 Class C networks. 192.168.0.0, 192.168.1.0, 192.168.2.0 and so on. Only the last octet is used for an individual host (computer, router, etc), the other three are used to specify the network address.
All of these blocks can be subdivided (or “subnetted”) by using a subnet mask. The “default” subnet mask includes only the network portion of the address. So for 10.0.0.0,the default mask would be 255.0.0.0. But you could use something like 255.255.0.0 to break it up into 255 small networks, each of which would have, at most, 65,023 (that’s 255 x 255 – 2) hosts on it.
A curious reader may wonder, “Why is it 255 x 255 – 2? Why not the whole 255 x 255?”
That’s because one address on each network (the one where the host bits are set to 0, e.g. 10.10.0.0) is reserved as the “network address” and another one (where host bits are set to all 1s, e.g. 10.10.255.255) is reserved as the “broadcast” address.
*You should almost always (some corporate settings are excepted) set up your private network to use one of the network blocks discussed here. Setting up your private LAN so that it uses other people’s IP addresses would have the effect of hiding the other poeple’s web sites and such. (For example, if your home network used the 72.232.101.0 network, you wouldn’t be able to reach WordPress.com, and what fun would that be?) Setting up a public network using someone else’s IP block would likely get you into trouble with whoever was providing your Internet connectivity. Don’t do it.