Dabbling in Linux

After much research I decided to try out Ubuntu as a Linux distro. It works on a more free principle then most other distributions, apparently they will even send the CD for free. They say that:

Ubuntu is an African word meaning “humanity to others” or “I am who I am because of who we all are.”
the Ubuntu distribution brings that philosophy to the software world.

It looked like it was perhaps the most user friendly for non-Linux people such as myself, while still holding enough power that once you got good at it you would still be satisfied.
My personal experience so far? Mostly good. The install was easier then any other attempt I made at Linux. I still have a major issue that hasn’t been resolved by anyone in any of the forums I asked yet, but other then that things are going well enough.
My first major issue was finding a way to duel boot Ubuntu and Windows XP, with XP on one drive and Ubuntu on another. I will detail some of what I did here in the event it helps anyone else out there, and then go onto my current problem

The first thing I did was get a hold of the LiveDVD for 6.06 LTS (Drapper Drake). Browse around the official site for the downloads and pick the one for your processor. They have CD and DVD ISOs.
The second thing I did was use PartitionMagicto cut my second hard drive down and make two Ext3 partitions. One was 500MB and this was for the swap partition, the other partition I used was for the distribution itself. I could have used Ext2, but Ext3 seemed to be a better choice in the long run, although it may be some time before I learn to use it journaling features. By using PartitionMagic I wasn’t at the mercy of the installer’s partition tool, which it does have one.
I then installed Ubuntu. The install went fine, I just had to make sure I chose manual configure partitions so that it wouldn’t do any damage to the Windows partition and that everything went where I wanted it to go. It looks like it would normally want 3 or 4 partitions, but since I was only giving it two, I just set those up and all seemed fine. I’ll skip all the details of what all I went through trying to get it to dual boot and just say how it should have been done.
Edit boot.ini on your main drive, and add this line (assuming GRLDR is on C:\ with boot.ini):
C:\GRLDR="Start Grub"
I am not sure if the Ubuntu install added GRLDR or not, but I am fairly sure it did. If you don’t see a file named GRLDR (I am guessing that is the Grub loader), then I am not sure what to do. Perhaps WinGrub will make it for you?
Next, download Ext2 IFS for Windows, this allows you to read the Linux partitions from inside Windows. You may need to edit the menu.lst under /boot/grub. In my case it was looking for Ubuntu on 0,3 (drive 0, partition 3), this is the first hard drive, third partition. Well, in my case it was on the second drive, third partition so when it tried to boot, it would crash. To solve it, I changed the menu.lst on the Linux partition /boot/grub/ so that the partition information looked to 1,3 (second drive, third partition… Grub uses 0 as a base, so 0,0 is first drive, first partition and so on). When I first started working on it, I kept trying to change the menu.lst on my C: drive, which is why I had problems. It wasn’t reading that one, it reads the one on the Linux partition. That fixed it booted fine.

A few other hints for using Ubuntu.
To gain access to restricted files, you will need to be a superuser. In the terminal type su then Enter, it will ask for you login password (for the main account), type that in, Enter and you will be in Superuser mode. Use cd to change to get out of the user directory (probably don’t have to, but I do just to be safe). Once there you can change to the directory of a file you may need to change the permissions on (you can’t do that in the GUI under the main account). To do that you will need to use chmod which is something I’ll leave you to Google. Just remember to reset it back to what it was after you are done editing the file. I normally set the permissions, edit the file in the GUI, then reset the permissions.
There is a lot of using the terminal it seems, so try to remember your DOS days, if you had them. If not, you’ll soon start learning the curve. Short story, cd is for Change Directory. If a directory is directly in the one you are in (desktop as the default) and you want to go to one inside that directory, say Examples, then you simply use cd Examples Say I want to get to the \boot\grub folder from the default, I type cd \boot\grub which is a bit backwards from what we may be used to in the Windows world where we use a /.
Get Automatix, it will make getting lots of software that you will need easier, especially packages that you can’t get from Synaptic (which comes with Ubuntu).
Next get EasyUbuntu. Unfortunately, I can’t install this one myself as my problem blocks it from installing properly. Anyhow, between Automatix and EasyUbuntu, you should be up and running with most of the stuff you will want quickly.
I went ahead and installed the KDE desktop as well, but I personally prefer the Gnome desktop that comes with Ubuntu. Don’t confuse desktop with themes, both have many themes to download and use.

My current big problem is I can’t seem to set locales without freezing the machine or having it reboot.
Here is what I posed in the forums about my current problem.

To fix the problem I uninstalled the English pack. Which allowed me to do a “dpkg —configure -a” without a problem. So now I have a problem with locales… which I guess technically was the problem before

I get the following when I tried to “dpkg -reconfigure –force locales”

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = "en_US:en_GB:en",
LC_ALL = (unset),
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
Package `lacales' is not installed and no info is available.


The last thing I tried was "dpkg -P language-pack-en-base", "dpkg -P language-pack-en" and "dpkg -P language-support-en" So I could do a clean reinstall of the Enlighs language pack.
If I "apt-get language-pack-en-base" the system freezes. I will try to recreate what it said right before it froze:

Setting up language-back-en-base
Generating locales
en_AU.UTF-8... /usr/sbin/locale-gen: line 238:5549 Segmentation fault l
ocaldef sno_archive --magic= $GLIBC MAGIC -l $input -c -f $charset $locale_alias
$locale
failed
en_BW.UTF-8...

And that is where it freezes. I may have wrote down or mistyped some of the above, but that is as close as I can get it without being able to copy/paste.
Before it got to that part there was a "Selecting previously deselected package" or something along those lines. Perhaps dpkg is trying to read an old one that is broken rather then a new one?
I figure either the script is off, or the something it is reading off a pack on the HD is bad. I downloaded the language-pack-en-base and language-pack-en from the Ubuntu website, but I am not sure what to do with them now...if they will do my any good.
If anyone has any help to offer it would be appriciated. Some programs just seem to refuse to install, or install but don't work with the language pack being out of whack. (Such as gcompris, which during install said something like "Please check that your locale settings" in the terminal window while installing. While it seemed to finish the install fine, it logs me off and sends me to the GUI logon prompt of Ubuntu.)