Spent all day yesterday downloading Ubuntu Studio, took 9 Hours, and then this morning I found a disc on trademe for $6.30.
The guys work out of Massey uni and offer a choice of three Linux disc’s, CD or DVD, for ten bucks so I credited a paltry 10 bucks and asked for Ubuntu Studio on DVD and a CD or two of OS’s that’ll suit my desktop and browsing, storing etc.
Then all I needed was a driver backup program to get all the installed drivers copied, on both ‘puters, so when I reformat and load Linux I’ve got driver CD’s for all the installed hardware ready to go.
In the end the process was made remarkably simple but it took 9 hours of downloading then an hour or two trying to figure things out after trying to figure out what I needed to learn and thanks yet again to those geeks and nerds who hang out at forums just to let you know how clever they are and how stupid you or… timewasters who aren’t needed by anyone except their own Mummies!
I know it’s a process of learning thats going on and I’m glad I’ve kinda finally got the concept of Occams razor down and it’s being brought into reality sooner than I used to bring it. For the Ubuntu studio I finally asked myself what do I want? Answer; I want a DVD with the program on it. Do I have to burn it myself after downloading? Answer; not if I can find a copy in NZ… look on trade me.
The question of drivers took me a little longer to understand and as usual it came down to nomenclature. The question is that ,because any working computer already has the hardware drivers installed, then there must be a way to get those drivers off the hard drive and ready to be reloaded after reformatting and install of an operating system. There is and it’s called driver backup. It’s not a restore drivers or system backup and thats where nomenclature is a pain in the ass and lots of searches and reading of posts in forums eventually got me to driver backup.
Drivermagician Lite
The program I used is quite nifty as it isolates all the drivers and highlights all the hardware drivers as opposed to the OS drivers. So you then just tick all the highlighted boxes and push play… or begin, I can’t remember. But before you do that it’s an idea to create a folder called hardware drivers or somesuch and stash it somewhere close to the top of a directory, like in my documents, then browse to it and hit play. Then just burn it as data and let the fun begin.
Took me a while to figure it all out that but I suppose I’ve learnt and thats what counts.