Installation Blues

[berniev]

I appear to not be alone in striking difficulty with install related tasks.

Recently I waited months before upgrading from 10 to 11, not wanting to be on the bleeding edge, and encountered a string of grub related problems.

Just bought a shiny new HP 6560b and figured it shouldn't be too hard to do a dual boot install. How wrong can one be? (the four partition problem).

My point is basically that I love Ubuntu but wonder how it's adoption is to be encouraged while it requires so much work to do simple things. I shudder to recommend it to anyone not reasonably technical and prepared to do significant leg work. Once it's installed it's great, but the amount of time spent Googling is annoying.

If I was knowledgeable enough I'd throw my hat into the ring to help, but alas this is not the case.

Am I out of line?

[Bucky Ball]

Probably should be in testimonials rather than installation and upgrades forum, otherwise no.

Nothing that complicated about knowing one physical drive can only have four primary partitions (just make the fourth partition an extended partition and put as many logical drives in there as you like - e.g. /, /home, /swap).

10.04 LTS is the current long-term support release, designed to be stable and supported for longest. By the sounds I'd stick with it because as the old saying goes, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. Anything outside the LTS releases is somewhat more 'experimental'. Give someone without technical knowledge Windows to install on a clean hard drive, see how they go ... but that won't be the end of it as things break and Windows issues arise. With Ubuntu once the 'leg work' (otherwise known as learning) is done, it's done.

Every average user will want to upgrade to 11.10 when it comes out in October, believing the myth that 'latest is the greatest' and all that rubbish, which will be when the forums receive yet another barrage of issues and problems concerning 11.10 instead of 11.04 for the next six months (and probably then some) when some update breaks the system or something else does.

Next LTS out in April 2012 but 10.04 LTS supported for a year longer than that anyhow (April 2013). Good luck whatever you do.