My Linux Saga: A Drama in Four Acts

A couple days ago, I figured I would give Linux a go. Several people I know love the whole open-source philosophy and therefore Linux, but I was primarily interested in producing a set of steps with which Abiathar can be installed on a Linux machine. Prior to this experience, I had used Linux about five times, and never in a serious capacity.

I tell the story in present tense for dramatic effect.

Act I: Hardware

I happen to have an Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 installation ISO laying around my drive for some reason, so I'll go with that. I'm not super interested in blowing away any real machines for this experiment, so virtualization it is. I've had success with VirtualBox, so we'll start with that. I create a new VM, give it 2GB of RAM, a single CPU, a 30GB SATA hard drive, and a DVD drive for the ISO. 

I turn it on and a purple-ish screen appears with a little keyboard and a person-looking logo thing at the bottom. Keyboard equals happy man? I think I'll start with the GUI, thanks, so I press nothing. A text screen appears with some dots that animate between blue and white. I wait a while and am rewarded for my patience with an error message about intel_rapl.

Welcome to Linux?

I wait a couple seconds, try pressing some buttons, try Ctrl+Alt+Delete, and nothing happens. I try a reset and get the same thing.

Fast-forward through thirty minutes of fiddling with hardware settings in VirtualBox, most of which either produced the same error or something else that sounds bad. I also try upgrading VirtualBox to the newest version, which gives me more buttons to press, but none of them help. So I abandon VirtualBox and try Microsoft Hyper-V, which I have used successfully exactly once. Does Hyper-V even work with non-Windows OSes? Beats me.

This should be good.

I create a new VM with similar specs. There doesn't appear to be a way to insert a SATA controller in Generation 1 Hyper-V machines, so IDE it is. I start the VM, connect to it with the Virtual Machine Connection, and receive the same error. Huh. Some Googling told me that the message is actually non-obstructive (read: spurious) despite how scary it looks. Perhaps VirtualBox would have worked after all. Oh well, we're with Hyper-V now.

After waiting several minutes, I receive a textured background and a setup utility-ish UI thing that tells me I should have an Internet connection for best results. Whoops, I forgot to install a network adapter. So I do that, and reboot the VM.

Act II: Setup

Both recommendation lights are green in the setup-starting dialog. Let's do this!

Setup asks me for a username, a password, and a computer name. Interestingly, after I fill in my username, it appends "-Virtual-Machine" to it for the computer name. I change the name to something more creative, like linuxvm. It thinks my password is weak, but I don't care, and it seems to be OK with that.

There is then a checkbox that allows the installation of proprietary components (some media player or codec or something). It is cleared by default. Heaven forfend there be non-open-source software on my machine! I check the box. Viva closed-source.

I start the installation. A progress bar dialog appears, spewing a bunch of piped text into the details box that I expanded for curiosity's sake. Hard drive activity is solid for quite a few minutes, and eventually I am presented with a logon screen. I type my password, press Enter, and receive what I believe to be a desktop. It is blank save for a black menu-bar thing at the top (which contains a single full word, "Activities") and a neat background in the main area.

Act III: Upgrades

At this point I am still feeling good about achieving my goal of running .NET software on Linux. The only thing I know is that sudo apt-get installs stuff, but I'm sure Google will help me figure out what stuff I need to install and what other line noise I need to put on a command line. Before I do that, though, I download the .NET software I would like to run and try double-clicking it for laughs. As expected, it doesn't work - Archive Manager attempts to open it, but fails, which makes sense considering that EXEs aren't archives.

Sometime during that experiment a Software Updater message made an appearance, so I figure I might as well make sure I'm running the most up-to-date version of everything before I begin in earnest. I press the Update button, and it prompts me for my password. I provide it, but I have no idea how to verify whether the prompt is legit. Good thing I'm not running any unvetted software yet.

Another progress bar appears, so I wait a while, then get some water, and when I come back the desktop has locked itself. Security is nice. I am pleased. I enter my password and press Enter to unlock. The UI clears the password box and does nothing else. I am not pleased. I try several more times, and receive nothing but a cleared text field. Deliberately entering the password wrong does produce a suitable message. There's a little link to log in as a different user - there are no other users, unless you count root - which I press. I get a list of users, which contains only me. I click me, and enter my password. It unlocks. Huh.

When the updater is done, Ubuntu tells me I should reboot. (See, even Linux needs to restart after important operations!) I do so using the little power icon in the upper-right of the desktop.

When the system comes back up, I get a kernel panic.

I stress that I have done essentially nothing to my system other than updating, much less anything questionable/unsupported. I haven't even opened Terminal yet! All I did was do what the GUI wanted me to.

I Google up some instructions to fix this. There is a boot menu that appears before GNOME (the desktop, I suppose) that contains an entry with "advanced options." The resulting advanced menu lets me boot from the old version. Neat! Everything is good.

While I was waiting for the Software Updater, I discovered on the Internet that there is a new Ubuntu version, Ubuntu 15. I figure now is a good a time as ever to upgrade to that, hopefully skipping all incremental "updates." Following some instructions, I change a line in a config file using an elevated (sudo'd) instance of gedit and then run a command to do the update. A bunch of stuff downloads and lots of text comes flying down the terminal.

In the middle of all that, a message box appears informing me that do-release-upgrade has encountered a problem and needs to close. I choose to send the error report, and it sends, but the text spew continues, as does hard drive activity. I let it run to completion, at which point it tells me that some errors occurred during the upgrade, but it seems that the errors only have to do with fontconfig, which can't be too critical, right?

I use the GUI to restart, but the system hangs in text mode at "Waiting for processes to terminate." I wait a good long while, but it stays there, with 0% CPU utilization (as reported by Hyper-V) and no visible disk usage. I cut the virtual power.

When the system comes back up, I get another kernel panic. I try the old version. Kernel panic. I try the recovery mode. Kernel panic. I give up and erase the virtual hard drive.

Act IV: Fresh start

Maybe things will work better if I'm on version 15 from the start. I download an ISO from the Ubuntu web site and put it in Hyper-V in a machine with the same specs. The purple screen and intel_rapl message appear again, followed by a black screen with a flashing text-mode cursor. Not good.

I reset. Wanting to be a happy man, I use my keyboard when indicated and fiddle around with some advanced settings in accordance with some other instructions I found somewhere. The black screen continues no matter what settings I choose or how long I wait. I am not a happy man, and my keyboard does nothing helpful.

I try the same in VirtualBox and experience the same failure.

Epilogue

I give up.

I tried, I really did. I wanted to like Linux, but I can't like something that I just can't make work. Maybe I picked a bad distro. Maybe there's something up with these hypervisors. Who knows.

Windows it is.