. : : Marc Sez : : .

The Ubuntu Live Disk Adventures

In my last post I didn’t mention how exactly I was still coming online even though my hard disk crashed and has gone for replacement (under the warranty).

Well, it’s through a Ubuntu Live disk. I got it shipped through me a long time ago. January 28, 2006 actually. The entry is in my old blog.

Here’s an explanation of what a Live disk actually is. (Apparently Wikipedia refers to it as a LiveDistro.)

Previously
When my hard disk was working, I had set my modem in the bridge mode. Then I would dial in to Airtel from Windows XP. However with Ubuntu I didn’t know how to connect to the internet simply because it didn’t let me dial in with a username and password in the way XP did. It’s hard to explain so I won’t. The point is, I couldn’t connect because there was no XP-like facility to do that. As I type this it strikes me that I could download a PPPoE dialer and then use that. (Hey! That might work, actually.) So I never bothered to investigate this matter further when I had tried the Live disk, simply because there was no pressing need for it. I was just trying out Ubuntu anyway.

And Now
Now that I had no hard disk and my computer hardware was useless without it, I thought I’d try to get internet working with the Live disk. I had the 5.10 version of the Ubuntu disk (Breezy Badger). It was seriously outdated but hey, atleast I have that. I booted into it and was checking the network settings. Suddenly it struck me that the modem could be set to automatically dial and connect to the internet. It had an inbuilt dialer which could be set from it’s the configuration page. That was the setting I was using it with back when I had a BSNL Dataone connection.

So I went to http://192.168.1.1 which is the modem config page and then changed the settings from bridge to PPPoE and set the dialer details. The modem connected fine and I launched Firefox and tried a Google search query to test the connection. The request timed out (meaning, no connection).

I don’t give up that easily. It was either get it working or stay without internet for the next four days until my new hard disk arrived. I went to the terminal and typed ‘ping google.com’ to see if I had a connection or not. What the hell, I was able to ping the Google server!

I could see google.com’s IP address (72.14.207.99) listed. Fine, let me try accessing the site through the IP address, I thought. I was reminded of Sachan asking Adithya to give him IP address links to sites because his DNS server wasn’t working or something. So I entered http://72.14.207.99 and the browser opened google.com! Okay so Ubuntu didn’t know my DNS settings. I found the DNS entries setting in System > Administration > Networking > DNS tab. The DNS IP already entered there belonged to my modem configuration page! But what were the bloody DNS servers for Airtel? I tried a Google search term for that but was unable to access the search result sites. Nor could I access many sites whose IP addresses I found by pinging them.

I called Chetan, Suren and George asking for the OpenDNS and Airtel DNS server IPs. Armed with this information I went back to DNS settings and entered the Airtel DNS server IP addresses. And it worked! Finally! Yay! I had internet working!

The Mystery of the DNS Resets
I went to the usual sites and was just getting warmed up when I lost the connection. Site requests kept getting timed out. I found out that the DNS entries were automatically getting reset to the modem configuration page IP address. Why was Ubuntu doing this? I couldn’t find help on the net through Google searches and George didn’t know either. He told me to directly edit some config files but that didn’t work either. So every ten minutes I have to re-enter the DNS values. Hey, atleast I have internet.

The Magic of GAIM
But I also found out that GAIM remains connected even if the DNS values are lost. It needed the DNS only to connect initially. After then it maintained the connection just fine. Not so for Meebo which dropped the connection every time the DNS reset. I’m not sure. Perhaps Meebo uses HTTP requests and GAIM accesses the server IPs directly or something. Okay so I now had internet access and then messenger access with GAIM. I was using GAIM in XP also so seamless transition. GAIM staying connected all the time independent of DNS was a plus.

Update blog? No problem. With photos that are on a camera? Still no problem!
Now I wanted to update my blog. That’s not a problem if all I wanted to post was text. I wanted to include pictures from my camera.

I had already connected my camera to the Ubuntu live disk earlier when I had USB problems and I knew that I would work just fine. It did. Now where do I store photos? On the RAM? Okay, I tried and I was able to. Now how do I resize images and save them as JPG? The GIMP was included along with Ubuntu and that worked just fine. I rescaled the image and saved as JPG. Then I was able to upload the photo, compose the blog entry and post it as usual. No problem at all!

Will online radio work?
Now I’ve already mentioned RadioVeRVe. Ubuntu seems to be able to do everything so why couldn’t it open the online radio stream? I used RhythmBox to open the stream but it kept crashing when I did. I went to the main site (www.radioverve.com) to open the browser based player but Firefox didn’t have the Flash plugin. Dammit! I tried the automatically install plugin feature of Firefox. It never works properly in XP so I didn’t think much of it. But it installed Flash player correctly on Ubuntu. I fired up the browser player and it worked.

Now to intall audio drivers, I thought. It shouldn’t be so hard to find them, right? I turned on my speakers and began typing the search query in Google but wait. What was that I was hearing? Holy crap! I already had sound. Why is this so surprising? Even Windows XP does not have default sound drivers for my onboard audio.

Ubuntu Rules!
Now I was really impressed. I had internet. I had instant messenger. I had USB support. I had image tools. I had online radio and sound drivers. All out of the box without installing anything extra (except the Flash plugin). So I can effectively do most of the things I do on my computer even without a hard disk! All it takes is a single Live disk. Now that is something quite amazing.

The only annoyances are Ubuntu sometimes freezes for no reason and the DNS keeps resetting but these are minor annoyances probably because the version I’m using is 15 months old.

And no, I’m still not a Ubuntu convert. It’s impressive, yes, but I’ll still install Windows XP when my hard disk comes back. I’m a gamer and support for games on Linux (even after advances and emulators like WINE) leaves much to be desired.

For people who don’t play games, Ubuntu is the way to go. It has everything you need, there’s load of extra software you can install directly over the internet from Applications > Add Applications, is stable and secure and most of all, it’s completely free.