Installing Ubuntu

Since last week my laptop has been on life support. My last chance of saving it might be a clean installation of the OS but I would have to back up all my files before I do that. Thus this week I brought my old house computer, which was in storage, to school. The monitor, keyboard and mouse were already here, for use with the RPi so I just had to bring in my CPU. Not wanting to use Windows as the OS I had burnt a Ubuntu 32bit installer on one of my flash drives using my house computer before hand.

 

For some reason there appeared to be a hidden drive that I was not aware of, running Windows XP. And it was twice the size of my main drive(80gb)!I was trying to remember if I had partitioned the computer before but could not remember doing so. And they appeared as two separate hard disks, not separate partitions. Ubuntu was prompting me to choose one to install over. I decided to investigate.

 

 This was the culprit. A small hard disk that I had savaged from a netbook that someone had thrown away. I had forgotten that I had connected it to this computer. I decided to leave it there for now, might use it for an upcoming hack I have in mind.

 

 And tadaa! My PC set up with Ubuntu! Ready to roll! If you are wondering why I chose Ubuntu over the other distributions; well I decided I had to start somewhere, why not here.

Currently I am having some issues. Online lectures are not playing and lan connection is not detected. Right now I am resolving the video issue and using a wifi dongle. Will look into the other issue when time permits and hopefully get around to customizing the OS.

Shopping Spree

Went on a shopping spree the past few days as preparation for two projects.

First project will be based on arduino. I got inspired after reading about a ballbot, so I will be doing a simpler version, a two wheel balancing robot. I did not get any battery pack for the robot, hopefully can find something lying around else will have to go down to sim lim tower. As for the body of the robot I will try to use two plastic sheets. Will visit one or two labs and check out their waste materials.

Second one will be a raspberry pi arcade gaming machine. The parts for this were rather expensive. I found a gamepad made for PS1/PS2 on Carousell for cheap and wanted to try and use parts from it but the seller did not reply for a few days. Only after I ordered the joystick he replied. Will not be getting it although I was looking forward to opening it up. I will be using my old monitor as the screen as it even has built in speakers. However it only has VGA input hence I ordered a HDMI-VGA adaptor.