Re: Can I do anything after booting from the Ubuntu CD?

At Mon, 5 Mar 2007 20:19:23 +0000 (UTC) nospam@xxxxxxxxxx (Paul Ciszek) wrote:


I can boot Ubuntu from the distribution CD, but that's about it.
I can't find any of my drives. Is there any way to boot
from the CD and then do things, to verify that my hardware will
work with Ubuntu, before I install it? Here are some of the things
that I would like to be able to do under Ubuntu:

* See my drives, obviously

* Play some music, to verify that Ubuntu supports my sound card

* Read from a thumbdrive plugged into a USB port, to verify that
Ubuntu can do that

* OK, the impossible dream: I would like to access my wireless
network card and see if it is one of the ones supported by
Ubuntu.

Usually *install* CDs only have the installer on it. That said, all of
the install CD's *I* have used (all RedHat flavored) run a plain bash
shell on virtual console 2 (press Ctrl-Alt-F2), and from there you can
run just about any bash shell command, and usually that includes loading
driver modules, mounting disks, etc.

Seeing your drives is pretty trivial, unless you have some really
off-the-wall disk controller. If you have basic IDE disks, you should
be able to do things like:

bash# fdisk -l /dev/hda
bash# mkdir /mnt/tempmount
bash# mount -v -r /dev/hda1 /mnt/tempmount

and so on.

The sound card is a bit tricky, since you need to install a driver and
need to know which driver to install. I don't know if all of the driver
modules are available in the *install* system -- sometimes things like
sound cards as defered to 'first boot'.

The USB needs the USB subsystem up and running, OTOH, vanila USB stuff
is trivially supported under modern Linux system. A USB thumbdrive is
just a USB mass storage device and all such devices (except for strange
and odd-ball things like 'hybrid' drives) are supported.

I am not sure about the wireless network card.

*If* you have a 'Live' CD, the system should come completely up to a
fully working desktop and you should be able to use all of the
standard/common applications, including things like music players (to
test your sound card), file managers (to test your drives, including
your thumbdrive). You should also be able to fire up networking
utilities to test your wireless card.

Note: a 'live' CD and not the same as the installer CD, although some
Live CDs can function as installer or rescue CDs.




--
Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933
Deepwoods Software -- Linux Installation and Administration
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.

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