Today, I managed to get an old computer working. I even had to manually test RAM because there was a bad stick. Finally, it booted up into Ubuntu Live. This guy I knew came over and said, “Ooh, I’ll get to see what a Linux computer looks like!”
People just don’t get that Linux is only a small part of an operating system. Linux just refers to the kernel, which manages writing to disks, memory, etc. The rest of the operating system includes GNU, X Window, and GNOME. This is why there are different distros – there are different ways of packing all the relevant components, and Ubuntu just packs it a certain way with its own little features. There is no one Linux OS, unlike Windows, which all looks the same.
I recently changed my system to a dual-boot setup with Ubuntu GNU/Linux, and it worked magically for awhile. However, I was using Windows XP to make a FAT32 partition (seems like I had to make it in Windows for it to be recognized), when my GRUB boot loader messed up. I couldn’t boot my computer. Luckily, I had Ubuntu Live handy, and I booted into a live session.
I made a rescue floppy by going into GRUB’s folder (with stage1 and stage2), and running the following commands:
dd if=stage1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1
dd if=stage2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 seek=1
I now had a bootable floppy. With the floppy, I can boot into the GRUB prompt. From there, I could either type in some commands to boot Linux, or I could install GRUB. I installed it by:
grub> root (hd1,0) or whatever partition Linux is on
grub> setup (hd0)
I now had GRUB back again!