After a difficult few weeks writing papers and getting very little sleep (more on those later), I finally found time to set up my new Viglen MPC-L. Out of the box, it booted up fine and I was able to connect to my temperamental router after assigning it a static IP and adding a few DNS entries for my ISP. With my network connection up and running, I gave the update manager a whirl.
To my disappointment, the version installed on the MPC (Xubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn) is already out of service and therefore no longer found on the main repository. Annoyed that a brand new box should come with an out-of-date OS, I set to work connecting to the old-releases repository. This managed to update most of my packages, but gave me errors on some and wouldn’t let me upgrade to a newer version.
So instead, I decided to do a fresh install. I haven’t attempted a linux install since my long-forgotten college days, so I figured better late than never. I grabbed the iso for the latest version of Xubuntu since it’s lightweight enough for such a minimalistic box. I burned it onto a CD using a USB DVD drive after checking the md5sum, and plugged it into the MPC. Booting from the CD wasn’t very successful until I realized that none of the front USB ports are bootable. I was then shown the main screen for the boot disk, but when I tried to install it, I got a scary message about the kernel panicking.
Fortunately, a friend came to my rescue, having seen a similar message during his install. I added the boot option “pci=noacpi” since the MPC hardware isn’t acpi compatible. This did the trick, and within about 4 hours I was good to go.
The CurrentCost setup itself was significantly less painful than the setup on Vista (no surprise there). It took all of 10 minutes to sort out. I didn’t need to hunt down any drivers; everything was included with Intrepid. The only piece of framework I had to install was the rsmb, which was a tiny download – no extra installation setup besides changing the name of my publishing feed.
I grabbed a copy of the source for talking to the message broker – again a trivial download involving very little setup, and within minutes I was pleased to see my little red graph back in business.
I’ve been wanting to install ubuntu for the last 2 years or so, but I’ve always hesitated to hand over my sole machine to the hands of open source. Now that I finally have an extra box to play with, I can explore the wonders of ubuntu without worrying about important software being unavailable.
So far I’m duly impressed. Based on my experiences in the last few hours, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance I’ll soon be migrating my main box over to Intrepid. Time will tell….
