Modern Mythology

I routinely work at three different computers, and I’ve been finding lately that I spend way too much time keeping software up-to-date on all three of them. My first thought was to get a nice big USB flash drive that I could always keep with me, but when I looked at the prices for an 8GB model, it made more sense to go with a 120GB USB HDD that I picked up from FutureShop for $150Cdn. The thing I liked about this HDD was that it doesn’t require a power supply, other than the USB connection to your PC.

The first thing I did when I got it was to install Ubuntu. I figured if I messed it up, it would be no big deal to re-format the whole thing and start over.

Surprisingly, it went very smooth. Here’s what I did:

• Start my laptop using the Ubuntu 6.10 Live CD
• Plug the USB drive into the computer
• Go to System > Preferences > Removable Drives and Media. Uncheck the three options for:
  • Mount removable drives when hot-plugged
  • Mount Removable Media When Inserted
  • Browse Removable Media When Inserted
• Install Ubuntu as usual. You may want to format the entire USB drive or partition it. I partitioned mine so that I had approx 30GB for linux.
• At the end of the install preparation, change the drive upon which grub will be installed to /dev/sda.
• Remove the CD and reboot.
• Configure your PC so that USB harddrives are at the top of the boot sequence (or after the CD/DVD).
• At the grub loader, you’ll need to change the boot entry from (hd1,0) to whatever is appropriate for you. It took me a few guesses, but in the end (hd0,1) worked. You’ll want to make this a permanent change by editing the grub file when Ubuntu loads.

So that’s it! It boots great on my laptop – it’s fast and everything seems to work fine. Right now I’m trying to boot on another computer, though and I’ve run into an error. More on that later.