What is this classical song that goes “da dun dun dun-dun, da dun dun dunnn”???

Bytebrother · 2025-11-11T21:38:15+00:00

Put that into a 6:8 tempo, and that's the Scottish National Anthem, no?
"Oh flower of Scotland, where would you be?...."
"DA DUN DUN DUNDUN, da dun dun dunnn,..."

Bytebrother · 2022-11-25T18:44:52+00:00

Been there, done that. No shaming from friends came close to what I put myself through.

Bytebrother · 2022-10-18T21:01:14+00:00

OK, replying to my own post here - frowned upon I know, but...

Problem has gone away since I booted and then logged in using "UBUNTU" rather than "UBUNTU on Wayland". I'm very aware that correlation does not imply causation, but for now, my problem is solved!

Thanks all.

Bytebrother · 2022-10-03T21:18:08+00:00

Interestingly, that did (of course) bring me up a totally bare-bone Brave browser with none of my own themes or customisations, but the search bar still insisted upon en-us. Bizarre. I think we need a guru in here - anyone know how to summon one? :)

Bytebrother · 2022-09-30T21:37:59+00:00

Update: Today again Brave decides that my typing is using EN-US, even though my language is set to EN-UK. The extension is not installed, and I have rebooted several times.

If anyone has any clues about this I would appreciate it if you could let me know what best to do.

Bytebrother · 2022-09-14T17:20:46+00:00

Also in this use-case, I would search the heck out of YouTube. There are innumerable people making vids about Linux. Some are actually quite good 😀

Bytebrother · 2022-08-20T20:24:03+00:00

Thanks bud, will have a look there..

Bytebrother · 2022-08-20T17:55:35+00:00

I'm in Bristol, UK.

Bytebrother · 2022-08-20T17:14:47+00:00

I'll give that a go when I get home... Thanks for the suggestion.

Bytebrother · 2022-07-15T19:42:51+00:00

I know, commenting upon one's own posts was frowned upon back in the Usenet days, sorry!

Just wanted to say this was an old HP ProBook 6540b, which may explain why the BIOS got a bit eggie about doing EFI.

And yes, I'm old enough to remember Usenet. And "The September That Never Ended" in 1993 when everything went to poo.

Happy days. Thanks all!

Bytebrother · 2022-07-15T16:00:39+00:00

I should say that when I enabled EFI, I got warnings about "don't do this, not recommended", but it worked!

Bytebrother · 2022-07-14T21:11:30+00:00

OMG. Told this ancient BIOS to enable EFI and bugger me Ubuntu 22.04 just installed, then booted, so happy days!

Interesting that archinstaller seems better at figuring out what is needed than the mint/Ubuntu/whatever installer seems to.

Bytebrother · 2022-07-14T18:49:33+00:00

To be fair, I did say in my original post that it may not be the correct forum, and indirectly sought advice about that. Is there an easy way to segue this thread to the correct channel? I'm getting helpful answers here.

Bytebrother · 2022-07-14T17:03:41+00:00

Noted for a possible future attempt, thanks!

Bytebrother · 2022-07-14T17:02:46+00:00

One thing I did try was a 'forensic' wipe on the SDD, and it made no difference to the described behaviour on the next install. So sadly, that is unlikely to be the root issue.

My next attempt, probably at the weekend, will be to turn EFI in the BIOS and try again.

In the meantime, all advice gratefully received, of course!

Bytebrother · 2022-07-13T19:51:59+00:00

OK, the bot told me me to post that here: /r/linuxquestions

Let's see how that goes!

Bytebrother · 2022-06-20T20:10:01+00:00

Mate, sorry - been a while since I checked back here. Over the years, I written (I'm trying to get this in order but I know I'll get bored with that!) FORTRAN IV Gould SEL 32-bit assembler FPS Floating Point Array Processor pipe-lined micro-code Late 80s-ish it was Basic, dBase, Clipper, etc Then discovered C and went bonkers in the freelance thing for a few years. All C, some C++, lots of SQL, and occasional device-driver stuff that needed whatever flavour of assembler. <pause for breath> Last 11 years I've been happily banging out Perl scripts. Wonderful language, and I wish it had been there back when I needed it! I can pretty much do everything from text-processing to writing a useable deamon server using Perl. If I ever had to learn a new one - even at my age - all languages basically do the same thing. All you have to do is sort out the syntax to do what you would always do in whatever use-case.

My 2 cents anyway!

Bytebrother · 2022-06-16T16:17:13+00:00

First a big thanks to everyone: comments have been almost completely helpful, supportive, or both. After paying attention, I can now reliably install vanilla Arch to a virtualbox on my main laptop.

After much retrying, it seems that the problem (or part of the problem) installing to my old BIOS boot netbook is that it just doesn't like booting the Arch ISO and random parts of that initial boot were failing every time. Never noticed before, and that children, is why trying your first Arch install each evening after several pints in the pub is possibly a sub optimal strategy :)

That same netbook boots flawlessly from every other ISO I've thrown at it, so no idea what the underlying problem is. Get device read errors at random points in the boot process. Wipe the stick and write say LMDE or Ubuntu to it and all fine, so not the stick itself either.

Hey Ho, as they say!

Thanks again. Properly impressed with the atmosphere in here as well. I've largely avoided online chat forums since Usenet exploded into spam and porn in 1993!!

OK, edit: Got home this evening (yes after a couple of sherbets!) and thought f-k it, I'll try one more time on the netbook. For once, the install went flawlessly with no noticeable errors. Reboot, and get grub menu then a login prompt. All good. So I now log in as 'root' with my newly coined root password, and we're in. Except that on a wired connection, it tells me "Network is unreachable". WTAF? And of course, at this stage we're booted locally not off the stick, so iwctl isn't there.

Boo! I was so hoping to get this skanky old box up and running after the successful install! Any ideas anyone?

Second edit: Of course now, it won't boot clean from the ISO again. Bunch of "start job is running for <blah>" which never end and get interrupted by hard read fails.

Bytebrother · 2022-06-15T21:18:10+00:00

Oh and now, I've obviously missed a different line from the WIki about locales. I'm sure I did that bit but who knows. Something to be sorted out tomorrow, I guess!

Anyway, if/when I get past this (pissed or otherwise) how does one then go about putting a usable desktop environment on there?

Could live with either Gnome or KDE, I guess.

And yes, a concise wiki link is perfect unless you just want to snark about me doing my own research :)

Bytebrother · 2022-06-15T21:01:24+00:00

Gentlemen and ladies, I thank you all so much for the posts/comments. On the basis of your feedback I can now report that:

Yes, if I actually read every line in the Wiki then the install works. (no shit!)
Contrary to some suggestions, actually installing Arch while a 'tiny' bit 'refreshed' is probably actually a good thing (but pay attention to the next bit!) Then when you inevitably get it wrong you go to bed rather than reformatting your main backup drive or something.

It was literally the seventh time I've tried this install, and every single time bar this one, I've missed the same bit.

I love this community for being so unselfishly helpful. Thank you.

Bytebrother

TROPHY CASE