livredor | Shiny new computer!

So I bought an actually new-new laptop to take to college. It came with Windows11 OEM, and I started it up and checked that was working ok, and immediately felt mentally itchy and gross so I was pretty impatient to replace it with Ubuntu.

As before, going straight to the main Ubuntu page didn't really help me because it's just a lot of adverts for why businesses should give Canonical money. So I ended up just searching for a guide, which found me this official one. I opened all the documentation on my old computer. I skipped the creating a bootable disk step because

jack had one that he was able to lend me with LTS 20.04.

The default key F12 didn't work, because it got me into a Windows only boot menu. However, searching for install Ubuntu with my laptop model Asus Vivobook got me a very comprehensive guide directly from the Asus site. It turned out that the hotkey for this machine is Escape, but I had to press it before the power button, ie start the keypress when the laptop was powered off, which I would not have expected. The tutorial also informed me that the correct menu option for selecting my USB stick was UEFI. To my surprise the BIOS screen has a primitive but easy to use GUI. I only needed to go as far as step 2 because when I selected the correct drive, it Just Worked.

I therefore returned to the Ubuntu installation guide. It didn't succeed in connecting to WiFi but there was an option to continue with the installation offline, so I chose that. Then I selected the option to install alongside Windows, using default partition settings. I kind of wanted to erase Windows like I did before, but I thought dual boot might be useful in case I turn out to need any Windows-only software for college. Then I got to the error that the tutorial warned me about Windows BitLocker is enabled. Slightly inconveniently, the URL for how to deal with BitLocker is only provided as an image, so I copy-typed it into a new tab. This actually took me to a kind of appendix to the tutorial I was already following: Windows with BitLocker.

The first step was to quit the installer in the middle and start again in Windows. This bit happened a bit weirdly, because it looked as if it was trying to boot into Ubuntu even though I hadn't actually completed the installation, but on restart I was able to get it to go back to the original Windows. I followed all the instructions which again pretty much Just Worked, although Windows gave me a dire error message that the decryption might take hours. Actually it only took a couple of minutes.

Then I repeated the previous steps and just kept going through the Install Ubuntu tutorial. As before I hardly needed it because the installer itself has lots of obvious and helpful menu options. This took me to a functioning Ubuntu desktop, with the terrifying staring cat who is the symbol of Focal Fossa. At this point I had a functioning OS but still no WiFi. I looked through a lot of tutorials about how to fix the WiFi, but none of them seemed to cover my actual problem, which was the computer could perfectly well see a bunch of WiFi networks but couldn't authenticate with them. Instead they wanted to explain to me how to fix the WiFi drivers. I found a troubleshooting guide which said, step 1 check that WiFi is actually working (yes, other devices can connect just fine), step 2 update the BIOS settings. That sounded a bit scary so I jumped straight to step 3: restart your computer and the router. This in fact worked.

Partly because I can't cope with the default desktop image, and partly because I was on a roll, I decided to go ahead and upgrade straight to LTS22.04 This took a bit of fiddling; I used the Software Updater app which told me that there was a newer LTS version available, so I said yes to installing that. I have tried this on my old computer (also running 20.04) and it never gets any further than my clicking OK and it appears to download something but then it never actually updates. On the new computer it prompted me to restart the computer, which I did, but it just restarted in 20.04. So I looked at the instructions in the Install tutorial step 11, which told me to type

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

at the terminal. That didn't obviously do much but when I restarted after that it did in fact display the Jammy Jellyfish desktop and was updated.

Then I tried to see if my dual boot thing was successful, by booting back into Windows. I panicked a little bit because I couldn't in fact seem to get it to boot into Windows. When I start the computer now, instead of immediately loading Windows, it gives me an old-fashioned text only screen with options for Ubuntu, Ubuntu with advanced options, and Windows. The first time I selected Windows it appeared to flash the Windows start screen for a couple of seconds, and then just went back to the options screen. The second time it said it was checking the disk for errors, it found some but was unable to repair them, so it powered off. The third time it just gave me a blank screen. I waited for about 20 minutes in case it was just being slow, but nothing happened, so I power cycled it. Then there were a few more times when it either cycled back to the options screen or booted into Ubuntu even when I'd selected Windows, and I was just about to give up and conclude that I'd killed Windows after all, when I tried just one more time and it worked fine. In the few days I've had the computer, I have quite often found that it takes somewhere around 3-5 attempts to boot Windows; the other times it gives me a random one of the problems I've described here. This is Weird.

The problem I still have is WiFi seems to be really inconsistent. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it takes a couple of restarts, and today it took me an hour to connect at all. The only problem is with the authentication, it's never that WiFi just isn't working.

So broadly I'm proud of myself, I just went ahead and did things and searched up tutorials and problem-solving when it didn't go completely smoothly.