December 6, 2008 was an important date in my life. That evening we had a launch party in New York for the start up I’d been working with since September. More significantly, it was my last day with a Windows computer in my home. In reality, I was supposed to be getting doing a dual boot installation so my family could continue to use the Windows software they were accustomed to, and I could play around in Linux world. All on the same computer. It seemed so simple.
The directions were in front of me, printed out from the Internet several days before. I hardly needed them, though, as I had read through them again and again as I struggled to work up the nerve to do the installation. The whole process took less than half and hour, but as I rebooted a problem appeared.
When a standard PC boots up you see BIOS working. What was supposed to happen was that I would see an option to log into Windows or go ahead and boot into Ubuntu, which was the new default. That option appeared, but no amount of key-tapping would make it change. Time and again I rebooted, only to be sent — after a brief wait — into Ubuntu.
Scouring the Internet and trying different tricks got me nowhere. Folks on the Ubuntu forums were very kind and tried to be helpful, but this was a no-go.
My wife managed to pull me away from the computer to get ready for the launch party. We had a very good time, but the computer problem at home gnawed at me.
We got home late, and I stayed up even later. By the time 2:30am rolled around I had accepted the inevitable and we had a full Ubuntu installation on our computer. I was glad I’d backed up our personal folders of documents and pictures.
It took a few days to realize completely what had happened, but now it is crystal clear. Our computer does not have any PS2 ports. Instead, the keyboard and pretty much everything else uses UBS connections. The version of BIOS on this desktop doesn’t recognize USB ports, so the keyboard fails to be identified and cannot be used in BIOS. Since the average user would never have any reason to be poking around in BIOS, this normally wouldn’t be a problem. Neither Windows XP nor Ubuntu 8.10 have any problem with USB keyboards.
So, if you are thinking about setting up your computer for dual boot Windows/Ubuntu use, take a closer look at your hardware and at BIOS. If you have USB ports only for the keyboard and if you see the magic words “keyboard failure” anywhere as your computer boots up, don’t try a dual boot install.
That said, now that I’ve learned my way around Linux to some extent, I wouldn’t want to go back. I’ve done maintenance on friends’ Windows computers since switching to Ubuntu and have been shocked at how shoddy Windows looks in comparison.
Note: This post originally appeared on my blog, Igneous Quill. Some minor editing to the text was made for this Linux.com post.
