A Grubby Kind of Lifestyle

For the last couple of days, I have been stuck in my house due to this dumb tropical storm.  And, my legs have been really sore, so the timing was right to rest up and get a few things done around the house.  One of the projects I've had on my plate was to fix my Ubuntu running Netbook.  The last update broke the WiFi connection and I couldn't get it up and running.  So, this post is more or less about the process I went through during the last couple of days to get this thing going.  I will warn you, though, that I do not have a great knowledge of what everything means and luckily my research ability was able to help get me through.  I would NOT try this type of thing at home unless you know what you are doing or you will end up with a brick for a computer.

The first job to do was to go searching for the right Distro...
I went to many different sites and downloaded many different OS ISOs and burned them all to disc;  Mint, Debian, NetBSD, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and last but not least, PuppyLinux.
I booted them all up one by one with a live CD and went through trying everything that I would need to run like WIFI and other drivers.  The only one that worked with my little Netbook computer was Puppy.  The others all looked great and were running pretty well, but without the internet, what use is it?
Puppy booted up and was flawless.  I had a wonderful time messing around with it and tried to use it with everything I would need.  Even the photo program is good and Firefox is available as a package so it was a deal!  I went through and reformatted all my drives with GParted and then installed puppy on my drive. 

Then the trouble started.  It's not something a hardcore computer guy would think hard to fix, but it took me a little time to figure out the few things. The first was that I was enjoying Puppy so much that I really didn't think about saving my first session before logging out and lost EVERYTHING!!  Starting over, I did things better and saved the session.  It then shutdown into the root menu requiring a password that I had not set...grr.  After I took care of that issue, the computer didn't want to start up as I didn't get the bootloader started and had totally wiped windows off the map.  Once again the live CD was booted and I fixed the issue by configuring Grub4dos.

It now starts up in grub which is really ugly...think DOS, but it's really no big deal.  I think there is probably some code out there I could type in the command line to bypass it, but I doubt my son will use the computer now that he has his own...a gift from Kim if I could fix it:-)
Anyway, all is now working with some minor fixes and I am now enjoying my Netbook again.  Thank you PuppyLinux for the wonderful OS and for making it so fast!  My Netbook is now faster than my desktop.  I'm not taking away from my desktop, either. It is fast as well...