It’s been a while since I did a tech update, but nothing like doing OS installs on a Friday night. My nearly 5 year old laptop, a Dell Inspiron 1501, is on its last legs. The only thing I use it for is BOINC, so I figured that installing Ubuntu would give it a bit more breathing room than Windows. However, when I tried to run the install, I got a screen full of crazy colored vertical lines. Doing a BIOS update did not help. However, a forum thread did lead me to the right solution: setting the nomodeset option before install.

So if you want to install Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop and you keep running into the crazy colored vertical lines, during the install, hit F6, then select “nomodeset”. Presto!

In a (very popular by search engine standards) previous post, I talked about moving from Norton Ghost to Clonezilla. Part of the move from Ghost to Clonezilla was creating a method of automatically determining the computer model I was imaging, and selecting the right image. This is possible by changing the custom-ocs file, and here are the changes I made to do it.

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• Current Mood: Monday
• Currently Listening To: "Run Like Hell", Pink Floyd

Update: In addition to this post, check out my guide on customizing custom-ocs.

In a previous post, I talked about using disk imaging software for setting up Windows in a corporate environment. For years, I’ve used Symantec Ghost, specifically Ghost 8. I’d previously manually run Ghost from a network drive, booting from a custom floppy bootdisk with a DOS Novell client to allow me to log into our network (we still use Novell). A couple of years ago, I switched to running Ghost from an external USB hard drive that stored all the image files. To make it even more automatic, I wrote a tiny utility in assembly that reads the model info from the computer’s BIOS and uses the correct image file.

As time went on, though, the shortcomings of Ghost became apparent. The biggest one is speed: by running Ghost in a DOS environment, I was limited to USB 1.1 speeds. Ghosting a 20 GB Windows 7 partition would take around 40 minutes. When you are ghosting many machines at once, the quicker you can do it, the better. I knew of a great, free alternative in Clonezilla, but would it work for what I needed?

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Windows 7 Release Candidate came out this week. Although I haven’t yet tried it out, I did try out the Windows 7 beta a while back (both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions). It looks like a pretty decent OS, but when the bar you are trying to leap over is Vista, that’s not saying much

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