Installing Lubuntu circa may 2014

[Gary Knott]

Questions about installing Lubuntu.

I downloaded an iso for lubuntu (- for some reason it uses AMD in the
title at the web-site.  This is sure to confuse some people.)
I burned a CD, and used the "live" feature to
run gparted and repartitioned my disk, leaving a
set of 3 win7  partitions and setting up swap, /, home and boot
as 4 logical partitions.

Then I used the CD again, choosing the install
option.  The install program tried to find our wifi
with dhcp connection to the net, presumably
to fetch other files needed to complete the installation.
It annouced it had failed, which is correct, because
I do not even have a wireless card;
I have a wired local network with fixed ip numbers
manually assigned to each machine and to
our gateway router.

question 1: The install process did NOT drop into a
state where it would ask for my
ip number, gateway ip-number, netmask, etc.
Why not?  This seems to be a terrible oversight.
(And as i recall KDE did ask a few years ago.)
And did I just not hit some magic key or something that
would have caused the install to behave properly?

After installing, I powered-off, restarted and selected
ubuntu from the grub menu.  The boot worked okay.
I did not set up our net connection (yet) but just shutdown.

Then I restarted and booted win7.  It worked okay.
Then I restarted and booted ubuntu.  The boot
started, the 5 dots appeared, and the screen then went full blue and
nothing happened.  I though maybe this hanging was due to looking for a
wifi connection, but remember I booted successfully before.

question 2: what is happening in this state?

Then I powered down, and rebooted and selected
the "advanced ubuntu" option from the grub menu.
This gives a menu from which I can select disk checking,
single-user mode (under another name), etc.
I just selected "resume normal boot".

Now the boot worked fine, (except screen resolution was
degraded to some lower resolution.)
I then immediately shutdown.

Then I restarted and selected the normal ubuntu
boot option from the grub menu.
Now the system booted fine and with the correct
resolution!  (and now I could configure my network
connection if I wished.)

question 3:  What happened here?  Why did this
"work", and what issue was overcome, and how?

question 4: Can you predict what will happen when I
boot win7 again?  [The answer is the win7 anomaly
does not re-occur. - But still, what happened?]

question 5:  what should I do to finish my lubuntu
installation?  I need TeX, Gcc, emacs, etc, etc.
Is there a graphical update program in my CD install
that will get  me a full-fledged system without too much grief?

[Answer, there is something called the Software Center Manager, or
something like this.  When I ran it, it had a very few programs one
could select from a dozen categories to download. I could get Emacs
though. I then ran the synaptic program - this was much better and i
was able to get teX, but it is still deficient - I like the Software
Center Interface (sort-of,) because it has categories, but it needs to
have "everything" available.

Later I read a web-site that said to execute the commands:
sudo -i
apt-get install lubuntu-desktop
apt-get dist-upgrade   (This does the downloads and takes awhile.)
apt-get autoclean
rm /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb

But there was no description of what each step does, or why i want
to do it.   (But I did it, and it worked.  I still don't have
gcc or a bunch of other stuff however.)
]


So I would like to suggest that the install program
be fixed to ask me for my net-connection, or at
least that the Lubuntu manual on installation that i found via a
google search be expanded to explain in more detail
what different kinds of users might expect to see happen
when they install.


question 6:  If I ran the "live" version of Lubuntu
off the CD,  and then set-up my net-connection =
ip-number, gateway, DNS server ip Numbers, etc.,
and THEN ran the install program in an xterm,
would my install be more civilized?  And what is the
name of the install program and in what directory is it
in?  I would need to know that in order to run it.

If this is a good way for people like me to install,
maybe it should be in the manual, and described in
options when booting the CD.

I will try installing the so-called LTS Lubuntu system
in a few weeks, since i don't want to struggle with
installing every 10 months or so.

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