October 28, 2004
Ubuntu Live CD
Ever keen to be on the bleeding edge after seeing the announcement on Slashdot I downloaded the latest Live CD image of Ubuntu Linux and burnt it to a spare CD.
I then put it in the drive on my PC at work and rebooted. Fantastic. A really quick bootable CD that lands you in Gnome running on a Debian based distribution. Not only that but it ships with Python 2.3.4. I'll leave the reviews to others but would like to add a word to the wise.
I found that there doesn't seem to be a way to turn the damn thing off. This may just be a trap for young players, but I'm not too sure. Selecting "Log Out" from the "Computer" menu did just that, except that it then automatically rebooted the PC and relaunched Ubuntu.
Unfazed by this I thought I would shut the machine down using the good old fashioned command line. When I started a root terminal and typed shutdown -h now the shutdown process started but then came up with an error message;
shutdown: timeout opening/writing control channel /dev/initctl
init: timeout opening/writing control channel /dev/initctl
Which ended any hopes I had of the machine turning itself off. Eventually I had to resort to brute force and ignorance, and managed to interrupt the boot process for long enough to force the CD to eject. Not pretty and not very intuitive. Please Canonical, can we have a shutdown menu item on the live CD distribution? Thanks awfully.
Posted by Andy Todd at October 28, 2004 03:19 PM