So after I played around some more I got the computer to boot from the flash drive. Cool. Ubuntu's load screen comes up, but it looks... primitive. Don't get me wrong, simple is good, especially when opposed to the candy coating over Windows' rank tomb full of rotting flesh.
Ubuntu's installation starts with this unassuming screen:
And I wait... and I wait... and I wait. I grow an eight inch beard. My wife gives up on me and has two children with the guy that fixed our window last year. Two presidential administrations come and go. (OK, it might have been only about twenty minutes. But still. You try spending twenty minutes staring at that screen and see how long it feels like.)
What the hell is going on?
Pressing a key--the down arrow key, specifically, in this case, although it turns out most of the keys on the keyboard will do, changes the screen to this:
Uh-oh. I'm no wizard but I'm willing to bet a fair sum that this is--and here I am going to use a technical term, so look it up if you have to--bad.
Actually this screen is fascinating in its own macabre way, as it continued on for an hour scrolling identical messages over and over and over, with a count on the left (you can't see it in the picture) steadily incrementing, one by one. At that point I said the hell with it and forced the computer off. Obviously, I thought, the install files are corrupt.
So I get another flash drive (I have enough of them lying around to build a one-sixteenth scale log cabin out of) and start over with creating the bootable Ubuntu install. They say insanity is trying the same thing again and expecting different results. But this was a totally different flash drive!
And you know what? For the greatest wonder since the fact Paul Mccartney is somehow still alive, it worked.
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