I had all intention of of finishing tidying the study yesterday but found every reason on the planet not to and therefore planned to finish off today. Well that isn't going so well either! You see at the moment we have two daughters at home who fight over a single laptop and, well that doesn't generally end well.
During my tidy I dug out my old 2006 MacBook Pro 17. I think it's described as being version 1,2. Although it works, OSX 10.6.8 is as modern as the recent as the operating system gets and this becomes a challenge with browsing the web as older versions of Safari don't support modern web code and plugins. Chrome, Opera and Firefox also have stopped providing "modern" browsers for such and old operating system. Never fear I thought, Linux! That'll run nicely.
What a ball-ache.
I spent many hours trying to create a bootable USB drive but the Mac just wouldn't see it. Aha I thought, it has a DVD drive...but none of my other computers do. So off I went into the loft to dig out an old portable DVD writer and a bunch of DVD-R disks. I managed to get Ubuntu burned onto a disk but it still wouldn't boot. The penny then dropped that the Mac is 32bit and not 64. Off I went to burn a copy of an earlier i386 (32bit) version. Brilliant, it worked ... but the installation failed due to a file copy error. Off I went to download and burn Ubuntu 14.04 and that worked a dream.
With 14.04 up and running and a known good DVD to boot from, I'm in the process of running all 14.04 in preparation for a 16.04 upgrade. Although I've used Linux before and am comfortable with the bare basics, running updates and using the command line is all very new. Jolly enjoyable to geek out on though!
So, fingers crossed within the next hour or so I'll have a fully functioning laptop that will stop the girls fighting and who knows, by the end of the day I may have a tidy study too!