I recently helped a friend of mine, who had virtually no knowledge of servers and networking, build a server and get it up and running in his office. He chose to install Ubuntu. I had run several versions of Linux servers (after I did away with Windows Server 2000 about 3 years ago) of the Centos (Red Hat) variety. Centos Linux is basically Red Hat Linux with all the Red Hat trademarks stripped out.
Anyway, my problem with Centos Linux was that it had an older kernel and I wanted to run some software that required an updated kernel. My friend liked Ubuntu so I thought I’d give it a try.
My plan was to add another disk, put Ubuntu on that disk, and keep the Centos disk in the computer. I wanted to do this so that if something got messed up I could just boot from the other disk and not experience any downtime.
To make a long story short, the Ubuntu installer hated this idea. Even when I turned off the Centos disk in the bios, GRUB on the Ubuntu disk freaked (yet I could always get the machine to boot from Centos). Once I got the Ubuntu disk to run by disconnecting the Centos disk, but when I added another SCSI disk, even if it was “after” the Ubuntu OS disk, the machine would not boot. So, I gave up, and figured I work on it some other time.
The other time came this past weekend. I was converting my SCSI disk storage system to SATA, and I figured I’d keep the Centos disk in the machine in case the installation failed (and so I could steal some configuration files). Again, the Ubuntu installer would have none of this. Even with the entire SCSI system gone, it wouldn’t install. It seems like it wants GRUB to be one way and the Centos system wanted it another (probably a difference in the way Debian vs Red Hat systems do things). The only solution was to disconnect the Centos drive (not just disable it in my bios) and do the installation.
This is what I did and I am now running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on this server. So, if you can’t get Ubuntu to install, or you get weird GRUB problems, and you have some other Linux OS on the machine, you may need to get rid of it before Ubuntu will go.
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