Having heard rave reviews of Ubuntu being a real alternative to Windows, I was keen to test this hypothesis out. I downloaded the latest server edition (7.04) and burned the ISO to a CD.

Installation was fine and completed but booting Ubuntu failed at the very start of the boot process just when “Starting …” is shown. The following dump is produced (or similar)

Int 14: CR2 f0000000 err 00000000 EIP c828c384 CS 000000060 flags 00010003
Stack: c007eb0 c83f129b c8371d8c 000000082 c00f7eb9 000f7eb8 00000000 00000000

I’ve read a great many posts about this issue. Suggestions have been made that

• It’s a dual boot issue
• It’s a laptop issue
• It’s a RAID disk issue
• It’s a video card driver issue
• It’s a BIOS issue
• It’s an incompatibility issue with the way the server edition kernel is compiled

Suggestions to fix the issue are also broad ranging from updating BIOS firmware to booting into recovery mode and twiddling with core system files.

Conclusion

If you have found this post hoping for a concrete answer then I don’t have it for you. The problem could be one in the list above or maybe another. Right now, it does not seem Ubuntu has addressed this explicitly despite the number of reports

However, one suggestion did work for me behind which I’ll throw my support.

Install the Ubuntu Alternative Desktop 7.04. This is available on the same Ubuntu download page as the server edition. You have to select the Desktop edition and then a checkbox indicating you want the alternative ISO. It weighs in a couple hundred megabytes heavier, but after installation I booted into Ubuntu no problems.

The server features I wanted; Apache, MySQL, PHP, I have added with XAMPP, though you could probably find the relevant packages in the package manager too.

I’ve been using Ubuntu for about a week now with no problems; wireless, mail, messaging, internet and so far the experience has been good.

Getting XAMPP working on Vista requires 2 things as far as I can see. I tried a fresh 1.6.2 install today but it does not work out of the box. Vista complains only about the Apache web server.

Reading around, I saw developers saying all sorts, such as making copies of the XAMPP folder to ensure Vista had the right permissions, or turning Vista’s User Access Control mechanism off, or installing services from the command line and so on and fourth.

But amongst all these suggestions, only 2 things need to be done to get XAMPP (1.6.2 anyway) working on Vista.

First, don’t forget to run setup_xampp.bat in the XAMPP installation folder.

And secondly, you need a file called msvcp71.dll to reside in the root XAMPP folder. I copied this from my old XP Windows/system32 folder, but you might need to get it elsewhere.

If you do these 2 things, XAMPP should fire up no problem.