I finally got to see my Ubuntu CDs yesterday, which had arrived a few weeks ago. There they were, nicely tucked into my drawer with the envelope in which they had been shipped still in place. My parents had called my up in college just after the packet had come, but that was almost twenty days ago and I had nearly forgot about its existence till I happened to see the white envelope in my drawer. Within a few minutes, the packet was torn wide open and the Live CD for 32 bit machines was inside our family desktop's CD-ROM.

Everything went on fine till I hit the login screen. How am I supposed to know what user name and password to enter when I had not created any user, not even the super user, and am booting the machine from a CD which is being distributed all over the world? Typing strings such as 'ubuntu' for username and password gave rise to another funny situation. A message popped up saying that my login session had not lasted more than ten seconds, and there might be a problem with my start-up scripts or I had run out of disk space. Now what am I supposed to make of that? Except, probably that my default Windows system, which was severely virus infected, was the root of all these problems. Now even the most hard core of Linux addicts would agree that it would be unfair to Micro$oft to say such a thing. However sadly for Bill Gates, the only way I could do anything about it, was to format my faulty Windows installation and hope that the Live CD would behave itself.

Since yesterday, I have formatted and re-installed my Windows system, but have not yet tried the Live CD again. The idea is to ask someone who has used the thing before, as to how to use it. That would also be a fair enough way to avoid heaping curses on Micro$oft unnecessarily! I just mailed Mateti Vijay Kumar regarding this and as soon as I find a way out of this problem I would post the solution here.