Q I have Feisty Fawn up and running reasonably well on an old PC. I had no problem going through most of the programs except when I tried the games. The only one that gave me grief was a card game that I play a lot on my XP that uses two banks of four cards. Every time I tried to play, it would freeze the computer at some stage, always. I thought perhaps it would be OK if I reloaded Feisty, but I can't try any of the Live disc programs, and I can't seem to get out of Ubuntu. How do I get back to a clean hard drive to start again? I am lost when it comes to uninstalling, I don't seem to have this problem with Windows. I have not yet been able to connect to the internet so I have lots of files that need a connection before they can be used, I don't want to keep swapping my broadband between the two computers. I must be doing something wrong somewhere, but I feel must persevere.
A Reinstalling the whole operating system to deal (sorry) with one card game is not the solution. All you'll do is spend an hour getting back exactly where you are now. The answer is to search Google or the Ubuntu forums, or ask on the Linux Format forums at www.linuxformat.com, giving the details of the game involved. If this game was included with Ubuntu, the fix is most likely quite simple. It sounds like your computer is set to boot from the hard drive before the CD/DVD, so you need to explicitly tell it to boot from the Live CD. Most computer BIOSes have a boot menu - press a key at boot time and it asks you which drive you want to boot from. If not, go into the BIOS when you power on the computer and change the boot order so that the CD/DVD drive is before the hard drive. A third alternative is to use Smart Boot Manager. Download it and copy this to a floppy by opening a terminal and running
sudo cat sbootmgr.dsk >/dev/fd0
with a floppy disk in the drive. Now reboot and choose 'CDROM' from the Smart Boot Manager menu. If you're using a DVD, don't worry - you still use CDROM. You don't say what type of broadband you have, but if your modem has an Ethernet port you should be able to connect it directly to the computer with a standard network cable, then set Ubuntu to obtain an address automatically (this is the default, so you shouldn't need to change anything). To use your internet connection with both computers, you need a router. Either a cable modem router that connects to your cable modem or, if you have ADSL, a combined modem/router that connects to your phone line with each computer is plugged into it. These are very cheap nowadays and make connecting computers to the internet and each other extremely simple.