Gnucash versions 2.2.9 and 2.4.10 broken in Debian Squeeze

[Colin Law]

On 2 February 2013 13:43, Ken Heard <kenslists at teksavvy.com> wrote:
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> On 2013-01-10 16:53, Colin Law wrote:
>
>> On 10 January 2013 08:22, Liz <edodd at billiau.net> wrote:
>
>>> Can anyone suggest a livecd image which Ken could get and dual boot
>>> with which already has a working gnucash?
>>
>> Ubuntu 12.10 includes a fully working gnucash (2.4.11) and should dual
>> boot with debian with no problems.
>
> I downloaded from the Ubuntu site file ubuntu-12.10-desktop-i386.iso and
> managed to write it to a USB stick.  Then I changed the BIOS in my
> laptop, a Lenovo R61 which allows booting from a USB stick disguised as
> either a HDD or a CDROM, and which has Debian Squeeze installed.  The
> machine knew that there was something on the USB/CDROM, but whatever it
> was it cound not boot from it.
>
> Examination of the USB/CDROM revealed a number of directories with files
> in them, but only one file outside of those directories which looked
> like something remotely bootable.  It was a XXX.exe file.  XXX
> represents the three letters in the file name which I no longer
> remember.  In any event, since any file ending with .exe is a Microsoft
> executable file, it would appear that Ubuntu 12.10 can only be live
> installed on a machine which already has installed in it a Microsoft OS.

No, that is not right, you do not even have to have a hard disk in the
machine to boot off the image on CD or USB stick.
There is a file wubi.exe in the root, but that is only used when
installing ubuntu inside windows using wubi, it is not used for
booting off the stick.
How did you burn the stick?  Did you follow the instructions from the
links at the bottom of http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop where it
has links "How to create a bootable USB stick" for Windows, OSX and
ubuntu?
You say that the bios has settings for booting from a USB stick
disguised as HDD or CDROM.  Is that two different settings?  If so did
you try both?

>
> Several days later, I wanted to document in detail what had happened
> when I tried that Ubuntu live installation by replicating it.  When I
> tried I discovered that the USB/CDROM was no longer readable by the
> laptop.  At this point I gave up.

That suggests that maybe the stick is faulty.  Otherwise why could you
read it one day and not the next.  That might explain why it would not
boot.

> ...
> The following question is now moot, but I will ask it anyway.  Does a
> live installation require use of a separate partition?

Not sure what you mean by a live installation.  If you just mean to
run ubuntu by booting off the live CD/USB stick then it does not touch
the disk (except I think that if it finds a swap partition it will use
it, but not sure about that).  If you mean to actually install Ubuntu
onto the disk then it does need a partition (if you are dual booting
with something else).

Colin