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New operating system!
Dec. 31st, 2006 11:51 amI saw how wonderfully ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rialian's Ubuntu 6.10 install worked on his new system. We'd made a joint effort to resurrect his old system which had died over two years ago. Since that time, it had remained dead in his closet, while he used a 266 MHz Apple G3 for email and little else. Music was difficult, and video wasn't really possible at that speed - it would play but was quite choppy.
So finally it was Time to resurrect the fast one. One mainboard/memory/processor later, he rebuilt the system even faster than it was before, and loaded Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on it. Within a few hours, he had the peripherals working. A day later, he'd figured out how to make browser-based flash work on a 64-bit box, and had purchased a video card to alleviate a browser scrolling problem with the sucky on-board video. The rest involved copying data over from various disks rescued from dead computers which was finished by that night. It is now ... alive.
Meanwhile, there I was, peering interestedly at this new life form as I used my mucked up Debian system. My mainboard had developed a problem around October of last year. For a while it was not booting up at all, until some friends created a kernel that bypassed the problem. It worked ok for a while, but the USB never really quite worked right, and it would freeze up intermittently.
Then we tried an experiment. We activated a CD-based version of Ubuntu to see how it handled the mainboard's glitch. It saw and identified it immediately, and took care of it. All USBs worked perfectly. All peripherals worked perfectly, including the camera.
I had a 30-gig disk that had Windows 98 on it from several years ago. I had long since moved all the data from that disk to my Debian disk. We decided to experiment with loading Ubuntu on that disk and converting the Debian disk with all my data on it to an external, portable USB drive. To do make the Debian drive external, we used a drive case we had bought for that purpose at a computer show a few years ago.
That way I could have a small boot drive for Ubuntu, and use the larger drive for data (where the data already was, so this involved a minimum of effort). This would add about 25 gig to my existing space and allow us to have a sizeable portable that we can carry to other computers for backup if necessary.
Actually, the REAL reason is that I was not willing to spend a dime on this system. The faulty mainboard is only two or three years old and has no business going bad now - my 200 MHz is over 10 years old and the mainboard is still fine. There's no way I'm buying another mainboard now - once I do that, then I have to buy a new memory and processor, and probably can't use my video and sound card because they've changed the card slots (again). So the constraint was to use components we already had and to leave the debian disk as it was, so I didn't have to go through an extensive backup process.
Within a few hours, Rialian set up the whole thing (yay!) The USB works without a glitch - that seems to have fixed itself as well. I'm not sure what it did exactly, but it apparently is able to detect bad portions of the mainboard, shut them down, and bypass the need for them altogether.
Edit Jan 7, 2007: The email problem in the last post was solved - I found the right file and copied it over, and the entire directory structure appeared in my new installation. No problems since then.
rialian's Ubuntu 6.10 install worked on his new system. We'd made a joint effort to resurrect his old system which had died over two years ago. Since that time, it had remained dead in his closet, while he used a 266 MHz Apple G3 for email and little else. Music was difficult, and video wasn't really possible at that speed - it would play but was quite choppy.So finally it was Time to resurrect the fast one. One mainboard/memory/processor later, he rebuilt the system even faster than it was before, and loaded Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) on it. Within a few hours, he had the peripherals working. A day later, he'd figured out how to make browser-based flash work on a 64-bit box, and had purchased a video card to alleviate a browser scrolling problem with the sucky on-board video. The rest involved copying data over from various disks rescued from dead computers which was finished by that night. It is now ... alive.
Meanwhile, there I was, peering interestedly at this new life form as I used my mucked up Debian system. My mainboard had developed a problem around October of last year. For a while it was not booting up at all, until some friends created a kernel that bypassed the problem. It worked ok for a while, but the USB never really quite worked right, and it would freeze up intermittently.
Then we tried an experiment. We activated a CD-based version of Ubuntu to see how it handled the mainboard's glitch. It saw and identified it immediately, and took care of it. All USBs worked perfectly. All peripherals worked perfectly, including the camera.
I had a 30-gig disk that had Windows 98 on it from several years ago. I had long since moved all the data from that disk to my Debian disk. We decided to experiment with loading Ubuntu on that disk and converting the Debian disk with all my data on it to an external, portable USB drive. To do make the Debian drive external, we used a drive case we had bought for that purpose at a computer show a few years ago.
That way I could have a small boot drive for Ubuntu, and use the larger drive for data (where the data already was, so this involved a minimum of effort). This would add about 25 gig to my existing space and allow us to have a sizeable portable that we can carry to other computers for backup if necessary.
Actually, the REAL reason is that I was not willing to spend a dime on this system. The faulty mainboard is only two or three years old and has no business going bad now - my 200 MHz is over 10 years old and the mainboard is still fine. There's no way I'm buying another mainboard now - once I do that, then I have to buy a new memory and processor, and probably can't use my video and sound card because they've changed the card slots (again). So the constraint was to use components we already had and to leave the debian disk as it was, so I didn't have to go through an extensive backup process.
Within a few hours, Rialian set up the whole thing (yay!) The USB works without a glitch - that seems to have fixed itself as well. I'm not sure what it did exactly, but it apparently is able to detect bad portions of the mainboard, shut them down, and bypass the need for them altogether.
Edit Jan 7, 2007: The email problem in the last post was solved - I found the right file and copied it over, and the entire directory structure appeared in my new installation. No problems since then.