Urban Adventures & More

I moved to my mom’s place last weekend, and managed to usurp my (older) brother’s room as an office (I have a desk, my girlfriend has a desk, and we left the bed alone so he can sleep there). Now that I have a place to comfortably use my desktop computer (it was pretending to be DVD player in my apartment), I realized that my Gentoo installation was almost a year out of date.

So I went about the slow and annoying process of updating everything. I think it said there was 1.5 GB of files to download, and don’t even get me started on the time spent compiling and fixing install errors. After a few hours of this, I threw up my hands, killed the install process, and downloaded an Ubuntu disk. That entire process took perhaps an hour all together.

Like my previous Ubunutu install, on my laptop (which I also upgraded to 8.04 Beta yesterday, which was a cinch!), things didn’t go perfectly. The problem is again mostly with the graphics card, and I think the problem is basically that the default video card for nvidia cards is the free version… which does not perform anywhere nearly as well as the proprietary version (the use of which I have no problem). I also have KDE 4, which is pretty sweet.

So, that was good. And then there is another machine we have (An AMD XP 3200+, I believe with an Asus motherboard), one we were using a server until we realized it was a waste to run this noisy machine ourselves. I decided that I would use it instead as a web browsing machine to put in our basement (the most convenient place for that part of the house). Although I had had some trouble with this hardware in the past (I couldn’t get the Gentoo install disk to boot; Windows barfed when it booted), I assumed that Ubuntu, known for its hardware excellence, would have no problem.

How wrong I was! As soon as you try to boot into linux from their main menu, the disk says something along the lines of “Kernel panic: trying to kill idle process”, and hangs. I haven’t done a thorough investigation online, but I don’t think this is a common problem; I wonder whether this is hardware, software or BIOS related. Specifically, I wonder whether something is really wrong with the motherboard, CD-drive or CPU or whether the disk itself is bad, or if there is a bad BIOS setting. The fact that I had similar trouble previously leads me to rule out CD-ROM problems, but it’s hard to tell what about the hardware is wrong.

If there’s anyone out there reading this… any advice? I suppose I should post on the Ubuntu support forum…