How I spent my day today +
Woke up today with a great idea: having some spare prehistoric hardware laying around I was gonna build a crappy box and install Ubuntu 8.10 on it. Why?
- I have the time
- I wanna see what’s changed since the last time
- I need a *nix box to try some video streaming stuff locally
Building the box took a bit longer than I anticipated at first (using only one hand to screw/unscrew stuff SUCKS). After about an hour, I had:
- an Athlon XP 1100 (TB)
- on an Epox ep-8rda+ mobo (nforce2 chipset, onboard lan and sound)
- with a GeForce 4200 Ti AGP gpu
- and a 60 GB seagate hdd
- and a cd-rom of course
- (was pondering a floppy drive for the fun and looks of it, but couldn’t find any)
I was ready to boot. The box refused.
Beeping like crazy, flashing codes on the mobo, it was RTFM time. Except I couldn’t, cause all the epox sites are gone, and the only manual I managed to find online was in Russian.
Desperate, I just took the CMOS battery out, praying it would reset everything and magically work. While waiting for the battery, I figured I might as well vacuum all the dust out. So I did. Guess what else I picked up.
After taking the vacuum apart and finding the battery inside the vacuum bag, I plucked the battery back in and took a deep breath. Tired, one-handed, frustrated and covered in dust I pressed the power button. IT BOOTED. Wooohoo!
The WindowsXP installed on the disk is from 2004 apparently. After reminiscing for about an hour (and backing up shit I’ll probably never need anyway), I wiped the C: partition and it was now Ubuntu time.
Booted Ubuntu in live-cd mode, it looked ok (although slowish, but that was expected), so I clicked “install”, which was conveniently placed on the desktop. Step 4/7 is the partitioning stuff — it didn’t work, just kept getting stuck with no output whatsoever in the “combobox” interface.
OK, reboot the machine and tried installing from the cd boot menu (the 4th step worked now). Installed. Updated the repos, updated the whole system (250+ MB download). That was around 2pm.
Installed ssh, enabled remote desktoping to the ubuntu box, and that’s where I should’ve stopped (and should’ve started installing webdev stuff via ssh and just forget everything else).
But no. I just had to see if I could install nvidia drivers and enable desktop effects. I could never get those to work. On any distro I tried. Ever. And I really want to see it live.
Bad idea. It’s now midnight, and I still haven’t managed to get the fucking thing to work. Giving up for today.
Other than that though, Ubuntu is looking really good.
Looks like you’re on an adventure! :)
Forgive me, I really can’t remember all the hoops and loops I had to jump through to install Nvidia (I have 6800 GT) drivers on Ubuntu 8.10 and to get compiz to work, but I can tell you two things:
– it looks really good (I spent several hours just rotating the dang desktop cube :)
– it’s buggy
This buggy part annoyed me enough to uninstall it. Specifically – compiz screwed title bars on all windows. They would randomly got scrambled – lose theme color, buttons would become invisible, etc. Second, and more serious problem – I couldn’t watch videos in full screen. Nada. Uninstalling compiz fixed the problem.
I forgot to add – but, I’m not sorry for trying it out. It really pays off when you finally see what GUI can look like and how lovely it can behave.
GL!
LOLZ… Well, when I tried to see Compiz Effects I had to:
1) install fedora 10 (I think)
2) reinstall fedora 10
3) install openSuse 11
4) deinstall openSuse 11
5) tried with Ubunutu 8.1 and it worked somehow.
Damn.. it took me a week to select and install linux distro.. Now.. it’s working.. :)
Good luck..
Ubuntu is my OS of choice for our servers. It has been treating us very well so far.
However, I tried running Ubuntu on my laptop and, at first I liked it a lot. I spent couple of hours tweaking it, and everything was fine until I tried to install divx player. I made my Ubuntu FUBAR in the process and that kinda rejected me back to windoze dark side.
Fuck it, switched to Ubuntu on my main box at home. Nvidia drivers working like a charm on it. I’ll see how it behaves now, and if I’ll miss anything from the win32 world…
Hm, WoW?!
@sh00le: you should try it, it’s incredible!
if people can use osx for web development, there is chance you could use ubuntu too. :)
This tutorial is the best guide I saw on the Internet dealing with nvidia driver installation. I use a nVidia Ti4200 card, and it works like a charm if you install the ‘legacy” nVidia driver.
http://desiato.tinyplanet.ca/~lsorense/debian/debian-nvidia-dri-howto.html