image from New Life Service Co.

I got an emergency call from a friend yesterday. His computer was totally eaten up by viruses and couldn’t function anymore. He’s a writer and doesn’t do backups, so he was naturally very afraid that he would lose the book drafts that he’s been working on.

I brought him and his ailing computer over to my place to give it some TLC and get it back in fighting condition. This system, Raine, is special to me as it was the second computer I built. That was way back in 2002, and when I cracked the case, horror itself greeted me. I could see that I had a long night ahead of me.

Triage

I really wish that I had taken pictures as the inside of Raine was disgusting. The picture on the post is actually a combination of before and after images from New Life Service Co who specializes in cleaning homes and salvageable items after fire, water, or storm damage. The image gets the point across about what I was facing though.

There are some natural enemies to electronics: cigarette/incense smoke, coffee, and soda. These things typically don’t instantly kill a computer, but they act as a cancer that slowly grows and over time can break a crucial system of the computer, causing the entire machine to fail. In essence, these things work together to kill the respiratory system of a computer, the fans that cool off the machine, this can cause massive heat buildup which eventually causes a component, such as a processor or graphics card, to overheat. At first, this overheating will cause the system to turn itself off, reboot, or freeze. It does this as either the component glitches out or the system proactively tries to protect itself from the heat buildup.

Basically, the sludge that is carried in smoke and the sludge that is created from dried coffee and soda creates the problem. The entirety of the inside, and good portions of the outside, were coated in a layer of this congealed slime it had combined over the years with dust to create a viscous tar. This tar was clogged between heatsink fins, had coated all the fan blades, had filled all the cracks where air flows through, and had even coated many of the fans’ shafts and magnets (causing the side intake fan to completely fail).

Raine had been in an environment with large amounts of cigarette smoke. My friend also indicated that coffee and soda could also have been involved. So, inside the case was a tragedy.

Now I know that the viruses and failed Windows install were the primary issues here, but it is like going to to the hospital because of a broken bone and they quickly discover a massive tumor. The broken bone is definitely a problem, but that tumor is a much bigger concern. So, before I was going to do anything to revive Windows, I needed to get that machine clean.

Getting Clean by Getting Dirty

Whenever I clean electronics, I usually do the same thing:

• Turn off, unplug, and remove any batteries from the electronics first. If it is a computer, turn the physical switch at the back of the power supply off (the ‘O’ down is off; the ‘|’ down is on) and remove the CMOS battery.
• Blow, vacuum, or wipe off as much loose dirt and dust as possible first.
• Break down the device into non-electrical components (casing, covers, screws, etc), electrical components (circuit boards, chips, cables, etc), and combination parts that can’t easily separated and then put back together (non-electrical parts that could be easily cleaned yet are mated via some kind of dark magic of manufacturing to one or more electrical components).
• Spray off the non-electrical components with water and clean with soap or other detergent as necessary. Where I do this depends on the size. Very large items get the yard and hose, medium sized items get the shower, and small items get the sink.I find the shower with the hand-held shower head to be the most useful for most situations. The hot water helps break up gummy substances, the mess goes down the drain, I don’t have to get muddy in the yard, and the drain strainer keeps small parts from disappearing down the drain.I know some people will also use their dishwasher to clean such parts. I’ve never tried it myself as I fear that the temperatures that some dishwaters can get up to is hot enough to melt certain plastics. So, I play it safe and don’t use the dishwasher method. If you do try it, share your experiences.
• I will then shake as much water off of each component as I can, dry it off with a combination of towels and paper towels, and then let them fully dry out for an hour or more before connecting anything back to it.
• The upholstery attachment for vacuum cleaners makes a very good hand-held device to wipe the loose crud off of electrical components. The bristles have enough stiffness to push dirt off but are soft enough to not damage any of the components. I lightly brush all of the electrical components off with this and set them aside for the next step.
• I will then get out a bottle of rubbing alcohol and pour some of the fluid into a small dish. Next I get some cotton swabs.I dip one end of the swab into the alcohol and let it soak up a small amount (don’t get the swab dripping wet, just damp). I then pick up one of the electrical components and gently clean any dirty areas. A gentle twisting action of the swab can help clean tough spots. I only do small areas at a time and then flip the swab over and dry off the dampened area with the dry end of the swab. Set each component aside for a few minutes to let any remaining alcohol evaporate before you try to reconnect it to anything.

This process is useful for all kinds of electronics and not just computers.

Typically, you can disassemble an entire computer with nothing more than a medium-sized Phillip’s head screwdriver. I recommend placing all the removed screws into a container. The first few times you disassemble an electronic device, you will want to use multiple containers, one each for each type of screw, and label them so you know exactly what screw goes to what part. A trick that I use whenever I know that I’ll have difficulty remembering what part or screw goes where is to quickly snap a picture with my camera.

Finishing the Job

After about six hours of hard work, I had cleaned off the entire case, the hard drive, portions of the motherboard, the heatsink, all the fans, the DVD burner, and all the cables. I had spare parts around, so I actually gave Raine a slightly upgraded processor, doubled the memory, added an additional drive (this came in handy when reinstalling Windows), upgraded the video card, and replaced the power supply with a nice, relatively new Thermaltake PSU. Unfortunately I didn’t have a spare 80mm case fan lying around (I know, I have spare CPUs, memory chips, graphics cards, etc but not a spare case fan? Shame). However, I usually scavenge good parts from broken components, so I did have an 80mm PSU fan from a failed PSU. The connector wasn’t the correct one, but I was able to snip up an old molex connector and splice it onto the fan. It isn’t the prettiest thing, but that fan really blew a lot of air at a reasonable amount of noise, so it worked out well.

I powered up the system, and everything worked. Actually, I did many, many reboots. I pulled up the motherboard manual on the Biostar website and made sure that all the jumper settings and cable installations were optimal. I had to completely reconfigure the BIOS since I had removed the CMOS battery. Anyways, I now had a newly refurbished Raine ready to get a shiny new OS.

I booted up the computer using a Linux Mint disk that I had handy. The idea was to boot into a Live OS environment, copy over the crucial files to another system to protect them from loss and then proceed with installing Windows again. Fortunately, this went extremely smoothly. Within about fifteen minutes, we had cherry picked specific folders to save to a safe location and had copied them there.

I had configured the new drive to be the primary drive as I wanted my friend to be able to pull off all the data he needed from the old drive before formatting it. I shut down Linux Mint and unplugged the power cable to the old drive. This wasn’t really necessary, but I wanted to make sure that the Windows installation wouldn’t in any way mess up the old data that we wanted to protect as much as possible. I then installed Windows onto the new drive, got Windows up and running, and installed all the necessary drivers.

I then powered down the system again, plugged the drive back in, and booted Windows once more. Now Raine is running smoothly, virus-free, and should have a longer lease on life.

So, even though I work at 8am, I was up past 2am working on the machine. I guess you can say that I’m a sucker for a computer in distress.

Tips

1. Every couple of months you should clean out your machine. Turn it off, unplug it, let it sit for a few minutes, take off the side panels, and then use a can of air duster (one that is meant for electronics) to spray out all the dust and other nasties. This will go a long way to keeping your machine running well for years to come.
2. Always make backups of important documents. You can get flash drives that can easily hold all of our documents for $10-20 these days. Every week, copy new and modified documents to this drive and put it in a safe place.
3. If your OS crashes, you can use one of the Live Distros of Linux to boot up your machine and copy important data to your flash drive. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are really good choices for this task. Finding information on a Windows drive when you are used to a user or My Documents folder can be confusing, so I will probably do a post on how to do this at some time.
4. The best way to keep your system virus free isn’t an anti-virus scanner. A scanner cannot offer you 100% protection, nothing does honestly, and can’t always fix problems when they do happy. The best way to protect your system and keep it running smoothly is to follow these simple guidelines:
   • Don’t ever install or run any programs that came to you in an email. Even if it appears to be from a friend. If a friend sends you a program to install/run, ask them to send you a link to where you can download yourself. Also, if it appears to be an image or document attachment, but your client warns you about executing it, don’t say “Yes” or “Okay.” Say no. That is a program pretending to be an image or document.
   • Don’t install every free program you find on the internet. Not all of these programs are bad. Just having too many programs installed can cause problems and slow down your computer. Your computer is only capable of doing so much, and loading 100 freeware apps that sit in your system tray is going to kill any system.Some of these programs were available for download simply because they wanted to be able to secretely install other programs without you knowing, so pick which programs you install carefully. Do a qiuck Google search for the name of the program and “spyware” or “virus” and see what other people are saying about it.
   • Go through and uninstall old programs that you no longer need.
5. If you are just a casual computer user or don’t have a specific need to run Windows, try running Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or one of the many other Linux distros some day. These desktop operating systems come with a ton of free software to do everything from making images to creating documents to browsing the web. It’s definitely not for everyone, but the odds of getting a virus or other nasty bit of software installed on your computer is extremely low with a Linux-based desktop as compared to a Windows-based one. Best of all, these operating systems are free and many can be run without installing them so you can easily try them.

Lumière is a system I built a couple of months ago to be a pure Linux-only machine. I haven’t done much with her, but it’s time to change that. As I’ve posted before, I really wanted to run different distros through their paces in order to weigh their pros and cons. However, I also wanted to have a system that I could actually use, so I decided to do a multiboot system with shared /home partitions.

Last night, I decided to start off easy and add Linux Mint (Felicia) on top of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex). Now I say that this is easy since Linux Mint is actually a modified version of Ubuntu (which also happens to be a modified version of Debian). Since Linux Mint and Ubuntu share a similar structure, all the user and group IDs would be the same. This means that setting up a shared /home partition would be much simpler.

I also wanted to use Linux Mint since it has been highly recommended to me many times.

I didn’t know how to do this on my own since I’m still so new with running Linux for a desktop, so I used this very helpful guide: Dual boot with two Linux, using the same home directory. This guide uses Debian Etch and Mandriva rather than Ubuntu and Linux Mint, but all the instructions seemed to match any combination of distros that I’d like to use.

In fact, doing the installation was even easier than the instructions as I didn’t have to mess with any syncing of user and group IDs. My process went as follows:

1. I booted from my Linux Mint disk and ran the installation program once the live desktop loaded.
2. I did everything as normal until I reached the “Prepare disk space” step of the installer. Since this step is for setting up the partitions and I wanted to share the /home partition, I need to do some work.
   • I selected the Manual option and clicked Forward.
   • I have two drives: /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. /dev/sdb is the drive I want since that’s where Ubuntu is installed while /dev/sda is merely for storage. I selected the unpartitioned space on /dev/sdb, created a new partition, selected a mount point of /, and selected an ext3 format. I then edited the /dev/sdb5 partition, which is my /home partition, and set it to a mount point of /home. I also have a swap partition, /dev/sdb4, so I edited it and set it to my swap.
   • After making these changes, I clicked Forward.
3. On the “Who are you?” step, I supplied the same username and password as I had used for Ubuntu. I don’t believe that this is necessary as just the IDs have to match, but I did this nonetheless.
4. I continued the rest of the installer as normal until I reached the “Ready to install” step. I clicked “Advanced…” and selected to have the boot loader installed on /dev/sdb7, my newly created / partition, rather than on the /boot partition.
5. I then completed running the installer.
6. Going back to the instructions in the guide, I rebooted the system into Ubuntu.
7. I opened the /boot/grub/menu.lst file and modified it by adding the following at the very bottom:
   title Linux Mint
root (hd1,6)
chainloader +1

   I emboldened some of the text to point out the truly important part to get right. I remember cringing when I first saw this a few years back, and it still doesn’t look friendly.

   Basically, Grub uses different drive and partition identifiers than Linux uses. The first number represents the drive while the second number represents the partition.

   Linux starts naming my drives sda, sdb, sdc, etc, Grub starts naming my drives hd0, hd1, hd2, etc. Notice that the letter is now a number and rather than starting at 1, it starts at 0. Similarly, the partitions also start at 0 rather than 1. So in my system, /dev/sdb7 is actually hd1,6 to Grub. You can find a lengthier description at Grub Terminology.

8. After I saved this change, I rebooted, hit ESC to bring up Ubuntu’s boot menu (you have to do this quickly as it just gives you 3 seconds by default), and selected my new Linux Mint option.

That should be the end of the story, but I ran into a problem. When I got to Linux Mint’s Grub menu and selected a boot option, I received the following error:

GRUB Error 22: No such partition

I was very disheartened when I saw this since problems with boot partition/Grub configuration haunted me during my earliest attempts to run Linux. I decided to power through this problem since I needed to learn how to handle these situations at some point.

I went back to the menu selection screen for Linux Mint, edited the default option (pressed ‘e’ while that option was highlighted), and looked at the information. I knew that I had the correct partition, and I double-checked to ensure that I did the count starting at 0 rather than count starting at 1. Everything checked out. I don’t have any reasoning to explain what I did, but I had a hunch and took a stab at it. I had the following configuration:

I then changed it to the following:

Amazing! It’s booting up. That’s when I hit the next major snag. Linux Mint itself failed to load and complained about a missing partition. “What in the world?” I thought. I rebooted and edited the boot option again. That’s when I saw it. The partition was also referenced in the kernel option. So, I made one more change:

Note: I removed splash from the end of the kernel option in order to make the data fit nicely on the page.

I booted from this newly-modified set of options, and after a couple of minutes, I was greeted with a friendly login screen. When I logged in, I was very surprised. In the midst of fixing all those boot errors, I forgot what the point of all this was. When the desktop loaded, I was looking at nearly the exact same desktop as I had on Ubuntu. The shared /home partition worked beautifully.

So, what was the problem that I had and why did my fix work? Ubuntu and its Grub loader saw my OS drive as the second drive in the system, so that drive was treated as /dev/sdb (or hd1). However, Linux Mint and its Grub loader saw the same drive as the first drive and named it /dev/sda (or hd0). My hunch was that they somehow saw the drives differently and changed hd1,6 to hd0,6 and /dev/sdb7 to /dev/sda7. I still don’t know why this is, but I’m going to keep digging. When I have an answer, I’ll post it here.

As for Linux Mint, I’m going to test it out over the next couple of days. Expect to see some posts about it soon.

Samus, my main machine, was having some issues earlier today, so I opened her up and felt around. I touched the graphics card and was nearly burned. I loaded up a temperature tracking program and found that it was running at 93°C. That’s nearly 200 degrees Farenheit. I was amazed that the GPU hadn’t been damaged by this heat.

With the system shut down, I removed the card and tried to see if I could fix the problem. The fan had some dust bunnies, but nothing worse than usual. I cleaned it off, removed the heatsink, applied some new Arctic Silver, put the card back, and powered the system on. I immediately realized that this wasn’t a dust problem. The heatsink fan had failed.

Why build a card that hits the market with a $300+ price tag, has the latest nVidia chip, and has high-end VRAM yet has a fan with an extremely-high rate of failure? I’ve owned around ten video cards from various manufacturers over the past few years. This makes the forth one to have a fan failure.

I immediately ordered a replacement from Newegg: a XFX GeForce 9800 GT. I know, it’s not going to shatter any records, but I go for price, not for performance. I rarely play any games these days as it is. Besides, it’s replacing a GeForce 7600, so it’s a nice upgrade.

The fact that I immediately ordered a replacement answers my earlier question. Why make a fan that lasts ten years when you can make them fail between one to three years and force the person to get an entirely new card?

Since that card won’t get here until Wednesday at the earliest, I had to find a way to keep the system running. That’s when I had the genious idea of doing a quick and dirty mod. I ripped the card out again, removed the cover on the heatsink, and zip-tied an 80mm case fan blowing directly onto the heatsink.

With the machine back together, I booted up, loaded TF2, and watched the heat go up. And go up it did. It started at a nice cool 46°C and jumped way up to 48°C as I gamed. I’d have to say that my jury rigging works better than the original fan ever did. So, remember kids, if you want a solution to keep your GPU frosty on the cheap, slap a case fan right on top of the heatsink.

Now that I think about it, the card is quieter now too. Maybe I should remove the fan from my old card and put it on my new card when it arrives.

I got Ubuntu successfully installed on my office machine (Dell Studio 17) yesterday. Today, I’m going to use it all day at the office while making notes on what still doesn’t work, what I could get to work, how I fixed problems, and I’m sure some random ramblings will enter at some point.

Dual Monitors

The first issue didn’t take long to present itself. I have an external 24″ LCD that I have hook up to at the office. This morning, I did what I normally do, plug in everything, including the monitor, and then start up the machine. When Ubuntu came up, the LCD functioned, but it was a clone of main screen.

I went into System > Preferences > Screen Resolution to see if I could set the monitors to have independent content. Unfortunately only one screen was shown.

I rebooted with the monitor disconnected and then plugged it in when Ubuntu had loaded. This produced something new: The screens were still cloned, but the primary laptop screen always tried to “focus” or center on the mouse cursor causing large portions of the screen to be cropped off if I moved the mouse to any of the edges. This was a new situation. I restarted X (ctrl+alt+backspace), and the problem remained. I decided to ignore this until I found another solution.

I googled around, read at least a dozen forum threads, and still didn’t find anything to address the issue of using dual view rather than clone view. So, I did what any good computer user should (or shouldn’t) do; I started digging around the menus for a possible solution. It only took me a couple of minutes to figure it out.

The Dell Studio 15 and Dell Studio 17 use an AMD video solution (personally, I prefer nVidia, but I digress). If you install the AMD proprietary drivers, you get a program at Applications > Accessories > ATI Catalyst Control Center. From inside this program, I could select a specific screen, click on the Multi-Display tab, and tell it how I wanted that screen to behave. I selected the external monitor from the drop-down, clicked the Multi-Display tab and then selected “Big Desktop left of display 1,” which matched the physical setup of the screens on my desk. The screens reconfigured themselves immediately.

Since I’m using cubes with Compiz, I loaded System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager, clicked on “Desktop Cube”, and changed the “Multi Output Mode” option to “Multiple cubes” to give each screen its own cube.

Headphones

Since I work in a room with other people, I always have headphones in. As soon as I had my dual monitor issue taken care of, I loaded up some music and found out that the sound didn’t work. I unplugged my headphones and heard sound from the system’s speakers. I plugged the headphones back in and didn’t hear sound from the headphones or the speakers.

I think this issue is due to the fancy headphone outputs on the Dell Studio 17. There are dual headphone outputs. In Windows, a software package allows me to select how I’d like to treat the individual jacks. I can use them as headphone outputs or line outs. I think it’s this ability to switch the functionality of the jacks combined with the fact that there is more than one jack that causes Ubuntu to fail.

A bit of playing around later, I found that if I loaded the Volume Control (right-click the speaker on the panel by the clock and select “Open Volume Control”), selected the Switches tab, and checked the “Headphone as Line Out” option, that sound is properly sent to the headphones. However, this has a side effect as having a headphone plugged in no longer disables the speakers. I’m working around this by muting the sound for the Front outputs in the Playback tab while the headphones are in use. Not the best solution, but it works.

Also of note, only the middle headphone jack functions for headphones as the front jack seems to be unaffected by the line out option.

There is an update on the headphone issue: Headphones Jacks Now Fully Work on Dell Studio 17 Running Ubuntu

Accessing the Windows Partition

Since I loaded Ubuntu to dual boot with the existing Vista, I wanted to be able to access the contents of the Windows drive. Here’s how I did it.

First, I had to install a new package. I loaded up terminal and executed:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

I then needed to find out which partition I needed to access. I ran “sudo fdisk -l” and received the following output:

   Device Boot   Start      End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1            1       19      152586   de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2           20     1325    10485760    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3   *     1325    16001   117882777+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4        16002    30401   115668000    5  Extended
/dev/sda5        16002    29810   110920761   83  Linux
/dev/sda6        29811    30401     4747176   82  Linux swap

Notice that /dev/sda3 is a bootable partition, is quite large (number of blocks), and uses the NTFS format. /dev/sda3 is my Windows partition.

I created a location to mount the partition called /mnt/windows  by running “sudo mkdir /mnt/windows“. I then modified the filesystem table (sudo vi /etc/fstab) and added the following line:

/dev/sda3  /mnt/windows  ntfs-3g  quiet,defaults,rw  0  0

The two bolded entries are what you will need to modify to match your own setup. The first option is the partition to mount. The second option is where you wish to mount the partition.

To load my changes immediately, I ran “sudo mount -a” to reload the partition mount instructions.

Now all my Windows files are easily accessible at all times at /mnt/windows.

Accessing Remote File Systems

Since I frequently access remote Linux file systems for my job and my hobbies, I thought that I’d take advantage of SSH Filesystem in order to make these file systems available as if they were local file systems. Thanks to the SSHFS AUTOmount on Feisty guide, I was able to set this up quickly and easily. Not only that, but the scripts provided automatically mount and unmount the filesystems when the internet connection goes up or down, which is really, really cool to play around with and watch.

I did make a modification to the /etc/network/if-down.d/umountsshfs script provided in the previously mentioned guide. This change may or may not be needed depending on your setup. I changed the last line to the following, note the bolded portion:

In case anyone is interested in my final /etc/fstab entry format, here’s one as a sample:

sshfs#servername:  /mnt/servername  fuse  comment=sshfs,
uid=1000,gid=1000,users,noauto,exec,allow_other,reconnect,
transform_symlinks,BatchMode=yes,ConnectTimeout=10  0  0

Note: I changed the actual server name to protect the innocent. Also, the uid and gid are specific to my setup. You can find your’s by running “id” on the command line.

You may notice the lack of username and other relevant parameters. I put those in my ~/.ssh/config file to make connections to the servers more easy. For example, here’s a sample entry from my ~/.ssh/config:

Host hostname
     User username
     ServerAliveInterval 15
     Port 23

An entry can be created for each server with specific SSH directives which allow you to keep connection information for often-used servers short and simple. Setting the ServerAliveInterval helps keep inactive connections alive (this may not be needed or recommenI have to ded in your setup). You can find a full listing of available options and their descriptions at the ssh_config NetBSD Manual Page. You might also find the SshfsFaq helpful if you try to set this up.

Misc Other Setup

I installed Crimson Editor to be my programming editor until I find one I like that is Linux based. I really like Crimson Editor, so it’s going to be hard for me to find a replacement. Running CE in Wine isn’t without its problems though. It seems that CE only remembers changes to settings if I exit by doing File > Exit. If I simply close the window, the settings are not saved.

I tried gedit earlier, and it is extremely close to what I want but is just enough off to make me not want to keep trying with it. It sounds silly, but if gedit just added the ability to make the tabs visible, I would probably use it as my main editor.

I installed jEdit, but it failed to load. I reasoned that since jEdit was built on Java that the JRE was missing, so I installed it. I find it odd that the JRE wasn’t installed by default when I installed jEdit. I’ll try it out later and see what I think.

I can’t use my favorite coding font, Dina, so I’m hunting for a replacement there as well. So far, I’ve tried Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and Monaco. They are both nice, but they just aren’t what I’m looking for. Oh well… Time to keep looking. Why or why can’t I just have my lovely Dina?

Remaining Issues

I still have massive problems with video. I’m starting think that AMD video hardware just doesn’t perform well in Ubuntu, even with the proprietary driver. Flash video is fine, but all other video is choppy or has a frame rate around 1fps. The performance is so poor, it seems like all video decoding and rendering is handled in software rather than hardware. I have yet to confirm this though.

I can increase or decrease the brightness using the Fn+Up/Down keys, but there are problems. The brightness indicator doesn’t go away, the keyboard stops functioning, and the panels no longer function. Every time I accidentally adjust the brightness manually, I have to restart X (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace).

There are odd times when X just seems to fail. It always happens in different ways, but every time it happens, the windows just stop responding properly or windows get stuck in odd places. As with the brightness adjustment issue, restarting X is a quick fix. I’d really rather not have to do that though as it closes everything I have open. Sure beats a complete reboot however.

The trackpad on the Studio 17 is really wide. I keep accidentally touching it with my palm, causing focus to shift elsewhere while I’m typing. I need to see if I can change a setting somewhere to ignore the touchpad as I type.

The mouse acceleration is much different than I’m used to in Windows, but I’m sure that I will get adjusted to this.

Performance overall seems a bit sluggish. For example, whenever I visit a WordPress site that has the snowfall thing going on (thanks Matt), scrolling is very choppy and closing/switching tabs becomes slow. I’ll have to see if I can find a site that has information about optimizing Ubuntu performance to get the mose out of the machine.

Final Thoughts

I have to admit that I’ve found more issues that I expected, and not all the problems have been readily solvable. Ubuntu has already given me the ability to do things that I just couldn’t do with Windows. Ubuntu has also presented some very core problems which may or may not be fixable, but at least I have the power to make changes and try to fix it while I always felt that Windows told me to “suck it up kid, that’s the way it is.”

I’ll be playing with the system more over the weekend. I hope to have it in fighting shape by Monday so that I can stop messing with my computer and start using it.

I have a Dell Studio 17 for my office computer. It’s a nice machine, but Vista fails horribly on it. The ATI driver for it causes a BSoD on average, once a day. I’ve finally had enough, so I’m switching over to Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex.

I’m writing this post as I install and configure Ubuntu. This will make it easier for me to keep track of what I did in case I need to undo something later or if anybody reading this wants to make the switchover as well.

Installing

Ubuntu truly has an incredible installer. There isn’t much to talk about since it was so easy.

I even installed Ubuntu while keeping Windows intact. This used to be extremely difficult. That is not the case anymore. I simply used the “Guided – resize” option. This option allows you to easily resize the Windows partition to create a new partition from the freed space where Ubuntu will be installed. I easily selected to give Windows and Ubuntu each a 100GB partition. The resizing took about half an hour. My only complaint is that the progress bar went from 0% to done with no intervals indicating how much time remained.

Overall, the installation took about 45 minutes with most of that time spent resizing the partition. Not only did the installer resize the partition and easily install Ubuntu, but it also imported many settings and options from my user on Windows. If the installation is this easy now, I can only imagine how amazing the installer is going to be a few versions from now.

I didn’t test everything, but the machine seemed to be completely functional at this point. All graphics were fluid, I was easily able to connect to my WPA2 access point, and sound worked. Now it’s time get everything set up the way I want.

Configuration

Drivers

Two proprietary drivers were available after the system booted up: “Broadcom STA wireless driver” and “ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver.” I activated the Broadcom proprietary driver which was quickly installed. I then tried to activate the AMD proprietary driver, but it failed without an error or message. I decided that I might need to update the system first.

I ran System > Administration > Update Manager and updated all the installed packages. I then rebooted the system. After this, I was able to activate the AMD proprietary driver without any issues.

Firefox

I use a highly-customized version of Firefox. Unfortunately, these modifications didn’t transfer over so well from Windows to Ubuntu. When I loaded Firefox, I found that I didn’t have half of the menu, the address bar was gone, and the View menu was gone so that I couldn’t fix it. I closed Firefox and decided that I would come back and figure it out later. For some unknown reason, I started Firefox again, and amazingly, it had reset itself back to default. Odd things like this confuse me and I typically don’t like them, but this odd behavior had a really good result in that it gave me a functional browser.

In previous versions of Ubuntu that I’ve played with, adding Flash to Firefox was amazingly easy: visit a site that uses Flash, click to install Flash, and you’re done. For some reason, this is different in Ibex. When I visited Youtube, I got the following message:

Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe’s Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player.

When I visited the link, all the options offered were for 32-bit systems yet my install was 64-bit. Needless to say, none of the options worked.

I ended up finding the following instructions to install Flash 10 easily on Ubuntu 64-bit.

$ wget http://queleimporta.com/downloads/flash10_en.sh
$ sudo bash ./flash10_en.sh

I then noticed that the backspace key didn’t take me to the previous page. Fortunately I found Fix Firefox Backspace to Take You to the Previous Page, which fixed the problem immediately.

So far, everything else seems to be working as expected, including the forward/back keys on my mouse  going forward/back in pages and middle-clicking opening up links in a new tab.

Packages

I installed the following packages:

audacious, compizconfig-settings-manager, emerald, mplayer, rar, subversion, thunderbird, unrar, vim, vlc, wine

Misc Changes

After getting those packages loaded, I loaded Sessions (System > Preferences > Sessions) and added a new program. I gave it a name of “Emerald” and put in a command of “emerald — replace”. This loads up Emerald each time Ubuntu boots. I then loaded the Royale Vista II Dark by dobee theme. I also configured Compiz using System > Preferences > CompizConfig Settings Manager.

I loaded up some videos and audio files and selected to install the required codecs. Due to having Compiz, the video flickered badly in MPlayer, so I switched the video driver to x11. I still have some video issues (such as the video not resizing when I change the window size), but I hope to have those issues taken care of soon.

I wanted to be able to use the Win key for creating hotkeys, and that requires a change in Ubuntu. Load the Keyboard Preferences via System > Preferences > Keyboard. Click the Layouts tabs and the “Other Options…” button. Expand “Alt/Win key behavior” and change it to “Super is mapped to the Win-key”. Now you can use the Win key for creating hotkeys. For example, I bound win+e to open the Home folder, win+c to run calculator, win+r to load the run dialog, etc.

I changed the workspaces from 2 to 4 in order to make it an actual cube. Just right-click the workspace panel in the bottom-right, select Preferences, change the Columns to 4, and click Close.

Conclusion

So far, everything is working very well. I haven’t hit any major problems except for the video codec issue, which isn’t a major issue currently since this is a work machine and not a general use machine. I’ll need to find a solution however.

I’m going to bring my laptop into the office tomorrow and see how well it does in actual use. Stay tuned for the “rest of the story.”

Things were going well with my Linux trials. I ran Ubuntu through its paces with the Live Distro with great results. I was really excited to get on with the installation when I ran into problems. Apparently I have too many drives in my system and GRUB didn’t get loaded properly. Working late Sunday night, I thought I had finally found the problem. So I went to bed satisfied that everything would work well when I started working on it again Monday; however, my computer had different plans.

I woke up yesterday morning to a dead computer. We had a storm roll through, so I thought that the power supply’s protection circuit was tripped. After trying to get the system to start for a few minutes with no sign of life, I started to get really concerned. I thought maybe my motherboard had fried. After testing the power supply removed from all the other components, I found that it was the problem. The power supply was completely dead with not even the faintest hint of fan spin when supplied with power and switched on (yes, I did short the green wire to tell the unit to turn on).

Fortunately, my power supply has a three year warranty, so I plan on doing an RMA for it to get a refurb. However, that does little to help me now, so I ordered a new unit to be overnighted and should get it today.

After I get my system back up and running, I’ll resume my Distro testing. I hope to start posting results soon.