Posted on Monday 18th of September 2006 at 04:26 in Linux

Ubuntu disappoints yet again

Ubutnu flat out refused to work on my main machine. Now, this is the second time my 'favourite' distro has been deturmined to make me cry.

A fair while ago I attempted to dual boot Breezy Badger with my XP SP2 setup (to upsetting consequences (see here). Either way, it was quite an experience so it must be in Ubuntu's credit that I felt this compelling urge to put Dapper Drake on my main machine.

I have a separate Ubuntu box; but that is lethargic at best, I want Ubuntu on my AMD64 Dual TFT main machine - only as a dual boot mind - but I want to experience it in all it's glory and try and live with it as my main O/S.

So, my confidence was high - the means of installing has changed slightly, requiring you to boot into the live environment before opting to install - therefore I felt that the problems I encountered before with the GRUB boot loader could too be fixed.

Well, I couldn't possibly comment on that, because it didn't get that far.

The Problem
I set the LiveCD starting (and yes, I had checked the CD using both an MD5sum and Ubuntu's CD-checker) and wandered into the other room to grab a drink and a snack. Upon my return I was not greeted with a polite orange(ish) login screen, but a black dialogue box with incorrect characters. Yes, my Xserver config is incorrect "your graphical device is not configured correctly". It offered me the opportunity to view the details or not - neither were particulary useful considering I just wanted to boot into the LiveCD.

My Setup
Clearly, a frustrating situation. My computer isn't anything specially new or special: AMD Skt 939 3700+, 2gb RAM, Ati X850XT PCI-e graphics card, 5x HD's (3x SATA 2x IDE), Creative Xtreme Music sound card - not brand new equipment and yet Ubuntu clearly objected to something.

So what do I do now? A bout of googling showed no real solution to my problem short of use another distro and "see how that goes". So, for the second time around, Ubuntu has disappointed me greatly - true enough I still get to use it on my standalone machine, but an Intel PII is not quite the home the quality O/S deserves.

If anyone has a bright idea as to how to fix this, please do suggest it, but as it stands the LiveCD will not load - which does not bode well for the full install (if I ever got that to work AND the GRUB boot loader didn't nuke my MBR).

(Also, FYI, starting it in 'Safe Graphics Mode' looked Ok until the both my displays went into standby mode, and there they stayed).

 

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