[NCLUG] PC for Linux (Ubuntu)

[DJ Eshelman]

Since the conversation went Green I haven't read much on (but I intend to).

But I have a few suggestions:

1)  Avoid 64 bit if you are only using 2 GB of RAM.  I can dig up some 
articles if you're interested, but the system overhead of running 64 bit 
actually negates most benefits.  As a general rule- only worry about 64 
bit if you need to use more than 4GB of RAM.  I may be a little out of 
date, but the last time I tried running Kbuntu 64 bit on a machine with 
1.5 GB RAM, it didn't run nearly as well as the 32 bit version.  That 
was about a year and a half ago, so things may have changed somehow but 
I seriously doubt there's much benefit that's worth any of the trouble.
2)  You may run into trouble with Ubuntu with an ASUS board- I did as 
well; it has to do with some oddness in the Northbridge from what I can 
tell. Almost like it's expecting something it can't find and just hangs 
when it goes to install the packages.  HOWEVER- Fedora ran like a 
champ.  I don't know why; I stopped trying to figure it out and just let 
it go.  That machine is running an Athlon 64 3400+ with 2.5 GB RAM on an 
ASUS K8n motherboard.  I still recommend ASUS in general; they make 
decent stuff; but there's full disclosure :)
3)  You said you had two optical drives; my advice would be to set the 
newest of them as IDE Master, and the second as slave.  I have seen 
instances where the 'cable select' fails on units like this that may 
have bad firmware or even different IDE versions.  If you can update the 
firmware of these drives, do it.  Alternatively, try switching the 
masters and booting from the different drive- see if it installs that 
way.  Optical drives have a fairly high failure rate- all it takes is a 
speck of dust to render one virtually useless, and dust can get in 
pretty easily.
4)  Check for firmware updates for the motherboard- get the latest 
version (which may be 2-3 years old, but still - make sure)
5)  Finally, check the hard drive and memory.  Just because you got it 
from CR doesn't mean they did a thorough examination.  I'd suggest the 
Ultimate Boot CD- http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html   Before 
we install anything to any custom built machine, we always run Memtest 
overnight.  Let it run at least 3 passes if you don't want to go 
overnight.  Check the hard drive using the long tests.

You'd be amazed at how many times Windows will install itself to bad 
hardware and Linux won't :)

 From what you describe, I'm putting my money on either bad IDE (#3) or 
bad RAM :)

If you want to bring it into my shop I can even show you how to check 
these things (after hours, otherwise I'd need to charge you for it :) )

thanks,

-DJ