[NCLUG] PC for Linux (Ubuntu)
DJ Eshelman
djsbignews at gmail.com
Mon Sep 15 12:07:36 MDT 2008
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 I may be a little out of
date, but the last time I tried running Kbuntu 64 bit on a machine with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
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