VaKo Posted April 2, 2006 Share Posted April 2, 2006 Wait! Now that I have your attention, could you put the weapons away? And put the burning torches out... I decied to install linux on a spare laptop today, a Compaq Armada 3500 (p2 366mhz, 192mb RAM, 6gb HD). Its an ancient machine, but a good one, and had been running windows 2K just fine. But it died, and needed rebuilding sans fluff before it would boot. The thing runs Windows XP fine, but seeing as how linux is good for older hardware, i thought why not. So I grab a freshly pressed offical ubuntu v5.10 install disc, inserted it, and booted. I was aware that compaq laptops have a special partitions on the hard disk for bios. So i set aside 2gb of free space for ubuntu, set ubuntu to patition that space and install. All is going fine, and the installer knows where windows is and where the bios is. It asks for a reboot, and then I find its pissed all over the bios partition it told it not to and nothing will boot. Not even a liveCD... So after going threw some 7 year old PDF files I find the answer is reflashing the bios from a floppy drive... Floppy Drive? WTF?!? I spend an hour going threw every draw and cuboard in the house, but nothing turns up. Finally I find a box of Win2K boot discs in the basement but thanks to water damage none of them format... Eventually one works for long enough to get the bios update on it. This is made harder because the only working FD in the house is in my server room, 2 floors down... So eventually I've got the bios on a disc, i go to the laptops floppy disc... and the disk won't fit... I pull the drive out, and find it looks like someone took a hammer to it... Not good. Whats even worse is someone had soldered a floppy to the drive dust door... No shit, the disc was melted to the door and some of the insides. So in the end i have to take the drive apart, and build the floppy disk into the drive as it put it back together. Somehow this works, and the disc boots. Hurrah, i can put the weird compaq bios back on. An hour later, and XP is running fine again. So much for linux on that machine, which is a damn shame really. So i'm thinking, what is could be wrong with this machine? I think its the weird HD bios. So i grab another laptop of the shelf, a dell Latitude x300 (dothan pm thinking, its modern, there should be no issues. I install Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0, looks good, has a partition manager and a boot manager. Its a POS. The boot manager fails... and even when you uninstall it, it stays on your hard disk. If you manually copy back the ntldr and ntdetect.com and do a fixmbr, its still there. If you remove all traces of it, its still there. NEVER USE THIS SOFTWARE. And whats even better, it fails to see any type of linux you install! Ubuntu, suse... nothing catches its eye... One thing that is a positive, I've found a great pen test liveCD, BackTrack So, i'm back to installing Windows XP on my laptop, again... which sucks Its a rant I know, but if your still reading, any ideas what went wrong? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melodic Posted April 2, 2006 Share Posted April 2, 2006 wow man you got screwd over. i have something like EXACTLY the same to this. i have a compaq 1200 (800mhz cpu, 320mb ram 9gb hdd) and that will not i say will NOT install any form of linux. ive tried knoppix live cd installer fedora every thing. does not want to kno. but wen it comes to installing windows it bloddy works!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cooper Posted April 2, 2006 Share Posted April 2, 2006 You guys do realize that you can simply use the Windows bootloader to start your Linux partition, right? No grub or lilo to eat away any BIOS space that you might need to keep reserved. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melodic Posted April 2, 2006 Share Posted April 2, 2006 yeh but in my case it wont even install Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
metatron Posted April 2, 2006 Share Posted April 2, 2006 ubuntu is not a good distro for the old computers, Debian would have worked much better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted April 2, 2006 Author Share Posted April 2, 2006 You guys do realize that you can simply use the Windows bootloader to start your Linux partition, right? No grub or lilo to eat away any BIOS space that you might need to keep reserved. Wasn't aware of that no, i was pretty sure that you needed some super funky one with *nix support. Do you have a link? Or some google key words? It was just funny, i hear all the time how linux is ready for the desktop. Yet when i try it, that was Ferris Linus's Weekend at Redmond... You know what would be a good thing to create, a page where you enter your systems specs and it suggests a distro that would be suitible. Hard to do off the bat, but an idea. Gonna give this another try though, I really want to have at least one machine with dual boot. Anybody got any links i should read? Any How-To's etc? Feel I've rather missed something... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
melodic Posted April 2, 2006 Share Posted April 2, 2006 You guys do realize that you can simply use the Windows bootloader to start your Linux partition, right? No grub or lilo to eat away any BIOS space that you might need to keep reserved. Wasn't aware of that no, i was pretty sure that you needed some super funky one with *nix support. Do you have a link? Or some google key words? It was just funny, i hear all the time how linux is ready for the desktop. Yet when i try it, that was Ferris Linus's Weekend at Redmond... You know what would be a good thing to create, a page where you enter your systems specs and it suggests a distro that would be suitible. Hard to do off the bat, but an idea. i think you can do something like this its like distrowatch.com or something Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted April 2, 2006 Author Share Posted April 2, 2006 http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid...=129&tid=49 This looks like its what i need Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
take it take Posted October 14, 2006 Share Posted October 14, 2006 I bet you guys hate this thread bump, but I've got my Ubuntu horror story to share. I downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 two days ago and tried to install it. The screen went blank after the installation started. I found out that I'm not the only person having this problem. A lot of people had the same problem. Then I downloaded Kubuntu yesterday. The installation went well, plus I'm used to KDE. Things started to go downhill when I did my updates with Synaptic. Xorg wouldn't start up as my monitor complained about its frequency out-of-range error. The solution I found was to do a sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg in recovery mode. Unfortunately, I had to do this every-single-fucking-time when there were some changes in the system, like software updates. My goal was to use my boxen as a MythTV machine. I followed the instructions on installing MythTV, as MythTV required a lot of tinkering. Apache2, MySQL, and PHP5 installed fine, except PHP5 wouldn't work after a reboot of the machine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted October 14, 2006 Author Share Posted October 14, 2006 After I was pissing around with it for ages, I found that freeBSD just works, all the time and doesn't need any of the hacks, kludges, prays and virgin sacrafices that ubunutu needs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garda Posted October 15, 2006 Share Posted October 15, 2006 i personally try and stay away from ubuntu, not exactly for technological reasons, but mostly for this doesn't everyone else find this creepy/cult-like Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PoyBoy Posted October 15, 2006 Share Posted October 15, 2006 back from teh d3ad. Yes, i suppose it is Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mpt Posted October 15, 2006 Share Posted October 15, 2006 I shouldn't have read this thread. I've just spent the past 3 hours apt-get'ing java, tomcat, apache, and ubuntu-desktop for my 1st time using ubuntu (figured it was time to get rid of mandriva). So now I'm going to have nightmares of waking up and having to reconfigure xserver everyday for the rest of my life :o ! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
take it take Posted October 15, 2006 Share Posted October 15, 2006 i personally try and stay away from ubuntu, not exactly for technological reasons, but mostly for this doesn't everyone else find this creepy/cult-like Yes. Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na Leader! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garda Posted October 15, 2006 Share Posted October 15, 2006 So now I'm going to have nightmares of waking up and having to reconfigure xserver everyday for the rest of my life :o ! ahh, dude, you only do it once, and it's pretty easy. Relax. Eat an ice cream, they're nice :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
barrytone Posted October 15, 2006 Share Posted October 15, 2006 Am I the only one with a good experience of Ubuntu? :? My laptop is only a few months old. I can't get BackTrack, Auditor, Knoppix or any of the other live cds I've tried to boot. I couldn't get suse to install. Or slackware, or debian, or fedora. Ubuntu just worked. And not only that, it detected ALL my hardware. I'm not saying Ubuntu will work for everybody, but I don't want it getting a completely bad rep. It's the best "easy to use" distro I've used. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a5an0 Posted October 16, 2006 Share Posted October 16, 2006 I've had Ubuntu installed on my laptop for a good long time. There was a little bit of weird configureation (drivers), but for the most part, it worked out of the box. I'm thinking about sacraficing a virgin and seeing if I can get AIXGL/Beryl working...... Maybe 2 virgins.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jester Posted October 16, 2006 Share Posted October 16, 2006 Ubuntu or should I say Xubuntu works perfect on my laptop straight outta the box even. Have it dual booting Win XP Pro and Xubuntu and everything ran perfect setup was flawless and everything. I was running XGL for a little while but it was more of a system drain then anything so I just got rid of it. Anywho I think you should Xubuntu its great. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chalito Posted October 17, 2006 Share Posted October 17, 2006 I'm running Ubuntu on my Dell E1405 and I like. Like most people it has given me some problems but non that are too bad. For one thing it didn't detect my wireless card so i spend a good amount of time messing with NdisWrapper...not fun at all. And when I finally get it working a Kernel update is released and breakes it again rofl. After that I just edited GRUB so that it boots the old Kernel. I'm too lazy to just run all the commands again. But other than that I have gotten everything i need on Ubuntu and it's cool because for the moment it's replacing my desktop. Only problem is i can't play CS or WOW. But oh well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
linux4eva Posted October 17, 2006 Share Posted October 17, 2006 Ubuntu ownz all. Don't be a playa hata. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a5an0 Posted October 17, 2006 Share Posted October 17, 2006 I feel that as long as you get some distro of linux installed, the rest is all customization (in general) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted October 17, 2006 Author Share Posted October 17, 2006 I do have to say that just because ubuntu hasn't worked well for me, doesn't make it Bad. Its just that personally I found freeBSD a lot more easy to use and setup in the long run. Linux always kinda worked ok, where as FreeBSD just works with very little messing around. It might be odd for some people, but its just honestly how I preffer things. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
take it take Posted October 17, 2006 Share Posted October 17, 2006 My Linux distro of choice is Arch Linux, since I got MythTV to work with it. But yeah, being Linux, it's very flexible to user's taste. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
billybob Posted October 19, 2006 Share Posted October 19, 2006 i have had similar problems with compaq bios on hds. first off it is just the bios setup tool that is on the partition, and if you screw it up you can download it from thier website. secondly try installing the bootloader to the mbr, not the first partion. the only problem i have had with ubuntu was getting my sound to work correctly, i have a laptop with a realtek card that i couldn't find suport for on most distros, but i found a thread on their forum site, and after compiling the new driver, and patching it in, i have had no problems. well except that sometimes after i do an update, i have to repatch for the sound to work again.[/img] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
a5an0 Posted October 19, 2006 Share Posted October 19, 2006 Its just nice to me off windows in general. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.