Success!
 

This is my first post from my Linux system.

It turns out it was the hard drive. I was able to finally cut a flawless Ubuntu CD and the company I bought my laptop from sent me a 40GB IBM/Hitachi drive to replace the 48GB noname brand with bad sectors. I confirmed that the disk was bad by partitioning it again as a FAT32 and attempting to format it with MS-DOS. The format hit bad sectors and crashed.

Getting the ISO burning to work was a combination of very low speed (4x), switching to brand name disks, using retail software, and luck since even then I had multiple attempts.

So I am free from Microsoft, at the price of at least 20 CD's sent to the shred bin and hours of pointless aggravation that I was too stubborn to blame on bad hardware. Next step - the wireless card:worried:.


The high cost of freedom.:sniff:

Wireless Success
 

This is my first Linux wireless post. I started looking for drivers and/or scripts for my wireless card. A bit of searching with Google turned up driver updates to Ndiswrapper that covered my cards. The install required a little deduction on my part since Bash wasn't recognizing the script, but it's all good now.

:jig::jig::jig:

Congrats! You're making me proud by casting off the MS shackles.

In my years I've found most stubborn Linux problems are actually hardware problems. Either the hardware doesn't have a driver or something is physically wrong.

It may be possible to use that old drive, but I wouldn't trust it. There is a way to format a drive while flagging the bad blocks, but usually more bad blocks come about. I think windows can do that too, but not positive.

When the Windows tools gave up on it, so did I. I'm still a bit unsure about Linux, but there were a lot of good tools on that Ultimate Boot CD and most of them declared the drive to be toast.

It sort of sucked to lose 8GB of storage, though.

Speaking of Ubuntu, I'm having problems trying to get it to work right with a Nvidia GeForce 5500. It tells me (when the card is plugged in) that x-server has failed to start, and when I use the onboard Intel chipset (828 something or other series), I can't get my beloved 1280x 1024 Screen res to be available? Any ideas on how to solve either or both problems, or to make my Linux work on dual monitors?

Get the nvidia Linux drivers
 

Heya,

You can DL the Linux drivers from www.nvidia.com. Ubuntu doesn't include those drivers on their CD, I believe.

Thanks,

Mitch

How do I get those to work, when my x server won't load right, and I get this screen from the 1980's, when I should see ubuntu's desktop?

I booted a feisty fawn CD this week, and noticed that Ubuntu has an option, at least on the CD menu, to boot into a "safe" graphics mode?

Tried the "safe graphics" mode, already. Hell, that was the FIRST thing I tried.

this person had a similar situation and posted a workaround:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=337950

It's weird because it shouldn't happen... a geforce 5500 should be able to handle safe mode. Bad card?

I forget the keyseq to kill X. It's something like CTRL-SHIFT-BACKSPACE or CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE. Do that and then you can download the nvidia drivers using lynx and install them from bash.

As for the missing screen resolutions you have to edit your xorg.conf (i think that's what Ubuntu probably uses). It'll have a section along the lines of:
Subsection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubsection

Just add the resolution to the front of the "Modes" line. In X type CTRL-SHIFT-+/- to change resolutions, I think.

Also try the nvidia forums and http://www.linuxquestions.org/.

I haven't used linux in too long, I used to know this shit by heart.

Oh, I get it a screen from the 80's. If you type 'echo $SHELL' and hit enter does it say something like '/bin/bash'?

(woot, my UA unix account is still active!)

If so, type 'lynx http://www.nvidia.com/'. Navigate to the drivers and download them using the arrow-keys; up and down to select links, right and left to go forward and back. Q will quit.

Back at the shell type 'sh ' and the name of the file you downloaded. Follow the instructions. It should leave a readme in the directory you executed the file in. Read it. Do what it says, which should be something along the lines of open your xorg.conf (use something like pico, or joe unless you already know vim or emacs) and change some lines.

Um...I hope that helps.

OS X is making me soft. What I meant was:
1) try google
2) man man
3) rtfm...newb
4) lern 2 haxxr 1t

I transferred this from another thread.

Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that sits on top of Debian and uses the Gnome desktop (KUbuntu uses KDE).

Actually, I didn't have any real problems with installation or use except for getting a clean copy off of my CD Burner and not realizing that I had a bad hard drive.

The only part that required extra effort was my WiFi card. In Ubuntu 6.10, I had to find a driver for my cards chipset. For 7.04 I used the .INF and .SYS files from my previous search, but I was able to use the included Synaptic package manager to find and install a nice graphical front-end for NDISwrapper, the utility that puts Windows drivers in a Linux 'wrapper'. It took me 1/2 hour the first time to find out the chipset for my WiFi card and find the appropriate driver (I could have just tried the drivers included with my card). It took me 5 minutes to download and use the graphical interface to set my WiFi card up the second time with Ubuntu 7.04.

For what I intend to do with my laptop (Internet, word processing, and spreadsheet), I have had no problems with Ubuntu 6.10. Ubuntu 7/04 was released about a week ago, so I am on the leading edge, but still I haven't had any problems.

Once you get a clean CD burned, installation is about 20 minutes. You boot from the CD to Ubuntu, look around at the features, and if you like it click the Install icon to have it wipe your drive and install.

If you want something closer to %100 Windows look and feel, FreeSpire Linux sounds interesting.

If you are having problems with X with Ubuntu, try using Kubuntu. I was having the problem with my GeForce 6150on my HP 6000 Laptop. I'm hoping the same thing will work on my Desktop that's got a GF 5500.

I'm more cutting edge than Michael Dell
 

It looks like I beat Dell by about four weeks.