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So once again I have discovered that Linux is no where near ready for the average user… Don’t get me wrong, it is much more powerful/flexible/fun/easy to use that any version of Windows that I’ve kicked the tires on. It’s just that free software means that not everyone works on what everyone else needs!

A case in point seems to be the graphics drivers that are available for the common user. They really are quite minimal and as such makes it very difficult to “push” a modern graphics card to do what it does best – display amazing graphics.

I unfortunately wasn’t paying attention when I purchased my new system and got it with an ATI Radeon graphics card. Which in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, if one runs Windows, however when one is trying to run Ubuntu it becomes a pain in the butt.

I had originally wanted my next computer to have an Nvidia chipset instead of Radeon, mainly because there “appeared” to be more support for it out there. Which I admit doesn’t necessarily relate to better support, but there seems to be more of it to choose from.

So I was stuck with trying to use the driver that Ubuntu released, namely…. xorg-driver-fglrx ( try and say that one ten times fast! )

At first it seemed to work quite well, the graphics performing as I thought they probably should. But…. I rebooted the computer ( after properly shutting it down of course ) and when the computer tried to come back up, that is where the grief started…. The display was scrambled and I had not way of logging back in ( and unfortunately it had been a while since the driver had been installed – so I initially didn’t even know what had caused the problem! )

I spent a long time researching and testing, trying to find what the problem was, and then in my searching I stumbled across a little posting that was actually a bug report 367741 ( a report listing a known problem with the software ) which supposedly means someone somewhere may eventually get around to fixing whatever causes this issue.

Oh, and the solution was to completely remove and purge the software from my system… Everything ( graphics wise that is ) worked fine after that was done. For those who might want a quick answer/solution do the following:

1. reboot your system into command line mode
2. run the command “sudo apt-get remove –purge xorg.driver-fglrx”
3. and reboot

Of course I only found out this morning ( as I was about to write this article ) that another hiccup occurred that may or may not have been related to the graphics driver problem…. but that’s for another day.

Good Luck!

I really, really thought that I understood everything I needed to do and know about setting up my little HP1000 printer on Ubuntu…. that was until I got a new machine and upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04… boy was I wrong!

First things first… why a new machine? Well my goal was to move everything eventually over to Ubuntu, but unfortunately some things ( read Windows programs ) are not yet available or not even being considered for Ubuntu which meant that I had to run them in an emulator/simulator.

There are several great packages in the linux community, including Wine and Virtualbox to name just two. Unfortunately, they both require disk space, and more importantly, dedicated memory… and this is where I ran into problems. My old beast was starting to get long in the teeth… which isn’t bad for a 5+ year old computer.

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I know I haven’t typed anything for a while, but trust me it isn’t because I haven’t had anything to talk about. I have actually been busy doing all sorts of little things that have added up to a whole lot of time, and who knows may generate an article or two if ever I get the time to write them! 🙄

I thought I would do a quick note ( well we’ll see how quick I guess… ) on something that I have just discovered and it makes my head hurt that no one has found an easy solution to it yet!

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So, as I have mentioned, I’m still putting the pieces back to together after my debacle with the Debian overwrite of my Ubuntu installation.

What has really hampered my recovery effort, is that I could only work on my main computer, no matter how I tried, researched, reinstalled or pleaded with all my systems, I could not get any external connectivity to my main computer from my other computers around the house.

This was really perturbing, because everything and I mean EVERYTHING was working almost flawlessly before the disaster. One of the easiest things that I set up  was my XWindows session ( essentially a remote desktop access ) was extremely simple to set up once I installed Cygwin ( a Linux operating system that runs within Windows ) on my XP machine. I just followed the guide ( the best directions that I have found on doing this are right here ) and everything worked first time almost effortlessly!

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One bright star in my recent Linux system corruption, was that my computer was dual-booting (could boot into Windows or Ubuntu), so that even thought my Linux partition was corrupted, I could still go back to Windows to do my research on what to do next.

One of my big concerns was, what all was impacted during the overwrite of Debian on top of Ubuntu. And especially were all my documents and files still okay and if so, could I rescue them if I had to overwrite my corrupted system with a new installation.

The big problem was that Windows could not read the advanced file system structures on my Ubuntu drives (in my case EXT3 ) and partitions. So the first thing I needed to find was a tool that allowed me to do that, and was free… So off to Google I went.

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