It’s often not until you loose something that you actually realise the value of what you have. That seems to be true of Windows. Having got Ubuntu running on my new server it really makes me appreciate just how well Windows works straight out of the box.
The stability as well. Ubuntu keeps crashing on boot up. It’s also very slow compared to Windows, it needs time to think to do everything and this is a brand new machine. It’s configuration also leaves a lot to be desired, not only is it simply missing the resolution I want (it’s not a problem with the monitor as I’m running the resolution on my Windows box, could be the graphics card though so I don’t want to point the finger too sharply at Ubuntu) but it has also misaligned the screen so that it’s too far to the right leaving me with a black strip down the left hand side and my shut down button missing off the right side of the screen.
As for configuration, I’m not taking to the Linux file structure. It wasn’t really a problem in my test box when I only had one hard drive but this whole unified file system doesn’t make much logical sense to me. I can see why it would be good but I much prefer having my hard drives and optical drives are separate entities. Not that it’s much of a problem as Ubuntu is blissfully unaware of my other two hard drives. I know I have to mount them but the point is, Windows would just do this for me. Ubuntu doesn’t even seem to have any kind of device manager to let me set these things up.
In my quest to get RAID working I re-install a DVD drive into the machine and stick the Ubuntu install CD in. It takes a good 10 minutes to boot LiveCD up because of the endless string of Buffer I/O errors that appear. Once it finally loads I decided GParted might do what I need. I’m wrong of course, it can’t detect any devices. Any. So I decided to try a re-install. Same thing.
Giving up on that I decide to play around with the BIOS some more. I eventually manage to find the option to enable RAID (it’s disabled by default) and now there is a RAID screen that appears for literally no more than a second with instructions on how to set up RAID. My manual for my motherboard hasn’t heard of any of this btw. In fact I’m not even sure what does it as I changed two settings from SATA mode to RAID mode (apparently if you use RAID you aren’t using SATA).
Out of interest when I first got back in after my break the machine wouldn’t do anything. I would turn it on but no output to the monitor or beeping. Now when I try to boot it stops at verifying DMI data pool. This is after the JMicro stuff spends a minute or two detecting my DVD-ROM every time I turn it on. So I insert the Edgy release and see if that will work. That takes me to the boot screen which locked the first time. Second time lucky maybe?
It spends a bit of time loading using the progress bar that goes back and forth. This then goes mental, throws a load of random characters accross the screen, freezes for 30 seconds, goes black with a blinking cursor, goes totally black then loads a blank orange desktop. Oh and guess what, yes, it’s misaligned the screen again. Edgy can’t work out the correct time like version 7 can do apparently. Having entered the settings the partion manager loads. It sees all 3 hard drives despite the fact two are now supposed to be configured in RAID.
I try to boot up the fresh install only for it to hang on the verifying DMI pool data. I go back into the BIOS and set everything back from RAID mode to SATA mode. This time it passes the DMI pool data verification and prints the words GRUB (the boot launcher) underneith before hanging.
I hate computers.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.