Ubuntu Install part II

After having installed Ubuntu on 2 of my own systems I was missing something when I went back to my work system on Windows. I wanted my Ubuntu back! So I decided to install it there too. It would only take a day.. right?

Wrong... Well, ok it hasn't taken more than a day YET but I'm not done.

Setup: A Dell Optiplex GX280 (hey, it wasn't my choice). Problem areas: no PS/2 ports, USB mouse & keyboard only.....

First action: resize the 65GB data partition to about 15 to make some space. I didn't have partition magic around so a colleague suggested using a Knoppix cd and QTParted. Ok. I booted the Knoppix - in failsave mode mind you, normal mode wouldn't boot on this Dell machine! Then the keyboard didn't work.. oooh... well the mouse worked, and fortunately I could do everything I need to do to resize the partition using the mouse. I found a bugreport and solution to the no-keyboard problem, apparently, booting with acpi=off will do the trick I successfully resized the partition, and then booted a Hoary install CD. Started installing the system, no problems, or? No, during the base install the Kernel install failed. It just wouldn't install it. Period.
Ok, let's go back to Warty. Warty installed, no problem. But after the first step, and the first reboot, the system hang on "Setting the System Clock using the Hardware Clock as reference" (That is, the second one, right after network interfaces). I ctrl-c'ed through it, and up came the "We're going to set up your user account now" screen. I entered... nothing. Entered again and the screen with the message started moving upwards..... What? I first thought it had to do with the fact that is was a USB keyboard (it didn't work in knoppix after all), and tried to fix that. I could use Ctrl-Alt F2 to get a login screen (I wasn't aware of this screen-like behaviour where you can have different 'windows' on all ctrl-alt-F key combinations). A colleague tried to help me out with some apt-get updates and upgrades, no avail (Errors Errors). I tried to load usb modules.. nothing helped. After a while one of the real 'Linux Gurus' on campus happened by and tried to fix it while I had to leave for guitar class. When I got back, my colleague, the linux guru, and another linux guru had fixed it to a point that it would boot properly. It had something to do with that hardware clock setting as it turned out. However due to the messing around with the system that had happened to get to that point, X / Gnome wouldn't start... I tried to fix this but x configs are not nice, I always have problems (except on my laptop, but after all, it is a laptop). Anyway, after trying and getting stuck a lot because of xorg.confs that didn't work and also froze the keyboard, I was getting somewhat desperate, and again, opted for reinstall. I installed warty, and ran into the same problem with the hardware clock.. but now at least I knew where to look for the problem!. I googled and found this site which explained you had to edit the following files:

/etc/init.d/hwclock.sh
/etc/init.d/hwclockfirst.sh
/usr/sbin/tzsetup

and add --directisa to every occurence of hwclock in those files. I did and... it worked! I could go through the installation process normally after that and Gnome started normally.. pfeeuw.. After that, it was again a question of Dual screen.. I have an nVidia Riva TNT2 card in that Dell next to it's onboard video. I know they could work simultaneously because I had a dual monitor setup in windows. I fiddled with xorg.conf again, tried to get the same setup as I did at home, though with different device sections this time. But... no. I could get both monitors/cards to work... but not at the same time.... I am pretty sure this has something to do with nVidia insisting on Twinview (which wouldn't work because this is meant for dual head cards I think, I'm pretty sure the onboard isn't going to play nice with it anyway), and not wanting to play nice with Xinerama... More tomorrow......

Day 2:

I arrived at 8:30 AM at work to find a few colleagues walking around the corridor going 'Take it easy, there's no network since 8AM'... Ok... but to get dual screen to work I don't *really* need network. After checking someone else's setup (was using Twinview on dual head nVidia card, no use to me), I decided to move from the 'save' VESA driver to nv for the nVidia card. It hadn't occured to me up until then that trying to use the same driver on two non-identical cards would be problematic. It probably was, because after changing my xorg.conf and rebooting (reloading the xorg.conf resulted in one white screen where the mouse cursor froze), voila!! Dual Screen!!!

Here's the final xorg.conf.