Computer Woes

I got an older computer from a friend with the intention of installing Linux and running a server off of it. Something to get my feet wet and learn. I decided to use Ubuntu since it was incredibly easy to install on my laptop.

What I went through with installing Ubuntu this time was really weird. I had the latest distro and it would get to the point where it was supposed to install the base system then it would just error out and not install at all. I have no idea what the problem was b/c I happen to have the previous release of Ubuntu (5.04) and when i ran that, it installed fine. The thing was, I had a problem- it didn't load the driver for my NIC. I went and found that there are in fact Linux drivers for it (surprisingly from Intel) so I downloaded them on another computer, stuck them on my flash drive, stuck the flash drive in the system and--- low and behold the USB drivers didn't load either />
So I stuck the NIC drivers on a floppy (.5 mb) and loaded them that way. Well, of course, the drivers had to be compiled and since Ubuntu doesn't install the necessary (e.g. any) Linux compilers I pretty much gave up. I didn't like alot of the default set-up in the desktop either, maybe it was just b/c it was an earlier version of GNOME. But anyway, I thought the disc I was using to try and install the latest Ubuntu was messed up (why else would the latest stable version not install and the previous one do fine? I take that back, the network interface in the older version was a little strange but that's a different story) so I burned a new disc, reformatted and I'm confronted with the same problem.

I checked the lists for a distro that was old computer friendly and SUSE and Red Hat came up. Red hat looks like it has a much larger user base but SUSE looks really cool and (hopefully) my experience with Ubuntu on my laptop has given me enough resources to draw on to deal with any problems it may contain.

Anyway, that's the long story of it. I'm at work, I finished everything for all of my classes so I'm sitting here reading a book on ASP so I can work on another webpage for my boss. I haven't had any caffiene (I can't believe the espresso machine at the library broke) and I'm hungry. I got the chatbot up on the server for my teacher but it's not going to be readily available to anyone until they do a site update, hopefully in January. I finished my digitial library project, but again, it's not up on the web. That will hopefully change by next week.

technorati tags: linux, ubuntu, drivers