Recently, my brother’s PC eventually packed up. It’s about five years old, and seen many Windows installations. He’d filled it up to the brim with crap until it stopped working. Nice 
Rather than do the bi-annual Windows XP clean install, I ripped a disc and jammed in the latest Ubuntu. Karmic Koala it’s called.
This is the first time I’ve installed Ubuntu as opposed to Ubuntu Studio. Installation was a bit daunting. It does it all through the Live CD but it has to boot up like that first, and it took a while. I left it with a black screen for a few hours, came back to it, and selected “Install” off of the desktop.
After that it went okay. There were a few issues.
Look ma, no wires!
Getting the wireless working was the same as on my garage PC. I go through this NDIS Broadcom wireless walk-through and it works like a charm. NDIS is Windows driver and I’d rather use native Linux ones, but it works and that’s ultimately all I care about 
I can see clearly now!
After all the trouble getting nVidia binaries working on Ubuntu Studio Jaunty (with the real-time kernel) I wasn’t looking forward to any graphics driver installation. As with the wireless, the graphics are also very similar (Gefore 5 and 6 series). However, the binaries in Ubuntu Studio Karmic worked fine straight away fresh out of the Hardware Drivers GUI (a tool for installing 3rd party binaries). Thankfully, it was the same on Ant’s PC. Nice one Karmic 
Notifications kept popping up down a bit too far. I’m not sure if this is intentional, but I found an Ubuntu forums post to sort it out (again, still searching for that link ).
What did you say?
Then we had sound issues. I tried multiple Ubuntu forum tutorials trying to get it working but no luck. The first problem was how distant the sound was. I wasn’t getting the right frequencies, any stereo field and MP3 compression sounded crap. Turns out I’d dislodged the speaker’s mini-jack
My bro tried out Battle for Wesnoth, having played it on an openSUSE distro I’d tried out years ago. No sound though. I followed a simple Ubuntu forums tutorial linking to a blog post, fired up a deb file and got it up and working in seconds! (I’ve misplaced the link for now but I’ll keep searching for it!)
Jerk, jerk, jerk!
So with the sound almost fixed, there was one last issue. On my machine, Ubuntu Studio Karmic with Compiz and the works, is damn smooth (far smoother than Jaunty). Yet this machine was clunky as hell. The log-on sounds we’re stuttered. They still are, but they’re a lot better and I’m putting it down to low spec and filing it under I-don’t-care.
Spending some time in the terminal, I was getting error messages spat out at me left right and centre over and over again at a fierce rate of repetition. They went like this:
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.512447] ata4.01: configured for PIO4
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.513091] ata4: EH complete
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.516020] ata4: drained 32768 bytes to clear DRQ.
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584267] ata4.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584275] ata4.01: ST_FIRST: DRQ=1 with device error, dev_stat 0x59
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584289] ata4.01: cmd a0/00:00:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 pio 36 in
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584291] cdb 12 00 00 00 24 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584293] res 59/00:01:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x2 (HSM violation)
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584298] ata4.01: status: { DRDY DRQ ERR }
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584332] ata4: soft resetting link
Daunting, eh?
The logs kept growing, and I couldn’t open the Log File Viewer because it couldn’t take it (as expected). I begged for help on the forums but because the query was so hardware specific and such a generic error the cry was in vein.
Now I don’t know much of what those errors mean at all. A bit of Google’ing led me to stories of duff hard-drives, but I wasn’t buying any of that! I fiddled around with the insides and fixed it by un-plugging the CD/DVD-ROM drive. So it must’ve been a dodgy cable or unit. But again, I don’t care why, it works. Yay
There, Perfect!
It’s sweet. From all that error checking, I’ve beaten the first level of lagno (GNOME game, Reversi clone) which I’m very happy about. Even Rhythmbox doesn’t jerk (haven’t tried it in the garage properly yet – far too cold ). I love it, and my brother can now study his A-levels, play on Wesnoth and browse with Chrome.
Also, I hate to admit it, but it’s not bad looking. The brown kind of glows, the fonts are bubbly. It makes me smile when I use it. (I feel like I should be telling this to a shrink!) I’ve got no proper gripes and it’s helping me use my PC in the greatest ways possible.
I haven’t got down to any major road testing with Ubuntu Studio Karmic yet, mainly because it’s so damn cold in that garage. I’ve got band demos to record and websites to build. Studio Karmic will get a thrashing. But for now, I’m very happy with what I’ve got. Thank you Ubuntu
