LinLog

It's that time again - time to fix things after upgrading!

This time, I did something unusual for me - rather than copying my existing Ubuntu install over to the new drive, I just did a fresh install. This was partly because I'd been carrying around that same install for at least 3 years (probably more like 5) and partly because it was the 32-bit version, and I wanted to use the x86_64 version, what with the new CPU and all. Of course, I did copy across my home directory, so I'm probably going to see some config problems there, but that's just how these things go.

My first two problems were a little unexpected. The first was that the numeric keypad on my keyboard didn't work. I mean, it worked, in the sense that certain keys responded in approximately the desired way, but it didn't actually type any numbers. Fortunately, a little Googling turned up this post, which had a very quick fix - turn off the "mouse keys" in the keyboard config dialog. Not something I would have expected to be on by default.

The second problem took a few minutes for me to figure out, probably because it's still early. When I fired up Thunderbird and opened Lightning, none of my calendars were there. And I couldn't add them back - the dialog just didn't respond. The solution dawned on me when I tried to install the newer version of Lightning. The install bombed out, complaining that the package didn't support x86_64. Duh! I was still running the old x86 pre-upgrade Lightning binaries that were in my profile directory. Unfortunately, the main Lightning page didn't have any x64 binaries linked, so I had to go hunting. Turns out you can grab them from the contrib directory, so that was an easy fix too.

We'll see what else is broken over the next few days. Hopefully I won't hit too many more snags.

Hooray! Sarah agreed to let me order an upgrade for my desktop!

This is the first big, i.e. multi-component, upgrade I've had in 5 years. I got all the parts on Wednesday, installed them on Thursday, did the trouble-shooting on Friday and this morning, and am not posting this from my fully upgraded machine. And boy is it fast! Or, rather, it's fast compared to my pre-upgrade machine and the piece of crap laptop they gave me to use at work.

My pretext for this upgrade was actually a previous upgrade. For my birthday, I got a $50 Newegg gift certificate, which I used to order a new 1TB Samsung hard drive, because my 750GB Western Digital drive was down to about 20GB free. The up side is that between the gift card and a sale, I only paid $10 for the new drive. The down side was that I forgot to do my homework, so it turned out that the drive only supported 3Gb/s SATA II. Which was great, except that my old motherboard only did 1.5Gb/s SATA. So it was either upgrade, or buy a SATA II controller, which seemed like a waste of money.

So this upgrade was basically replacing the guts of the system - motherboard and CPU. I ordered myself an ASUS M4N68T-M microATX socket AM3 board, with integrated audio and NVIDIA GeForce 7025 video. I might have gotten something a little better, except that I had to set aside $25 of my budget for a new power supply, because my old one was making some troubling noises. For the CPU, I splurged a bit and got a 2.8GHz Athlon II X4 quad-core processor. I topped that off with 4GB of Crucial RAM (because 8GB was outside my price range).

So now I've got a quad-core with decent RAM, a modern video card (even if it is integrated) to replace the 64MB Radeon 7000 I'd been using, which didn't even support Compiz, and a bit under 2TB of total storage. Plus I can use the old 160GB hard drive I took out of my system in another old box which I intend to hook up to one of my TVs a low-end digital video player.

And for the first time in a long time, Ubuntu flies on my system!