Ubuntu Studio 9.04

I backed up my desktop at home (mostly), took it out to the shop and blew out all the accumulated crud with an air compressor and packed it my car along with a few other projects.

At work I downloaded the latest version, placed a new DVD blank in the DVD-RW drive, chose the "iso" and clicked "write to disk". Nothing. Often a reboot helps, so I restart the machine and ... nothing. I pull the plug, wait for a few seconds and power up. Nothing. Finally I remove the blank DVD, power up and try again. Same story. This machine will not boot with a blank DVD in the drive. I repeat the exercise a few more times and finally resign myself to replacing the DVD drive.

This time it works and I start burning the "iso". This is going to take a few minutes so I surf the web for installation stories. Even the ones that reported eventual success indicated this might be a bad idea. But "fools rush in".

The base installation goes much better than the horror stories so I start the updates. There is a new kernel so I reboot after the updates and ... ugly video and no sound. Even worse, the little widget that downloads and installs the proprietary drivers disappeared.

I want some drivers and codecs which are not in the base installation so I go through the usual process of downloading and installing the stuff that plays DVDs, decodes AVIs and DIVxs. I also want to do some development work so I download and install build-essential and devscripts.

It is time to go home (the promise of ribs keeps me on schedule). I hook up the machine to the big LCD and ... nothing. I hook up the little LCD and their are a few encouraging flickers and flashes. I can even log in but ... still no sound and ugly video.

I reread the installation stories and while avoiding much of their gloom, I realize I must install the proprietary drivers for the NVIDIA chipset. But I can't see anything. Fortunately, Ubuntu lets you drop into a command line window and I install "nvidia-glx-180". There are several others but the numbers are smaller than 180. A reboot and the little LCD works. Remove the little LCD and finally everything works, video, sound, everything.

But it is slow. I tweak the desktop a bit and it is slower.

I realilze I now have a machine that is running the latest real time kernel, has an ugly desktop and is excruciatingly slow. I'll reload Gnome today.

If you get the same urge, be very quiet and maybe you'll hear tarvid whisper in your ear "Don't do it. Please."