Going nuclear

[cosmolinguist]

Oh man, I can't tell you how happy I am to be here. Oh Semagic and Trillian, how nice to see you again; I was beginning to think we'd be parted for much longer.

I turned the computer on yesterday and so many things went wrong that it took me an absurdly long time just to figure out what they were, much less do anything about them. It didn't help that the first problem involved it shutting itself down as soon as it finished booting up (which gave me nasty flashbacks to the only new computer I ever had, which did that almost right away and at increasingly frequent intervals, and which I finally gave back to my parents because it was just a big paperweight for me; it ended up needing a new motherboard), but that went away on its own (luckily, as persistence is the only real method I have of dealing with that sort of thing).

What had been a fine (well, as much as it ever is when the power supply is making that weird noise and the monitor gets weirdy flickery sometimes and the whole thing takes about eight years to start up, which is coincidentally about how old most of its components probably are), functioning system when I shut it down the day before was suddenly an excuse for Andrew to comment how happy he was that his wife knows what the BIOS is, for me to ask him for sellotape and a safety pin (which he was, bizarrely, able to produce!), for me to have to get out my screwdrivers, and for my traditional computer-fixing flesh wound.

My Nuclear Option didn't even work; when I got this computer (a cast-off from someone else's job, and not like an IT or office job where they update these things frequently) I was already looking at it askance, letting it know that as soon as it tried to get funny with me I was going to put Linux on it. So of course it's been on its very best behavior for the last year and a half, by far the most stable XP setup I've ever had the pleasure to know, and so I never bothered to get around to installing it (though I have been getting a bit wistful about Linux again in recent weeks, and I believe I did make overly-excited noises, checking my e-mail at envoy's, just to see GNOME again).

Speaking of which, I said "Ubuntu" when Andrew asked me what he should be downloading and burning for me. Is that good? Ubuntu was just barely coming into existence when I stopped using Linux; I heard things about it that were good enough to want to try it, but I never had a chance to get around to it. Yeah, that's how long it's been. Is that good, d'you think? I know my friends list mght not be as *nix-geek oriented as it was three years ago (three years ago! can that be right? damn!) but it's worth a shot: let me know whatever you think I might like to know, and I'm quite open to other suggestions too. I can't believe how out of this loop I am.

Anyway, this "ha I can put Linux on you!" was all for nowt, as I'd forgotten this computer has never even believed that it has a CD-ROM drive (it does, though; I can see it, right there), and even trying to swap it for the other one we've got (from the computer that this one eventually replaced after it gave up the ghost) made no difference. I can't even tell if there was something wrong with the old CD-ROM too, if there's something wrong with this computer's ability to recognize such a thing, or if we really didn't plug that cable into the right place (it had been completely missing in this computer before, but seemed to play an important part in the computer I got the old CD-ROM from, so I gave it the old college try.

It's a moot point now that we are now in the process of seeing if Dell will let us pay in installments. We were hoping it'd wait until after Christmas, as we have a lot of things to pay for by the end of this year, but my computer throwing a fit certainly got our attention, so now this has scooted up a few notches in our list of priorities. That's my Really Nuclear Option.

I'd be getting a new laptop. I can't wait. I can't yet believe it, actually I've never had a new computer, other than the aforementioned evil one that never worked properly. I still have the unspoken (and unexamined) conviction that space for mp3s on the hard drive, burning CDs, watching DVDs, and wireless internet are only for other people.

Comments

[ex-humanfema327.livejournal.com]

ubuntu is great its very easy to install and use. and it plays drums when it starts up.

[diffrentcolours]

A lot of people really rate Ubuntu, but I've never gotten on with it. I much prefer the Debian GNU/Linux on which it's based. The developers seem to care more about letting people making an informed choice about free software which is important to me.

I also find having more power and control available to me if I need it to be useful; The only time I ever managed to install Ubuntu involved downloading some alternate CD image which was the only thing that let me choose the boot options I needed.

My experience is also that Debian's support is far better than Ubuntu's - I was told about the abovementioned alternate CD image by a fellow Debian user after the Ubuntu support forums had failed to help me.

[cosmolinguist]

I knew that (if this caught your eye at all) you'd say that. :) I told Andrew as much yesterday. He too pointed out that it's based on Debian (which, if I remember correctly, is also something I've never tried thought I've meant to because I've heard good things about it) and that it's incurred the wrath of the free-software people.

As I said it's kind of a moot point for now with the "I see only floppy and hard drives here!" computer, but the new desktop will certainly have some flavor of Linux on it, so I shall keep this in mind!

Be careful though, if I do end up with Debian; there is some appeal to me in choosing something that I know someone (and indeed someone nearby!) uses, as I always seem to have a bunch of stupid questions, and I'm sure that'll be even more true now than it was when I was new to this, as three years is enough time to forget much more than I ever knew. :)

[diffrentcolours]

Don't worry, I seem to have managed mostly to support greyeyedeve and taimatsu's Debian GNU/Linux questions so far.

[taimatsu]

Indeed, I have regular support needs which you deal with very well :)

[cosmolinguist]

See! I knew it was a boyfriend-type thing!

[cosmolinguist]

My old tech-support (as of course I was using his distro of choice at the time, as my exposure to Linux was ALL HIS FAULT!) came from my then-boyfriend. Thus in my experience it's a special privilege that comes with the boyfriend territory. :)

[diffrentcolours]

I can often be found voluntarily supporting complete strangers on #debian on irc.freenode.net so you can always ask me there ;p

[cosmolinguist]

One of the good things I have heard (but of course cannot corroborate ) about Debian is that it has unusually good and friendly support, which is just the sort of thing a person in my position likes to hear!

Duff IDE Cable?

[diffrentcolours]

Your unrecognised CD-ROM could be several things - a duff connector on the motherboard, a duff IDE cable, problems with conflicting master/slave devices on the same channel, dodgy power connector to the drive, or indeed a broken device.

I'm assuming that you're checking the BIOS' opinion of the existence of the drive rather than the operating system's. It's probably worth pulling the data and power cables out the back of the hard drive, and putting them into the CD-ROM, just to see whether it's recognised then.

Re: Duff IDE Cable?

[cosmolinguist]

With that level of variables, and my increasing level of apathy (and yes, not being entirely sure these days which one is the IDE cable, though I know I could find out again easily, but that's the level of ignorance we're talking here :) ), and the fact that Andrew was apparently wrong about it being a software thing (just as he was wrong about it being the mouse, because it was in fact the keyboard as I'd originally surmised!), is enough for me to wait until we have the shiny new computer(s) to mess around with this any more.

Or at least to wait until tomorrow. I may not have bothered to put the screws back in or slide the case back on, but I'm still not taking the damn thing apart again just yet.

Thanks for all the suggestions, though; I really do appreciate it even when I'm feeling lazy. :)

[ethernight.livejournal.com]

Ubuntu pretty much took over the linux desktop scene a couple of years ago. And for good reason I think -- it strikes an excellent balance between sane and obvious defaults, and allowing you the power to dig into the nuts and bolts if you want to wander off the beaten path. I'm not sure what your familiarity with linux is, but I consider Debian to be reserved for pretty hard-core geeks, who aren't satisfied with their system unless they have built every bit themselves.

In regards to the CD-ROM drive, last time I had that problem, it was the master/slave pins. If you should feel inclined to poke at it again, take the drive out and look at the back (where the cables plug in). There should be a series of pins with a iity-bitty bit of plastic covering two of the pins. (See the third image down (http://www.fonerbooks.com/r_cd.htm).) The cover is called the jumper. A diagram on the drive to show you which position the jumper should be in for the master vs. slave position.

Grab some tweasers, and try switching it from master to slave or vice versa. (I think you probably want it on master, but it depends on the configuration of your other drives, and how they are connected to the motherboard.)

Good luck. :)

[comradexavier.livejournal.com]

You forget, perhaps, that before you had the aforementioned evil one, you did have a new computer: the laptop that your parents purchased for your first year of college. I'm surprised because, aside from being generally unspectacular and having a network card with a wimpy dongle, it was reasonably reliable.

Ubuntu is a good choice of distribution. Even I now use it, as I have found that most of the time its software selection and defaults are what I would have chosen, had I spent the time to select, install, and configure software for a particular task. I switched after spending three hours getting my scanner to work (again) when a Gentoo update broke it. I realized that, working full-time, I don't care all that much about perfectly customizing the software of a computer I use almost exclusively for scanning (as my scanner is an eight-year-old oddity with decent Linux drivers but none for OSX).

[karaksindru.livejournal.com]

Awww... *hugs* What sort of cable was the one missing? There should have been two, possibly three: power, EIDE and possibly audio ... but I see diffrentcolours has already mentioned that ...

I have no opinions on which distro you should use, save for "you probably don't want a source-based distro like gentoo, slackware or linux-from-scratch" .. ;)

[cosmolinguist]

Sadly I don't even know enough about cables to describe t other than by appearance. The old computer I took the CD-ROM out of, to swap it, had three cables attached to it and I thought maybe the reason the one I was trying to use wasn't working was because it was missing one of them. So I tried attaching that but there didn't seem to be a really useful-looking place to hook the other end of the cable to anyway. I'm so out of my league. :) Not a hardware person. I'm still happy to give up on it, as long as it keeps working, until a new computer is forthcoming.

I used to use Slackware, as that's what comradexavier was using at the time and I was introduced to it after I lent him my laptop and he asked if he could put Linux on it, so that's how I got it back. I actually thought it was pretty cool because you could use all the IM clients from one program. :) I liked Slackware well enough, but I could never install it myself. Same with Gentoo, which a friend-of-a-friend actually tried to put on my computer a couple of years later after a hard drive died and had to be replaced. He was there until about three in the morning but couldn't get it to work, and he actually know what he was doing, so I've never even been interested in trying that. :)