Tuxi’s Blog

This post is labeled as Part One because it only discusses the upgrade of my desktop/web server/ file server. If I run into other issues on my other machines, I’ll post related parts.

The machine in question is a desktop which I had built for me while I lived in Indonesia. The motherboard is an Asus P4P800E-Deluxe with an Intel P4 HT processor. The graphics card is based on the Nvidia 7600GT.

My first issue was that, after the update, the nvidia driver wouldn’t work. The good news is there is now a failsafe X-server configuration that allows one to modify the parameters in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file using a GUI which doesn’t expose the workings of the file. I was able to get up and running, but the way this works wouldn’t be obvious to a newbie .

I finally discovered that the restricted modules for the generic kernel I had weren’t installed! I manually installed the restricted modules, manually modified my xorg.conf file to point to the nvidia driver and did
sudo modprobe nvidia
I then logged out, restarted the x-server with ctrl-alt-backspace, and I was using the nvidia driver. (A side note, somehow I had kdm in a configuration where it was eating up resources, but a reboot took care of this.)

My second issue so far is that the Ubuntu distribution upgrade decided to use the gcj iced-tea java plugin instead of the sun plugin that I prefer to use. After I found this, I removed the plugin using adept and manually creating a symbolic link to the plugin I wanted in ~/.mozilla/plugins folder.

Both of these issues will cause newbies headaches (or they won’t realize they could have it better). Fortunately, the fixes really aren’t that hard. I consider the situation I faced both a weakness in the upgrade scripts and a strength in the configurability of Linux.

(P.S., I’ll also be happy when Deepest Sender is working with FF 3. I hate WordPress’ writing interface and prefer to hand code the html, but I can no longer find the setting to edit in html mode .)