Feed My Frankenstein

Subtitle: The Great Linux Experiment




As you may recall, my oldest boy got many computer upgrades for Christmas. This resulted in a rather large pile of old parts. A couple of weekends ago,I decided to apply some trickle down (or, if you prefer, trickle up) technology upgrades. The younger's comp is rather sluggish, so I decided to upgrade it's hardware. One of the old memory modules bumped it up to the coveted 512 range. The old video card also gave way to better things. I did both of these at the same time, and was rewarded with no video signal. After much trial and error, things worked right, with one exception: Windows decided that the changes were significant enough that it could be a whole new system, and demanded re-activation. OH yea, as an added bonus, in the course of these changes, it lost the network card and sound card drivers. Long story short, (or short upgrade long) it took several hours to do a relatively simple upgrade.

After all that, you'd think I'd have had enough. Not so, being the glutton for punishment that I am, I decided that there was more fun to be had with leftovers. I think it may have been the fact that it was a rainy afternoon. Still having a perfectly viable motherboard and processor as well as extra video cards and smallish hard drives without number, I ventured into the basement storage area. From the dank depths, I retrieved a computer I had trash picked a few years back. Primarily I had got it for the case itself, as well as the A drive, which I never seem to have enough of, even though they are almost never used. Having acquired it from out of the rain and never done a thing with it, I first connected it and fired it up. Worked just fine, although it was an interesting history lesson. It was running Windows 95, which I have no experience with, and featured ISA type cards, as well as a passive heat sink on the processor. After a bit of snooping to see what was contained therein, I unceremoniously yanked out its innards, and was shocked at how well the motherboard fit in its place.

For an operating system, I selected a free downloaded Linux version called Ubuntu. You download it and burn it to a CD, insert it into a CD drive before the operating system has started on any computer, and it runs "live" without being fully installed on the hard drive from the CD. I've been wanting to try this for a while, and here was the perfect opportunity. It takes some time to start up, but it was an impressive and quite different experience from Windows. Upon starting, it immediately recognized the video and network cards. The sound card, I know worked at least once, but not having any media on this computer didn't have much chance to explore. Many idiosyncrasies that I have yet to completely work out, such as not seeming to be able to access the A drive to save or retrieve pictures (Or any other) files from, and the pop-up blocker that came on when I attempted to add a picture to this post. Also, Java and Flash would need to be installed. Since I'm running it from a CD, there is no point in attempting this right now. A lot of the things that it comes with work remarkably well, such as the spell checker, which tells me every time I misspell a word.



Running from a CD causes some delay in running. I have attempted several times to install it on the hard drive. It acts as though it installs fine, but every time afterward, it gives a message of boot drive failure. Don't know why. I'll try the users forum and see if anyone has an answer. After I see if this will post from Linux.