Chiriquí Chatter

I happen to be one of those people that manage to create work when others would leave well enough alone. That is what I continually do with my computer environment. I hear that a muscle that isn’t used atrophies. That being the case, I guess I am just causing my brain to remain healthy. I always have more work for it to do, whether the work is worthwhile or not.

My latest mental exercise is related to the PC I just got back from the shop. When I bought the components for this PC a year and a half ago, my plan was to put Linux on it. However, before I got to do that, my XP PC hard drive died and I had to move XP to the new PC. Linux got put on the back burner.

When I got a new hard drive for my old PC, I put UBUNTU on it and dedicated the XP PC for the training of English for a couple of students. The older PC now became my primary PC for me to learn Linux.

Then recently, the XP PC started dieing (the problem that was just solved). I replaced the XP PC with my Mac Mini for the English training. I was afraid the XP PC had a costly problem, but it turned out to be minor.

Since, I had now freed up the XP PC, but still wanted to get Linux on that PC, I decided to add a SATA drive to the PC and install UBUNTU on the new drive. My thinking was that it would simplify creating a dual boot system with XP on its disk and UBUNTU on its disk. Since this PC has a AMD 3500 64 bit CPU, I decided to install the 64 bit version of UBUNTU. Time will tell, if that was the best decision, but my current problems have nothing to do with a 64 bit architecture.

Yesterday, I installed the new drive in the PC. I then installed UBUNTU on the new 160 gig drive. This was an easy process. UBUNTU then installed its grub loader on the original hard drive. I rebooted and the system asked me which system I wanted to run, XP or UBUNTU. Success! I now have a fast PC with the capability of running both Linux and Windows XP.

Now the fun and the new challenges begin.

The first problem was that I only had low resolution on the monitor. An Internet search, told me that adding the restricted Nvidia drivers would solve the problem. I installed those drivers and the problem was solved. Now, it took about 15 minutes for UBUNTU to bring down all the updates for the new system.

The next challenge was getting FireFox to run flash, since there isn’t a 64 bit flash plug in. A little more surfing on the Internet provided the solution.

I then added the applications that I wanted. Since I now have a large hard drive, I went ahead and installed the KDE desktop. Now when UBUNTU comes up, I can either run Gnome or KDE.

Since I use Evolution for my email and calendar application, I needed the .evolution files from my other PC for migration. My assumption was that with this hidden directory moved to the new PC, I would have all contacts, saved emails, tasks, calender etc. Well guess again. It was close, but no cigar.

None of the calendar or tasks were copied. This was really my first test of using a backup to restore a Linux system. The new folders that I had created were copied and I have all my saved, sent, and inbox emails.

My contacts are sort of correct. I have some entries that don’t have all of its email addresses. I may have one, but it lost others. Very strange. That and the loss of all of my calendar entries really bug me. If Evolution had moved properly, I would have declared the move a major success. All of my working file directories for my blog (journal, photos, etc.) moved without a problem.

There is no question about the AMD 64-bit PC being faster than my old AMD 32-bit PC. However, until, I get the Evolution contents correct, my production PC is still my old PC. In this case, I would say the move was 2 steps forward and 1 step backward, which is better than 1 step forward and 2 backward. All in all, I am making progress, I am just not there yet.

Tags: Linux