deandra.homeip.net

Yesterday afternoon, as I was working on some notes, I turned briefly away from my laptop to get a drink. When I returned, there were odd splotches of colour on the screen, and the machine had frozen solid. "No matter," I thought, "it's done this before. I'll just reset it and be on my way. Hopefully my thumbdrive hasn't been hosed by the rude reset."

Well, there was good news and bad. The good news was that my thumbdrive was intact. The bad news was that I wouldn't be able to find this out until much later, as my laptop now failed its POST (Power-On Self Test). Basically the lights would come on, but the display wouldn't light up, and it wouldn't boot. I was in no mood to deal with it at that moment, and left it until the next day.

First thing the next morning, I set my machine down on my desk at the office and took a good honest whack at it (well, figuratively speaking.) Juggling around the RAM didn't help; neither did pulling all the power for a few minutes. Since I needed my laptop to get actual work done, I didn't spend any more time messing with it. Instead, I cannibalized the DVD burner and 250GB hard disk and dropped them into a second-hand Fujitsu Lifebook (Model T4020D), one of several we'd recently acquired. I'd have taken the 2GB of RAM as well, but the Lifebook didn't like it, probably owing to the fact that Nostromo was a 64-bit AMD machine and the Fujitsu is a 32-bit Intel.

My plan at this point was to simply boot the Lifebook from Nostromo's hard disk, and be on my way. Of course, that plan failed as soon as I reached the GRUB screen and remembered that the Debian installation on Nostromo was a 64-bit userland perched atop a 64-bit kernel. Oops. Time to reinstall. This time, however, instead of PXE-booting the Debian installer, I borrowed a EEEbuntu Jaunty install CD from a coworker.

The CD has the option to run live, that is, to boot from the CD and try the distro without modifying the hard disk at all. I tried this, and was surprised to find that the tablet digitizer and wireless NIC Just Worked. At this point, I clicked the Install icon on the desktop and wandered off to a meeting while packages were installed. Since I had placed my /home filesystem on a seperate partition, I didn't lose anything save for my installed programs.

In fact, installing Ubuntu on this machine was so simple that I haven't even made a HOWTO for it. The new machine's called Endeavour, and will most likely end up being the third laptop that I've worn out in my employ with the school district.

Update: Well, now that I've had some time to play with my new laptop, I've found some things that need improvement. For starters, suspend to disk doesn't work. Since Ubuntu doesn't make it easy (by design) to build your own kernels, I'll probably be switching back to Debian so that I can roll my own kernel using TuxOnIce.