Day One – (Feb 8th, 2013)
My first day went well. I actually started on Thursday night, (the 7th), but I kind of screwed the pooch with my video driver Friday night so I decided to start over and begin fresh.
For now, until I know more about what I’m doing and feel comfortable with my new OS, I will refrain from updating my video driver. It seems that if I use anything other than the Nouveau driver I lose my resolution and Ubuntu thinks my desktop is a laptop capable of only 640×480.
Even after purging the nvidia-current driver and restarting the x-server I was at a loss. I was losing valuable downtime and I was getting frustrated. It didn’t help that it was 3:30 in the morning.
I know, some of you are probably thinking I fail because I just re-install the OS before I fix the issue. Yes, I did, but I didn’t have time to really tinker with my video settings again. I have several other minor things to configure and get running before Sunday that I need to focus on. I have a webcomic to maintain so I need a stable system.
And this all came about because I found a game I really wanted to play called Astromenace. The game was a little choppy but still playable and I wanted to see if maybe using a more updated driver would help. That ended up costing me about 2 hours of frustration. Looking back, I don’t think it was the video driver. I played Trine on my old system without any issues using the same video card, just different CPU and motherboard.
Maybe I’ll give Trine another go, (it’s a super fun game!), but not until I fix the following:
- Access a Windows share that has all of my webcomic files
- Install Dropbox, Handbreak, GIMP and Steam
Last night I was able to successfully install Keepass2, Chrome and get my Ubuntu One account sync’d with my phone. Now I can access my photos and files at home and on the go. I’m also contemplating purchasing 20GB of storage for Ubuntu One. 25GBs for $30 bucks/year isn’t bad.
I have to say, I’m doing great, I’m on task to having a robust, stable and very usable Linux PC.
