Gutsy Gibbon - 2

Ah... Staying up till 4:30am installing Ubuntu 7.10 did not end too well. It turned out that Ubuntu installation was not as breezy-easy as some enthusiasts claim to be.

Huddles I had to overcome to make my computer boot up properly:
1) I had to learn how to burn the Live CD (Installation CD). The fact that I forgot how to burn an image (.iso file) was one thing, but having to burn in a slo-mo (I used x8 speed) was another thing. Perhaps I was just being too impatient, but I burned 4 CD's at higher speeds and they all turned out faulty! Blank CD's are really cheap nowadays, but still, what a waste (especially of time)!

2) Some may attribute this to my old hardwares, but after installing OS and reboot, the screen would go blank. After some painful research, I found that it was to do with Ubuntu startup splash screen (that one with Ubuntu logo and a progress bar underneath). /etc/usplash.conf file did not have the right resolution setting (for my monitor whose maximum resolution is 1024x768) when installed, so it would mess up the graphics card and wouldn't display anything on the screen. Fortunately, I wasn't the only one having this issue and smart people posted up how to fix this problem on ubuntu forum.

3) Some of the hardware config setting was too brittle I found. When I finally got the above problem fixed, and logged on to my computer, I was trying to look around and see what this OS can do with my computer. When I was looking at my display setting, my monitor refresh setting seemed to be set a bit too high (from my memory), and with an intention to prevent hardware damage, I tried lowering refresh rate to 70Hz from 75Hz, but that suddenly gave me another blank screen! I was able to restart and login as root in recovery mode, but I couldn't start x-windows when I booted up normally. So what did I have to do? Re-installation.

4) Now, I still wanted to check out that famous desktop special effects (compiz/beryl), and I couldn't make it work with my current drivers. I tried downloading the latest driver from ATI website, and after installation, guess what? Another blank screen... damn... Well, I'm gonna give another shot at it still.

Will update if I finally get the whole thing working, but might take a while...