I had intended to create blog post about my frustration with Vista and how I finally installed Linux on my almost one year old PC.  A funny thing happened on the way to Linuxland, a roadblock whose name is Jaunty.  

So arrives the much hailed Jaunty, destined to be the final stake in the heart Vista.  For the few Windows applications I need, I begin by giving less than half of my disk to the new Vista install, a common clean start to a gradually failing Windows operating system.  Suspecting I wouldn't be using Vista anytime soon, I didn't bother with updates or anti-virus, saving those wonderful tasks for a later date.  The next step was the uneventful install of Jaunty, updates, multimedia codecs, and Virtual Box, nothing unusual.

My first indication of problems were burning a audio CD for my daily commute.  One of the touted features of Jaunty was the much improved Brasero CD/DVD burning software.  After building my list of tracks I began the burning process.  Stepping away and returning to my machine, there sat Brasero with a message “normalizing title...”  After a short on-line search, I found there is a bug with the normalizing plug-in for Brasero, that is installed and enabled by default.  No problem, turn off the plug-in and a audio CD is created, albeit with varying volume between tracks.
Read more

After installing 8.04 on my daughter's machine, I realised that the ATI Radeon 9200 128Mb RAM AGP video card was not going to pass muster.

Though it could manage some of the simpler eye candy in Compiz, it was not able to run Celestia or GoogleEarth without serious image problems.

Installing an Nvidia FX5200 I thought would be a breeze. I'd installed it previously in Dapper 6.06 and had no problems. It is a twin-head card on which I ran two 17" monitors.

I installed the card, booted back in to Ubuntu and selected the Hardware Drivers option in the menu, selected to install the drivers and on rebooting...I had a black screen!

Read more