Giving Up and Asking for Help

Here's the add I want to post somewhere on campus:

I NEED HELP WITH LINUX!

I have a machine running Ubuntu 5.10 and the audio and video settings, drivers, and plug ins need work. I want to be able to view movies an animations in a browser, and to run more than one audio app at a time. I'd like to use my USB headset without having to restart the audio program, and to record with the included microphone. My son's machine needs similar tweaks, plus his video card is not configured correctly.

If you are up to the task and can work on the machine in my campus office between 8:00 and 5:00 please email me at xxx@purdue.edu and we can discuss pay and schedule.

What do you think?

Now I just need to figure out where to post it.

Installing CastPodder

I've been using iPodder (now called Juice) on my Windows partition to gather podcasts. Now that I'm running in Ubuntu, I've been looking for a Linux program for the same task. CastPodder is based on iPodder and has a very similar look and function.

I grabbed a .deb package and installed. When I tried to run it, it complained about a missing python module called wxversion. The CastPodder forum wasn't very helpful (since the author and a confused user got into a flame war instead of answering the question).

I found an Ubuntu documentation page that referenced the wxversion package. I decided to try to grab it with sudo apt-get install python-wxversion

No problems! It installed without a hitch. However, CastPodder was now asking for a module called wx. A little more searching through the Ubuntu site found docs for python-wxgtk2.6. After sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.6, I was good to go.

I'm not sure yet if CastPodder will start up automatically at boot time. Next time I reboot (after all of these bittorrents I'm downloading are complete), I'll find out.

I wasn't able to find where the Windows program stored the feeds, so I'm just re-entering them. I only have around 10, so didn't take very long. Plus, I decided to trim a few that I wasn't listening to.

New Motherboard

I had been having trouble the desktop computer (the one that I built back at the beginning of this blog). The network card was acting up, so I put in a new one. Since then, it had been either locking up or rebooting. I played with a bunch of things, and then finally took it into the local shop.

The guy told me that I had cracked the motherboard because I didn't have all of the mounts and screws for the motherboard installed. It's true that they are not all there, so he was probably telling the truth.

I toughed it out for a couple of weeks with the machine running for about 20 minutes at a time.

Today, I installed a new motherboard, processor, and memory. The motherboard is from Biostar USA. The processor is a 2 GHz AMD, and the package from Tiger Direct included 512 MB of memory.

With this new board, I no longer need a separate network card or sound card. I'm still using the ATI video card instead of the onboard video.

So, I got everything installed, and it went pretty easily. After about an hour, I had the board in, all of the jumpers and cables attached, and the case buttoned up and ready to go. I powered it up and went to run Win2K. No luck! I'm getting the error INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. My research is telling me that the problem is the fact that the drive controller has changed. So far, it doesn't look like I'll be able to recover. However, I'll take my time before I do anything drastic like reinstall from scratch.

On to the Linux partition. I fired up Ubuntu, but it wasn't able to start X. Something about an error in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. At the top of the file, I noticed the comments included the command for running the automatic detection for video.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

This utility let me pick the ATI driver, and all was well. I may have to switch to Linux full time if I can't get Windows going.

If I do decide to reinstall, I may move up to WinXP, since I now have a machine that can run it. I can get the upgrade CD from work for $10.

I'm not sure what will happen with GRUB if I install Windows (of any flavor). More research is called for. Meanwhile, I'm trying to convert everything from the Windows side (email address book, podcatcher, Picassa, etc.) over to Ubuntu. It's going slow, but I'm learning as I go.