Assorted Babble From a Faux Linux Geek

When my wife’s 800 MHz P3 Debian machine developed onboard video problems I couldn’t fix I bought a new motherboard for an 800 MHz Duron CPU I already had and just swapped out the board.   I assumed that switching from an Intel P3 to an AMD Duron would force me to reinstall Debian so I was pleasantly surprised when the computer booted up and seemed to work.   Everything continued to work well until I tried updating the system with Synaptic.   A couple of updates kept crashing so, after the fourth failed attempt, I decided to go ahead and reinstall the OS but that proved to be a mistake.   The Debian install finished on a command line with no GUI.   Egads, a catastrophe and me with no minions, what do I do now?.   My solution was to start over with my brand-new-spiffy SAM Linux CD that I bought from Edmunds Enterprises but the computer wouldn’t boot up with SAM so I tried Xubuntu 6.10 which booted up just fine, installed easily, and I figured I had it under control at that point but not this time.   The video display freezes after about an hour, the keyboard and mouse cease to function and hitting Ctrl+Alt+Delete has no effect on it at all.   I’m not sure what’s happening but I expect that either the RAM or the CPU is overheating and causing the freeze up.   I’ll try it with the covers off and see what happens.

One of my friends from our local Linux Users Group commented that he thinks I’ve become a Linux geek but I don’t think so.   I wish he was right, but a true Linux geek would have identified the problem and corrected it instead of trying different things until something seemed to work.

In other, less depressing, news, I received my first-ever purchase from cdbaby.com today and loved it.   "What purchase was that?" you ask?   I’m glad you asked, I need to brag about this.   What I bought was a CD entitled "Journey Home" by Roger Wang who’s a very smooth guitarist and, if that sounds interesting, you can listen to some clips here.

Lastly, I promised to mention my favorite health care worker in spite of the sneaky way he pointed out everything I’ve done wrong, I have to give the guy a break because, like me, he loves words, word play and quotations, not to mention which he’s a loyal reader of our ezine.

Don Crowder