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Old 05-18-2016, 10:47 AM   #685
DMcCunney
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Join Date: Aug 2007
Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregg Bell View Post
Hey Dennis. Thanks. Thing is this computer is only about 3 or 4 years old. It's 64 bit. It's pretty nice.
That's old in current terms, but not positively ancient, as my Fujitsu is.

You can still get 32 bit versions of Windows (including Win10) and Linux, but I don't believe you can get a new PC that's 32 bit. The PC world has all moved to 64 bit hardware.

From the average user's point of view, 32 bit vs 64 bit is mostly irrelevant. The difference between them is the address space supported. 32bit tops out at 4GB. 64bit is an order of magnitude larger. 64bit machines will permit you to install more RAM and have more programs loaded simultaneously. But you likely don't care if the programs are 64bit - an application that needs more than 4GB address space is unusual. I run 64bit programs if there is a 64 bit version, but don't care if there isn't.

Quote:
I hear you. The installation instructions for many things leave stuff out. Like you're supposed to be a psychic as to what's needed. So frustrating. I usually need two or three information sources to install anything.
I normally don't, but I've been pounding my head against these sorts of walls for decades. I start with background knowledge about what's going on that you may not have.

Quote:
I've got two Dell Latitude 505 laptops. I just wanted to run Libreoffice on them and use them as word processors. People told me there was no way. Well, at first I installed Xubuntu on one of them and although the LO wasn't bad, everything else was molasses.
See my earlier comments about installing Xubuntu on my Lifebook.

I just looked at the specs. They look reasonable for that usage, depending on installed RAM - I'd want to max them the the full 2GB possible.

Quote:
Got rid of Xubuntu and installed MX-14 and the LO works great. The other laptop I put Porteus on and that works even better. (So much for the naysayers.)
What are the specs on the machines? The main variable I'd look at would be RAM, where more is better.

(On my old 32 bit dual-core desktop, I dual-booted WinXP and Ubuntu. My preference is to install different OSes to different drives. The motherboard I was using [an emergency replacement for a failed one] had a quirk: it supported four IDE devices, period. I had a PCI IDE expansion card that added more IDE connectors, and had more than four IDE devices in the system. Things would work fine for a bit, but at some point, one of the IDE devices was likely to simply disappear.

I had that happen to the drive Ubuntu was installed on while I was in Ubuntu. Ubuntu tries to do everything in RAM, so I didn't even notice it had occurred until I was trying to install updates and the install was failing because the file system the updates were to be written to no longer existed.

I can only imagine what might have happened had I been in Windows and the Windows drive dropped out... )

Quote:
I can't really tell yo anything else. Yeah, the information (the DDR3 etc) just shows up as if it's on the terminal. It isn't the actual terminal (I don't think anyway) but it's data on a black screen.
No, it's not the terminal emulator. It's the device console. Sounds like stuff put up by the BIOS in the boot process.

Quote:
Nothing happens. The computer gyrates (the red light comes on intermittently as if it's loading) for about 2-3 minutes and then the "No Input Signal" window comes on and then the monitor shuts off.
You get that because the system isn't generating anything to display on the screen. It doesn't necessarily mean nothing is actually happening - only that if something is happening it isn't creating visible progress indicators.

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I don't need to preserve much. I would be more concerned about the stuff that syncs, like Mega (cloud storage), Dropbox, the favorites in the Firefox browser and a few other things.
Those are easy enough to preserve.

Quote:
And the other kernel is 15.10, not 15.04 LTS.
I know. But if you did wipe and redo from scratch, and 16.04 didn't work, I'd use 15.04 as it's also an LTS release. As a rule, I recommend LTS releases for most cases. You still get security fixes and installed program updates, but you don't get a new version of Ubuntu until the next LTS version is ready. Unless you have special needs or like to stay bleeding edge, I see no reason to got for "point" releases of Ubuntu itself.

Quote:
But there's a new development. I was uncomfortable about that GRUB_DEFAULT=4, and today there was a software update that I installed. Well, as it was installing I watched the "details" in the terminal. There were a ton of things of course but also several Warnings! that anything other than "0" in the GRUB DEFAULT would not be recognized. (or something along those lines anyway).

So I went in and changed the grub default back to zero. Then (the software update called for it) I did a reboot.

The reboot started out as the same old same old. Totally not typical. No Dell screen. No Xubuntu screen. And I can't remember if there was the DDR3 and Master/Slave stuff that is usually there (I don't think it was there). So it was just the blank screen and then the "No input signal" window and then the monitor turned off.

Well, in the past when the computer booted to the 16.04LTS kernel (from the power switch) I always waited about 17 minutes before I scrolled the mouse and then the screen would be up and populated with icons (all normal). So today on this latest reboot I waited the 17 minutes and low and behold the screen was up. All normal.

I ran the
Code:
uname -r
command and it was indeed running the latest 16.04LTS kernel.

I was tempted to see if I could get into the latest 16.04LTS kernel via the Grub loader (to bring it up faster) but then I thought I didn't want to mess with things. I can live with the 17 minute start time. (Otherwise, I'd have the 15.10 kernel running and then are the software updates for the 16.04LTS backward compatible and apply to the 15.10?)

This way, hopefully, when the 16.10 (short term) upgrade comes along it will take properly.
The question is what happens if you shutdown/reboot. Do you still see the 17minute delay before you finally get a usable screen?

The fact that you performed your operation and did successfully boot up into a 16.04 release indicates it's not a kernel problem. Something else is causing the delay, and we're trying to isolate what.
______
Dennis
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