A Jaunty gradeup

Well I took the plunge and upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04. First I tried the upgrade option and that caused all kinds of hassle. To be fair, I did start the upgrade, stop, restart, stop, restart again... several times. So I'm not too surprised that something wonky happen and could not get to the login screen.

Further, since I had several old kernels installed, installing from the live CD allowed me to get rid of old partitions, resize and generally cleanup the drive. When I did to a clean install I was tickled when I got to the login screen! Sweet glassy goodness! Login, good, password, good, ... screen goes all VGA on me and freezes... not so good. After checking the boards and finding many others had screen shots that looked exactly like mine and all were using ATI graphic cards I was not amused. But I pressed on, the solution (for me - and there does not seem to be a singular solution here) was to boot into a Gnome safe mode session and activate, download and install the restricted ATI drivers. Yeah! it worked. errrrr wait. where's my sound? crap. Thats an issue for another day.

So, if you have an ATI graphics card try logging in a safe graphics mode (lower left corner of login screen) and give that a try. It worked for me, it might work for you.

jaunty, upgrade, ATI,

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It all began several years ago

Started using computers back in the mid '80's (I don't count the comp sci classes on the the commodore 64 or the PET machines in highschool). I was a MAC man. As a graduation present my dad bought me my very own MAC with a monstrous 20MB external SCSI HDD.

In grad school I laughed and laughed at the poor DOS folks. Then Windows 3.1 came. It was just crappy enough to become popular but I carried on on my own little bubble of MAC happiness.

Getting a job after grad school forced me into the windows world and I went grudgingly, hating every step.

Financial concerns precluded me from updating my MAC but it was still a going concern a late as '92.

With win95 and each subsequent OS version I became more and more disillusioned and started hearing about this Os called Linux that was free.

Over the next several years I've installed RedHat, Mandriva, tiny, yellowdog, searching for the distribution that best fit my skill level and hardware compatibility. Well, I've finally settled on UBUNTU. I started with feisty and have been upgrading through to hardy 8.1. However, I've had little time to actually use it beyond checking for updates and tweaking my GUI.

Today is a new day. Today I start in earnest and shall share my trials and tribulations. My successes and failures. My highs and my lows.... you get my point.

If you're a linux newbie or are thinking of becoming one or are a kind hearted guru please follow and share your experiences as I start trippin' pn Linux
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