Ubuntu, Day Two

Still liking Ubuntu. I've found people to give away the CDs to. All techies, of course. Although one is a networking techie and one is a process techie, not really a system techie. So it's cool to be able to hand this stuff out to people who can use it, but who aren't really OS geeks like I am.

Hit my first little snag with Ubuntu last night. For some reason, the first time X comes up, the screen is stuck in 640x480 resolution mode, and won't go any higher than that. I have a Rage128 Fury card and a Dell 771p monitor so I should certainly be able to do better than that. After browsing the forums for a bit, I located the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

With that, I was able to get the screen in 1024x768@24bpp. I'm happy with that, although my default resolution is usually 1280x1024@16bpp. Hey, when you have big plans, you need a bit workspace. If I had a monitor larger than 17", I'd be working at 1600x1200@16bpp. As a matter of fact, I may go looking for one for work use this morning... We've got some spares around here somewhere.

I also added a sound card to the box last night, making it a fully functioning desktop computer. It's considered a little on the slow side, but it's older hardware, and not that fast to begin with, by today's standards. Plugged her into the speakers, and she sounds just fine.

Anyway, I'm probably going to leave the Ubuntu system as a desktop for a while. I'll give it a little time and see how stable it is, how well it performs, then maybe start moving some stuff over there. Who knows. I may even try to set up some dual-boot action on the Dell box. I'd be very interested to see how Ubuntu would perform on some speedier hardware.

The current Ubuntu box:

Hostname: biohazard
Processor: Celeron 333MHz
RAM: 256MB PC100
HDD1: Samsung 20GB
HDD2: Samsung 20GB
CD: Maxtor 6x Speed
Display: ATI Rage Fury 128MB
Audio: Ensoniq PCI64
OS: Ubuntu Linux v5.10

Onward.