Ubuntu luncheon

Clare had a school open day to attend throughout the day, so I took a trip to Monmouth to collect a mirror she'd ordered for the dining room, and then called in on my old friend Martin for lunch and PC trouble shooting at his Stow Hill home in Newport.

Martin had called me a couple of days ago for advice because his stable and reliable Ubuntu desktop no longer worked properly after his always-on PC was disconnected from the mains accidentally. As the latest version Ubuntu 12.04 was launched only a few days earlier, I suggested he might be able to upgrade on-line and that this would solve his problem. He got the installation running, but after reboot reached a blank screen, and gave up, not knowing what was going on out of sight. As I couldn't run any diagnostic without seeing the screen and poking around, we agreed a lunch date would be the best answer.

He was out when I arrived, so I sat down quietly with his machine and booted it to a visible desktop using a Ubuntu live DVD I'd made earlier. To my relief I found that his hardware and filesystem was intact and functional. Nothing corrupted or lost, despite menacing messages about hard disk health flashing on screen - a particularly scary feature, for which there appears to be no simple reason or remedy. 

I decided to do another install direct from the DVD, and this ran smoothly while we ate a very nice fish risotto and caught up on the news. The end result, however was much the same. Blank screen. Then the penny dropped. This machine, a couple of years old didn't have the graphics capacity for running the Ubuntu Unity 3D desktop without the required drivers, which clearly weren't available at install. Pressing Ctr-Alt-Del a few times replaced the blank screen with the log-in screen - the installation by-passed this as it was set to auto log-in. Switching to the Unity 2D Desktop and logging in produced the desired result, and once more gave Martin the access he needed to his system.

I guess it might have been possible to tweak the installation to produce the 2D desktop at first pass. If so, I didn't notice it. The message from Ubuntu producers Canonical seems to be 'Up grade your hardware.' It's left to others who rely on the core Ubuntu product for building their own Linux distribution to make sure it runs 'out of the box' on older standard hardware - as it certainly does, very well indeed. Except for the odd tweak here and there.

Back home for supper, preparation an early start tomorrow, then two hours of 'The Bridge' before early bed. I don't know why I watch this bleak dystopian stuff. Sunday mornings following in church, even dull routine Sunday mornings are such light and harmony in contrast.