A friend gave me an Ubuntu Live CD last Friday, knowing I’d expressed an interest in trying it out on my wives older PC. So this weekend I connected her PC and booted from this CD. All appeared to be going well until I realized that the keyboard and mouse were not being recognized. Ten more boot attempts all ended with the same results (Isn’t the first sign of insanity doing the same thing and expecting different results?). Both the keyboard and the mouse are USB and this machine only has USB 1.0 ports. I’m wondering if this could be part of the problem?
Not wishing to give up my weekend quest of exploring Ubuntu, I decided to try booting the Live CD on my standby Windows XP machine. This is a PC that I built and the hardware is fairly new, but not bleeding edge, so I figured it was a perfect candidate. With this PC, Ubuntu booted and I noted that the mouse and keyboard were recognized. Yeah! However, near the end of the booting process, after the Ubuntu logo and booting status bar were displayed, the screen went blank and my LCD monitor displayed a message that it could not display the current display mode. Grrrrrh!
So, I switched over to my Mac and surfed to the Ubuntu site for some after-the-fact research. There I found references to a similar problems with Nvidia Cards and the default Ubuntu drivers. Ok…makes sense, I’ve got an Nvidia card in this machine. While at the Ubuntu site, I noticed that I had been given an older version of Ubuntu Live. Wanting to try the latest and greatest, I downloaded the latest version and burned it to a Live CD with my Mac. When booting this new version of Ubuntu on my standby PC I noticed that there was now a boot option to load safe graphics drivers. Selecting this option, Ubuntu booted successfully and the graphics display worked. The only problem was that the “safe drivers” did not allow as high of resolution display as I normally run on my LCD Monitor, so Ubuntu did not look as nice as I know it could. Still I did get a chance to play with it some.
First impressions; Ubuntu Linux has come a long ways from when I looked at Red Hat Linux three or four years ago.
I still want to install Ubuntu on my wives older PC. Next chance I get I’ll connect the PC again and try booting with this newer version of Ubuntu Live. I’m hoping this may overcome my keyboard and mouse issues. If not I’ll need to do some more research.
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Hi Earl,
I’m glad to read you’re giving it a shot. As far as the mouse/keyboard problem I’m a bit stumped. USB1.0 should not be a problem.
Also, I remember having a choice immediately after the initial bootup screen where it gave a choice of ‘F4’ to set the display resolution of the setup. I was having troubles so when I chose F4 and picked my LCD’s native resolution, it seemed to work fine. Maybe give that a shot as well.
Two other quick things I experienced when installing Ubuntu that might help you out:
1. There are two different ISO’s you can download. The Live CD version and what they call the ‘Alternate’ iso. The alternate is a text based installer (as opposed to the graphical installer that is on the live CD), and it is the one that many people still recommend. Then again, lots of people use the live CD’s graphical installer without problem.
2. I had a number of weird problems the first time I downloaded the ISO. I was getting different errors on each install run. It turned out that I downloaded a bad ISO. So make sure if you do download the ISO that you run the MD5 checksum to make sure there were no errors in the downloaded file. Also, if you are downloading and burning your own install CD, make sure you burn it at 4x speed. CD-burners can introduce errors at higher burn speeds which can manifest themselves as weird setup problems. A little extra time up front would have saved me quite a bit of setup frustration.
Just a few tips based on my experience. Keep on truckin’ and good luck.
Hi Richard,
I don’t remember seeing a choice of F4 but I’ll take a look at it again. I haven’t yet tried the older PC with the latest version I downloaded.
Thanks for the tips, I may be soliciting your advice later on.