[Wftl-lug] Learn and grow by building

[James Alexander]

Most of the time my experiences have matched others on this list: "For
the most part, Linux just works."

However, on my latest machine that I built, I had issues and was never
able to resolve them. (Linux noob here, so that may have had something
to do with it as well) After an apparent successful install, no
errors, no problems reported, the machine wouldn't boot into the OS.
While it's been months ago and I can't remember the error, it had to
do with not being able to find the /boot partition, which I thought
was odd since I used all defaults when installing, and used a simple
/dev/hda IDE device with a single partition, and the OS couldn't find
it. I tried Fedora, and server and desktop versions of Ubuntu, all
three with the same problem. (semantics were slightly different on the
error, but essentially arrived at the same point) I tried using a Live
CD (Knoppix in my case) and it worked fine, I was able to see the hard
drive, and saw that all the files were there, there was a /boot
directory, and a grub.conf file. To this day I have no explanation for
this problem.

I had to unfortunately revert to using Windows XP... which having more
experience with installing XP, isn't a big deal for me. At some point
I'd like to go back and try the new version of Ubuntu on it, to see if
my past installation problems persisted to this OS as well, but I
haven't gotten time to try.

All that to say: If you stay with slightly older hardware, (6 months
older or more) you should be fine. ;)



On Dec 19, 2007 12:14 PM, Patrick Green <patlgreen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Donna,
>
> Both Linux Journal and Linux Format Magazines periodically do a report
> called Build the Ultimate Linux Box.  They get very specific on the
> hardware.  Another good place to go is your chosen distros website.  Most
> distros have a hardware page in the site that lists hardware known to work
> out of the box with their distro.  The more savvy communities even include
> which version of the distro works with which hardware best and rate the
> hardware on some form of sliding scale.
>
> This is how I used to pick my hardware.  If it was a Linspire Box, I would
> go to Linspire's page before buying my motherboard, hard drive, wireless
> card, etc.  If it was a Mandrake (now Mandriva) PC, I would go to their
> page.
>
> Below is a link where people discuss the most recent Ultimate Linux box
> issue of Format and discuss their visions of an ultimate Linux box.  I hope
> this helps!
>
> Cheers!
>
> Patrick
>
>
>
>  On Dec 19, 2007 11:01 AM, Troy W. Banther <agnustic at gmail.com> wrote:
> > LOL. Until recently this has been the story of my life. Must be in my
> > Karma.
> >
> >
> > On Dec 19, 2007, at 9:54 AM, Chuck Pilger wrote:
> >
> > > my adventures in assembling a functional computer from junk
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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