New lives, new machines

Posted on Sunday, July 11, 2010 | | In , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Parnaparnti's Win98 install went well, but the 98 had great difficulty with every piece of hardware on the system except the keyboard and mouse. I decided to try Win XP, knowing that the machine was just within the requirements for it. That install went smoothly, and XP properly detected every device without problem. It runs a bit slowly, but the friend I gave it too seems satisfied with it, and that's what counts.

So Parnaparnti has left my home for a new life. In his place have arrived three new-to-me machines, generously donated by the local library, who now don't have to pay to have someone take them away and recycle them.

The first of these machines has been dubbed 'Adelaide' and has been installed with Win XP and Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10. The XP did a 98 on me - failing to properly detect the video/display settings. I have a driver disc for that problem, which I'll get to later. Adelaide's primary function is to be my Linux print server; the Windows is there for scanning purposes, as the scanning function of my Epson Stylus combo printer/scanner/copier is reportedly not supported in Ubuntu (and I haven't tried to wrangle with XSane yet, though I plan on it).

I had originally tried to install Lucid Lynx on Adelaide, but the install disc gave me some unusual problems, not the least of which was the fact it would blank the screen halfway through the install process, leaving me unable to interact with the machine at all. So I installed Karmic, which seems to work well. The -14 kernel runs smoothly; the -22 which came with the initial updating does not. Molasses flowing down a glacier would run faster, I think. There are possible solutions to that issue as well, which I've bookmarked and are on my to-do list. For now I'm running -14, which is just fine for my purposes.

The other two machines have not been touched yet. I'll be poking around in those later this month, I hope.