Kickoff

I thought I'd document progress on my new desktop adventures.

I'm becoming a Linux-only home office.

I thought about what I _really_ didn't want to live without from my PC, and if there were equivalents. In sum, I found replacements. The one or two things that I didn't know how to replace I got to run under wine. Good-bye traditional PC!

What I'm running on:

Asus M3N78 Pro; AMD Phenom 9500;

Those are the basics. I had some trouble bringing up these boards and getting stable running, but here are some basics of what I ended with:

• Ugrade ASUS BIOS to 1003;

My board came w/ 0701; I read someone had luck w/ 0403 - didn't work for me; I tried 903; a little better; 1003 (latest as I write) seemed to improve things, so I went with it.

• Find an O/S which seems to run stably on this board;

Before upgrading the bios, I tried live CD's - running, trying things. My first try was Ubuntu 9.04, x86_64. I experienced basic problems - usb drives would lock up after some short use; monitoring system use with gnome-system-monitor would either not work, or lock up after a time. I tried playing around with various BIOS settings, memory, etc. based on threads I found on the net - most of these will ill-directed or ill advised. Resetting the BIOS to default settings (for RAM, etc.) proved operational, indeeded perhaps most stable. I can't tell home much of this was settings vs. the 1003 BIOS version, but 1003 is what I continue to run.

Fedora-10 (what I'd used on a 64 bit machine at work) didn't work any better (worse, if I recall). I tried Fedora-11 preview, and it seemed to work all day long; games, internet, devices, mounting, etc. Two days later, Fedora-11 was released and I loaded that.

I posted a report to Ubuntu forums about my problems, and was encouraged to try 8.04 or 8.10 Ubuntus to see what my experience was. I wanted to get a working system, but finally did try 8.04 x86_64, and it seemed to work well. By now, I was convinced there was nothing wrong with the mother board / processor.

Later, I would try to boot from by Ubuntu-32 bit 9.04 usb installation (I don't know why I didn't try this sooner) - I tried the "recovery" mode first, and that seemed to test and reconfigure (?) things - in any case, booted and worked well - except for the NVIDIA driver - it would lock on some gnome games (completely - no mouse, no keyboard; I had to powerdown). Upgrading to the NVIDIA driver (see below) solved this problem. I am writing this from my Ubuntu-32 9.04 boot from the usb. Great stuff.

• Install NVIDIA driver for GeForce 8300 (version 185.18.14)
  

I have dual monitors; I used to boot/run Ubuntu from a usb drive on a Dell laptop; dual monitor support was great.

I wish I had documented more of this as I was going, so I will continue to.