Every Flavour Beans

After trying every one of the Ubuntu family of operating systems and failing to boot into any one of them, I had to believe that the graphics card might be the main culprit, as the monitor was frequently dying off as soon as X was getting started(among other ‘can’t load the driver’ and kernel errors). Here is what I had to do to get both Ubuntu and Kubuntu work with my NVidia GeForce 5200 graphics card.

First I tried to install Ubuntu 6.06 LTS from the ‘alternate’ CD which gave me strange kernel stack trace errors when I tried to boot into it after installation; tried to install Kubuntu 6.06 LTS from the Live CD but it couldn’t even get to the desktop(where I could have run the graphical installer) – even in the ‘Safe Graphics’ mode. Kubuntu installed successfully from the ‘alternate’ CD(text mode installation) but then it refused to boot into X just like its Live CD did. With my suspicions now firmly set on some problem with the configuration of the graphics card, I booted into the ‘recovery’ mode of Kubuntu(second option in the boot menu) and reconfigured the X server:

Leaving most of the settings with their default values and selecting ‘nv’ as the graphics card(instead of the default ‘vesa’) solved my problem. The X loaded without any problems when I rebooted into Kubuntu.

Encouraged by the results, I wanted to repeat the process with Ubuntu too, but it didn’t even give me the shell in the recovery mode to get me started. The last error message looked related to a USB device; so by disconnecting the two USB hard-disks and the USB TV tuner card, I was able to get to the shell, where all I had to do was run ‘dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg’ again, select ‘nv’ as the graphics card and the rest went as smoothly as with Kubuntu. After successfully booting into the GNOME desktop, I tried to connect the two USB hard disks to the computer, which were instantly detected by Ubuntu implying that the USB TV tuner card was the source of the problem earlier. I will recheck this and will post it in the Ubuntu forums/launchpad if the problem persists.

More than Ubuntu, I found the look of Kubuntu to be awesome. I never knew KDE can also look so beautiful and provide such a rich navigational experience. Look of KDE in SuSE 10.1 wasn’t bad either. I am tempted to switch from GNOME to KDE now because of the support for it from these two operating systems! Konqueror web browser is better than Firefox in many ways, my favourite applications amarok, K3B and Akregator are installed by default, and though Adept Package Manager is no Synaptic, I like the text editors in KDE, for the most part, better than gedit. I will try to compare KDE and GNOME after using them for some period as shipped by Kubuntu and Ubuntu distributions.

The next job for me now is to install Xubuntu desktop in either Ubuntu or Kubuntu OS, and possibly, Edubuntu also. Hoping for an easy ride this time :)