Ubuntu is up and running, but it wasn’t all quite as simple as it should’ve been… so here are the list of things encountered and how I got around them.
#1 Screen Resolution
During installation you are prompted for which screen resolutions you want to use, however there are two blocks of text… the top one implies that marking a resolution will ‘remove it’ from your system, and the lower one-liner implies that marking a resolution will ‘add it’ to your system.
Initially I followed the first and didn’t mark anything… bad idea… then you get virtually nothing available except for three default modes.
The key is to mark all of them, at least that way you get the choice.
To repair xorg and to make the other screen resolutions available you can do this:
1) Stop xorg (this will drop you to a command line):
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
2) Reconfigure xorg (note that it helps if you have your monitor’s Vertical and Horizontal Sync numbers available):
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
3) Fire up xorg again:
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start
I found that information here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=454217
#2 Skype
I couldn’t get Skype and a few other programs working under Ubuntu AMD64 at all. Instead, install Ubuntu i386. Yes, it’s not so nice to have a 64-bit CPU and then install a 32-bit Operating System, however you’ll notice immediately that there is far more software available on i386 and it’s far less buggy… even Easy Ubuntu loves i386 but not AMD64.
#3 Grub Error 17
I have three harddrives installed:
Disk /dev/hda: 120.0 GB, 120000061440 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14589 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 14588 117178078+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
Disk /dev/sda: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 31 248976 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 32 38913 312319665 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 32 38913 312319633+ 8e Linux LVM
Disk /dev/sdb: 320.0 GB, 320072933376 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 620181 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 620178 312569680+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
As you can see, hard drive 1 is Windows, hard drive 2 is Ubuntu, hard drive 3 is an NTFS disk full of files.
During installation of Ubuntu I disconnected the NTFS disk of files, as that and the disk I was putting Ubuntu on are the same make and model and I was afraid that I might overwrite the wrong volume.
So… disconnected hard drive 3, installed Ubuntu on hard drive 2… and it worked 
Until I re-connected hard drive 3.
It turns out that this was because hard drive 2 (Ubuntu) was actually plugged into the mother board in SCSI5. Hard drive 3 (NTFS files) was plugged into SCSI2. All looked fine in the BIOS but once grub has started up, it recognised hard drive 2 as /dev/sdb2, but grub expected to find the /boot partition on /dev/sdb1.
The solution was simply, plug Ubuntu into a lower numbered SATA (SCSI by appearances) socket. So I moved Ubuntu to SCSI1 and grub worked perfectly.
#4 Accessing Windows and NTFS partitions
Couldn’t figure out how to do this at first, but the answer is over here:
http://www.ubuntuguide.org/#windows
So that’s everything up and running… well, the basics. Next up is seeing whether the webcam will work, figuring out what to do with email (I used The Bat! before and I’d like to use it again, but there is no Linux version… so it may be a case of using Wine).
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