The Great Ubuntu Reinstall of 09

Well, as the old proverb says "all good thing to come to an end" and so it is with my association with 32 bit operating systems.  True, its been a fun, with lots of productive work and fun filled hours, but as we said good bye to horse-drawn carraiges, I must now say good-bye to Ubuntu 7.10, and old pentium 4.  RIP.

Hello AMD Phenom quad core, Ubuntu 9.10 (beta release), and a new 1.5TB SATA drive, let the good times roll.  Well, the rolling hasn't actually started yet but I'm sure some form of rolling will soon begin, at least I really hope it does.

I started my journey in Geek Mecca, Frys Electronics.  Since Intel rolled out some brand-spanking new technology, AMD slashed the prices of their existing hardware.  The quad core with mother board was bit north of $100.  Of course, that's not the end of it.  You can't have a smoking hot processor with stale old drives so I purchased a new hard drive and RW DVD as well.  Then you need memmory with fast access rates.  All in all I spend about $350 for the new system including my nemisis, the CPU fan.

I setup my workbench at home and removed my old mother board, CPU, and fan.  I planned to reuse my old drives so I left them in the box.  As I lowered my new mother board/CPU into its new home in my old box, I began mentally salivating as I thought of the speed of my new computer in old clothing.  

The new board went in fine but I hit a snag as I tried to put my old Intel fan on the hardware.  It didn't fit.  Cursing, I drove back to Fries to buy a new fan.  It didn't fit either.  Cursing more, I called Fries.  "It should work fine, sir" they said.  I didn't see how unless I took a drill to my new motherboard.

I called my friend Derek to ask his advice.  "You know," he said, "they'll install that system for about 60 bucks."  After having spent 6 hours, including travel time, this seemed like a deal to me. 

I took the computer to Frys service department and was again told the fan should fit.  I told them to go ahead and mount it and run it through POST (power on system test).  I had to wait a few days but it was worth the effort.

When I got the system back it had a different fan on it.  At last, my new system was home.

Since I'm using a beta release of 9.10 a few things aren't working quite right.  My Eclipse development environment is running a little odd.  For some reasons the buttons don't always work.  I've tracked down the issue to a problem with the gtk version but for now I can always just select the button and hit "Enter".

There is other oddness revolving around VM ware.  I haven't tracked that one down yet but everything else seems to work.  I'm very impressed with the speed of both my new system and Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10). 

I hope to have VMWare working soon and with it my old Windoze VMs for when you absolutely, positively have to have a windows environment.  After that, I'll be cooking with nuclear fusion.