Some Orbis-Tertius Ubuntu install notes

Most of the problems I had (or still having, if you count the NVIDIA video card...) were because this is really old hardware that it is not designed for this use, and it took all this "days" to get this baby on its feet because I had to do all the work during the nights, and -mostly- because it is way too slow, specially during the first two days, anything that involved the CDROM (booting form it, copying files from it) took for ever.

Day one:
Lotsa problems with the (pretty old) BIOS.
Had to set the HDDs to different IDE channels, since putting them all on IDE 1 did not work.
Set the BIOS to ignore the large HDD that will hold the /home partition (the BIOS simple chocked if it stumbled upon it)


Day two:
SQUASHFS errors galore, tried to make a regular install with Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and Ubuntu Server, in the end, only Ubuntu Server worked, but I had a problem with the BIOS that I did not forsee, and the system was unable to boot.


Day three:
Re-installed Ubuntu Server, after re-arranging the HDDs layout. On the IDE0 channel, the smaller HDD that will hold the /boot and the / partitions, as well as the swap, on the IDE1 channel, the larger HDD that will hold the /home partition.
This day finished with the installation up and running A Ok.
Friday, August 15th, in the early dawn hours.


Day four:
The same Friday, towards 4 PM started the install process to transform the Ubuntu Server, onto a plain vanilla Ubuntu (with Gnome desktop et all).
It took some 500 MB of file transfers, and about of 3 hours of setting up to get everything up & running... By far, the worst thing was the amount of time that 'scrollkeeper' needs.


Day five:
Used most of this day to set up X Window (that was fast & easy) and to do test after test after test to get the NVIDIA card working (this was slow & cumbersome)
In the end, the video card is recognized as an NVIDIA one, X Window does load it correctly, but it doesn't seem to be working properly, that is, I still have no 3D effects from it.