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I got an old Rock Sigma SSI laptop (no, I couldn't find any reference to it on google either) dating from around 2001, and had a nightmare trying to install Ubuntu on it. Not because Ubuntu won't run on it (866Mhz PIII with 128MB RAM), but ironically because the installer won't run on it! Took me a while to work out the magic bullet combination needed to get it to work.
Firstly I tried the Ubuntu 9.04 release for shits and giggles. The standard install hung once the graphical interface came up, so I downloaded the "alternate install" CD which was supposed to be for computers which had trouble running the install. Trouble was that crashed/hung too - only this time with a black screen instead of a pretty coloured one. I then downloaded the "alternate install" CD of the oldest version of Ubuntu I could, which turned out to be 6.06.2 LTS. There is a "text install" option which I clicked in smug knowledge it would work fine.........and it was at that point the headwrecking really started because that too crashed with a black screen. To cut a long story short what I had to do was change the graphical mode (press F4 on the title screen) from VGA to the shittiest resolution I could, in this case 640x480 @16-bit. Once I did that the text-mode install worked perfectly and the laptop is now happily running Ubuntu. Oh, and Ubuntu auto-detected the graphics card properly so it wasn't stuck at 640x480 after installation! Update: We had to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 because Firefox 1.5 wouldn't show Flash websites. When we went to a site it said "additional plugins are needed to display the content on this page". Following the links allegedly installed Flash, but when we restarted Firefox we got the same "additional plugins are needed....." message. Lather, rinse and repeat as often as unnecessary. Of course 8.04 comes with Firefox 3.0 which is a memory hog so now the thing is running like a dog and I'm on ebay looking for more RAM. Its never easy, is it? |
