Installation on a Dell Optiplex GX110 - Pent. III - 128 megs ram

[sir-bliant]

After installation the desktop won't completely come up. When accessing the konsole, it won't accept root password. When trying to bring up kppp, at first I get a message that resolve.conf is missing. When configuring kppp it can't find my modem.
I had mepis on this machine and it worked fine, so I put it back, though I prefer kubuntu. I've already put drake on my home computer and my laptop with no problems.
Any help would be much appreciated.
thanks
Sir Bliant

[Nirvana]

Re: Installation on a Dell Optiplex GX110 - Pent. III - 128 megs ram

That is weird. Try a re-install, or better yet, fire up Xubuntu on that old machine.

[Rob]

Re: Installation on a Dell Optiplex GX110 - Pent. III - 128 megs ram

sir-bliant, I have the same PC as you (GX110), just with more RAM.  Are you using the onboard i810 video card or a PCI add-in?  I used to have an NVIDIA TNT 16MB PCI add-in, but it was causing so many problems that I had to disable it in BIOS.  The crappy this is that the i810 onboard only allows a max resolution of 1024x768.

Are you installing Kubuntu 6.06?  Also, be sure to have your PC connected to the Internet so it can update its list files and download security updates during install.  That might help you...

Also, the reason you can't log in as root is because its password hasn't been specified yet (I think).  I had to do this before I could log in as superuser in Konsole:

[kubuntu@b-205-110 ~]$ sudo passwd
Password:[your own password]
Changing password for user root.
New UNIX password: [your own password]
Retype new UNIX password: [your own password]
Done.

It may not look exactly like that, but it will be very similar.

[markofealing]

Re: Installation on a Dell Optiplex GX110 - Pent. III - 128 megs ram

I've got two of these one with 512Mb and the other with 256Mb, both with Matrox G200 PCI cards as the onboard i810 is rubbish and pinches RAM from the OS as video RAM (part of the reason why it's slow)

Make sure your BIOS is the latest version (upgrades available from DELLs site to download), mine are both revision A09 which is the latest. The BIOS upgrade is really simple.

Both of my GX110s run Linux. One Ubuntu ad the other Kubuntu without any problems. Just for reference mine use socketed CPU rather than SLOT1 but I doubt if that makes any difference as the boards should essentially be the same.

Do you get an error message for your desktop load failure?

[askrieger]

Re: Installation on a Dell Optiplex GX110 - Pent. III - 128 megs ram

DO NOT SETUP A ROOT PASSWORD. That is not the way that this distro is supposed to be used. It is a security hole and it can make system rescue operations more difficult (and you WILL need system rescue operations). Before setting up a root password read this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo People who are used to the old fashioned way of using Linux will try to convince you that using a root password is easier. THEY ARE WRONG. I've got roughly 25 years of Unix experience (24 using root) and I'm telling you sudo is easier and safer.