It's been a while since the last post, my computer just died. Or to be more precise, I got tire to repair it and I got a new one.

I was running Ubuntu (Feisty) for a couple of months, if it wasn't that I had to change both motherboard and CPU I would probably have the same installation right now. But shits happens.

Of course I asked my best hardware geek friend to pick me hardware with the best price/performance ratio, he knew I wanted Linux only on my system so he avoided exotic or too recent hardware. But we didn't investigate Linux compatibility any further.. Foolish me.

I was pretty exited to install Linux on a quite good machine. Here's some specs for the geeks readers:

I didn't expect all my hardware to be detected, but I surely wasn't mentally prepared for the five days of struggle to get Linux working. Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty weren't booting at all, I had to disable ACPI, then only they would boot with half of my hardware undetected.

I finally got a stable system when I installed the 64bit version Gutsy, the next LTS of Ubuntu, which is still in development..

Surprisingly mostly everything worked fine, I only had to download and compile Nvidia proprietary drivers and install the Flash plugin with the nswrapper provided in Gutsy. Apart from having to recompile my graphic drivers now and then when Ubuntu release updates I have to say that I'm pretty happy with my system.

By now the only thing I haven't got working is VMware server and the desktop effects. I have strong doubts about what is wrong with desktop effects but for VMware server I'm afraid that I'll have to wait. I managed to make it run but each time I boot a guest OS I freeze my whole system before any error is being logged.

It was a lot of work and frustrations but working on a flexible, stable and clever operating system was worth the pain.