N00b-un-2
October 2nd, 2008, 07:04 PM
My laptop has been a paperweight for a little over a week now. The wifi kept crapping out, I had multiple crashes and my graphics card which worked fine about a week ago just stopped working entirely. I've been able to trace the problem back to an update for the Intel i800 driver that my computer is supposed to use. The update renders my computer utterly useless. I think that it screwed up my xorg.conf to the point where my computer was suffering from basic input output failures (things like mouse, keyboard, sound, not recognizing the hard drive). This was extremely frustrating because up until about a week ago, Ubuntu has been rock solid on both of my computers since I switched from WinXp a few months ago. Not that it's really all that pertinent to the people this is intended for, but I have an Intel mobile chipset gl965 which is supported "oob" for most computers. And until the driver update came out, it still was on mine.
So the moral of the story is this: Break yourself of your bad habits from Windows. Don't just automatically download updates simply because they're offered. An update is not necessarily an upgrade, especially in Linux. Software is developed so quickly that sometimes features don't get tested fully before becoming available to the public. Take Intrepid for example. It's available for download, but believe me it's far from stable at this point.
Before installing, try running from the live CD and if everything works, LEAVE IT ALONE!!! if there is something that you need, you can always install it manually. That way if you do mess something up you can always retrace your steps. It took me more than a week to figure out what was wrong with my computer after automatically updating.
So the moral of the story is this: Break yourself of your bad habits from Windows. Don't just automatically download updates simply because they're offered. An update is not necessarily an upgrade, especially in Linux. Software is developed so quickly that sometimes features don't get tested fully before becoming available to the public. Take Intrepid for example. It's available for download, but believe me it's far from stable at this point.
Before installing, try running from the live CD and if everything works, LEAVE IT ALONE!!! if there is something that you need, you can always install it manually. That way if you do mess something up you can always retrace your steps. It took me more than a week to figure out what was wrong with my computer after automatically updating.