As I described in my previous post, I have kludged together a rag-tag collection of spare and cannibalized parts to create a "computer" system I refer to as the Jalopy.
It is based on a Dell Dimension 8200 I inherited from a relative who had no use for the dusty beast after an upgrade to a newer system. In its day, the 8200 was top of the line and sports a 2.4 GHz P4 with Hyperthreading (HT) technology and 512 MB of system RAM. I received it without a hard drive but had an even older Dell system that I use for spare parts and grabbed it's massive 12 GB Maxtor Fireball.
The Jalopy had no problem booting from the Karmic CD and the system partitioned and formatted the Fireball in ext4 format and installed the OS in around 20 minutes. Working with the the late Beta of Ubuntu 9.10, I went all out and also grabbed the latest development release of Google Chrome for Linux and it runs nicely.
On day two of enjoying blazing speed, nifty graphic effects and 100% free software the integrated network interface circuit on the 8200 motherboard stopped working. At first I thought perhaps our network was down, but after some port swapping and verification with the other systems in my office, the network looked fine. The interface displayed a solid red LED rather than the standard amber so I figured the old network interface had breathed its last breath.
Not be dissuaded from all of the Karmic goodness I ran down to my "junk pile" and grabbed a rusty (no exaggeration) 3COM PCI 10/100 network card, shut down the system and inserted it into an available PCI slot in the 8200. Given my experience with older, less developed operating systems, I fully expected the scenerio to go something like:
- Install the new PCI network interface card
- Reboot and have the OS inform me it cannot find drivers for the new device
- Reopen the case and try to find a model number on the NIC
- Use a different computer to surf the web for the NIC drivers
- Download the zip file onto a USB
- Move the USB over to the Ubuntu system, copy and unzip
- Install the new drivers and reboot
- Realize there is only about a 50% chance it will work on the first try
- "New PCI Detected"
- "PCI resourse conflict - resolving..."
- "Username:"
I'm sorry, what? After logging in my connection to the Internet was restored and all systems back to normal.
What a concept... The machine discovered a problem, resolved a resource conflict, installed the proper drivers and connect to the Internet... automatically.
Good Karma indeed.



