Pasofino's tale (so far)

Pasofino is my first linux computer. I haven't used it much in some time (CPU is a C6-200, not exactly high speed nowadays) and was going to use it as a testbed for trying out different operating systems and distributions. But it wasn't booting from the CD right, and was acting generally weird. So, A little troubleshooting was in order.

The CD drive might be flaky, but it might not. I don't know yet. I spent part of last night doing things the hard way. Pulled the cover, pulled a memory stick, tried booting from CD and from HDD, and saw the same errors over and over. Swapped memory sticks. Same thing. Put all memory back. Same thing. Then a realization finally dawned.

The thing would boot from the hard drive, but would blank the screen as X started up. Maybe it was booting fine and I just couldn't see it? Tried pinging it. Yep, there it was. I tried logging into it remotely. Yep, there it was. Things seemed to be behaving. (D'oh, should have tried one of the non-X consoles, too.) So it looks like the video card is flaking out. It bugs me that I didn't check things the easy way first and wound up crawling around swapping hardware that didn't need swapping.

I shut pasofino down and as it was getting late did nothing more. Tonight I get to pull the video card and re-seat it and see if that's all it was. If I'm lucky, it is just a card seating issue and I'll have a working system again. If not, well, maybe a trip to Mankato for a replacement video card will be how I spend part of Saturday. If that's the case, maybe I can get a card like the one I have (only working) so I don't have to fiddle with driver issues. But if not, well, I was going to wipe the system anyway. And then I can see if the problems are over or if the CD drive really is bad.