intertwingly

My plans are to do a fresh install of Intrepid Ibex on a number of computers, and since I had a spare machine, I thought I would recover Windows to a known clean slate, insert a second hard drive, and use that install to clone existing machines which would then be wiped and restored.

A few bumps along the way, none of which affect my overall plan.

The recovering of Windows went fine, as did the installs of the various updates.

My first problem occurred when I tried to boot Ubuntu from CD-ROM.  The machine wouldn’t recognize the disk.  Other machines booted fine from this disk.  So I tried another (unrelated) disk, and it wouldn’t recognize it either.  The BIOS and Windows recognized that there was a CD reader, and could even be told to eject a disk, but couldn’t read anything.

I swapped out the CD reader for another one.  Same symptoms.  I swapped out the IDE cable.  Same symptoms.

Stumped, I decided to try out the new bootable USB maker.  System » Administration » Create a USB startup disk and within a few minutes I was happily installing.

After I installed Ubuntu on the second drive and rebooted, I was into Windows.  So I went into BIOS setup and reversed the boot order of the hard drives, and could boot into Ubuntu

My next problem was after I booted.  I got to the login screen, but after a successful login, all I could see was a background.  I could not Ctrl-Alt-Delete.  I could not Ctrl-Alt-F2 to see an alternate console.  But by rebooting and then doing a Ctrl-Alt-F2 before logging in, I could log in.  Looking at my Xorg.0.log file, I saw a number of messages like this:

[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
[mi] mieqEnequeue: out-of-order valuator event; dropping.

Based on this bug, I removed compiz and compiz-core and could then login to Gnome.

Finally, I could no longer boot via grub into Windows, but these instructions worked like a champ.