My PC died two days ago. I thought it was the powersupply, but it was the powersupply and the motherboard. I guess one caused the other to break.
I bought new hardware. P4 mobo’s are hard to get nowadays, so I decided to dive into: 64 bits. AMD’s are cheap nowadays, so I bought a Athlon 64 X2 6000+ (dual core, 3GHz each), a motherboard that had AGP (instead of PCI-e), 4GB of memory (4x1GB) and to complete it all: a 500GB SATA harddisk to replace two old, noisy, heat-producing SCSI disks.
Today I assembled the whole shebang. Whilst putting together the system, I was still in doubt whether I would install Solaris 10 64bits or Ubuntu Feisty 64bits. I like Ubuntu very much, but Sun has tons of experience in 64bits. And I like Solaris.
Not knowing what to expect when powering up the system, I could never have guessed I was in for a very very pleasant surprise. Not only did I get the normal Grub prompt, no, the system completely booted into my existing Ubuntu. Of course the devices in fstab had to be renamed, but that was it. Sound does not work, but that’s because I did not reinstall the soundcard (since the mobo has onboard 7.1 sound).
So here I am. Basically with a complete new system and my OS still runs as always. Are you paying attention, Mr. Gates?
Of course I still need to install Solaris/Ubuntu 64-bits, to use the new hardware to its extends. But that’s an exercise for later.
So whatever these socalled experts say about all the Ubuntu-blogging out there, trust me: Ubuntu rocks big time!
Just chiming in to say I’ve had the exact same experience. Well, not all the hardware had changed, but replacing the motherboard effectively puts all the hardware at new locations / buses / registers. So as far as the OS is concerned, the whole system had a makeover.
I could just imagine the amount of fixes I had coming, but I tried to just plug everything back in and power up to see what happens. Boy, what a bummer: nothing happened. Instead it went something like this: power on – hold breath – wait for beeps / BSOD’s / anything – hear login sound – exhale and smile.
Yup, there’s a lot Ubuntu and Linux in general can improve, but on the other hand: there’s a lot thats already ROCKIN’.
Err… *any* modern linux distribution can do this, it’s no specific feature of ubuntu
Just curious which mobo you’re using. I have an Asrock AM2NF3-VSTA, also with AGP, sound doesn’t work but I had a SB Audigy LS from my previous box, so that wasn’t a problem.
I run 64-bits Ubuntu 7.04 on it and I love it!
@rufusD: I had my share of hardware failures, and this is the FIRST OS that actually did it all without major problems. None of the Microsoft OS’s can manage this, and the Linux I’ve been using (RedHat, Fedora, SuSE) did not even come close to this experience.
@heer opstand: I have the same mobo now, the AsRock AM2NF3-VSTA. Too bad you did not get the sound working, that means I have to plugin my old SB Live!.