HPR1106: Of Fuduntu, RescaTux (or the Farmer Buys a Dell)

Summary: This is another one of my How I Did It Podcasts (or How I Done It if you rather) where my goal is to pass along the things I learn as a common Linux user administering my home computers and network, and engaging in the types of software tinkering that appeals to our sort of enthusiast. I'd been thinking for a while about replacing the small computer on my dinner table. I had been using an old HP TC1000, one of the original active stylus Windows tablets, of course now upgraded to Linux. With the snap in keyboard, it had a form factor similar to a netbook, with the advantage that all the vulnerable components were behind the LCD, up off the table and away from spills. It had served my purpose of staying connected to IRC during mealtimes, and occasional streaming of live casts, but I wanted more. I wanted to be able to join into Mumble while preparing meals, I wanted to be able to load any website I wanted without lockups, and I wanted to stream video content and watch DVDs. I was concerned that putting a laptop on the table was an invitation to have any spilled beverage sucked right into the air intakes, and I never even considered a desktop system in the dining room until I saw a refurbished Dell Inspiron 745 on GearXS.com (I wouldn't normally plug a specific vendor, but now GearXS is putting Ubuntu on all it's used corporate castoff systems). This Dell had the form factor that is ubiquitous in point-of-sale, a vertical skeleton frame with a micro system case on one side and a 17” LCD on the other, placing all the electronics several inches above the surface on which it is placed. I even found a turntable intended for small TVs that lets me smoothly rotate the monitor to either at my place on the table or back towards the kitchen where I am cooking. I already had a sealed membrane keyboard with an integrated pointer and wireless-N USB dongle to complete the package. Shipped, my “new” dual core 2.8Ghz Pentium D system with 80Gb hard drive and Intel graphics was under $150. [The turntable was $20 and an upgrade from 1Gb to 4Gb of used DDR2 was $30, but both were worth it.] Since the box shipped with Ubuntu, I thought installing the distro of my choice would be of no consequence, and that is where my tale begins. I'm going to start my story towards the end, as it is the most important part. After the installation of four Linux distros in as many days (counting the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS the box shipped with, a partial installation of SolusOS 2r5, Fuduntu and finally Lubuntu 12.04), I discovered I couldn't boot due to Grub corruption (machine POSTed, but where I should have seen Grub, I got a blank screen with a cursor in the upper left corner). A. I thought I would do a total disk wipe and start over, but DBAN from the UBCD for Windows said it wasn't able to write to the drive (never seen that before) B. Started downloading the latest RescaTux ISO. Meanwhile, I found an article that told me I could repair Grub with a Ubuntu CD https://ubuntunigeria.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/how-to-restore-grub2-using-an-ubuntu-live-cd-or-thumb-drive/ , so I tried booting from the Lubuntu 12.04 CD (using the boot device selector built into the hardware). Same black screen, preceded by a message that the boot device I had selected was not present. Same thing with the Fuduntu DVD that had worked the day before. With the exception of UBCD, I couldn't get a live CD to boot. C. Now having downloaded the RescaTux ISO, and suspecting a problem with the optical drive, I used Unetbootin to make a RescaTux bootable thumb drive. RescaTux ( http://download2.berlios.de/rescatux/rescatux_cdrom_usb_hybrid_i386_486-amd64_0.30b7_sg2d.iso ) has a pre-boot menu that let's you choose between 32 and 64 bit images, but that was as far as I got, nothing happened when I made my selection.