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Well, I have been running Ubuntu on my desktop for over a month.  In that short period of time, I found that Ubuntu is just not for me.  I love it on my Thinkpad, do not get me wrong but on my desktop, I need something different.

I miss not having to edit something, really.  I even stopped developing on my desktop.  Weird since many developers gave up Gentoo or other distros so they could have a stable system.

Isn’t is strange that I could get a server to run on Gentoo, Arch, or FreeBSD, but not on Ubuntu.  Seriously, this is not right.  Ubuntu is supposed to make things easier for me.  That’s what all the Ubuntu users tell me.

To be honest, I got a lot of things done when I was running Gentoo and FreeBSD systems.  Arch Linux opened up a new world to me as well though I preferred to do things the Gentoo/BSD way.  If it wasn’t for that bad battery in my motherboard, I would probably still be running either PC-BSD or Gentoo now.

Right now I need a stable system to get Django to run properly.  For me, that means doing it with Gentoo, possibly with FreeBSD.

Will I give up on Ubuntu, no way.  As I mentioned many times, Ubuntu is the choice of users in Vietnam. I still need to use it but if I want to go back to my geek roots, I got to use Gentoo again.

I am not a distro hopper, I am just a Gentoo ‘jump back and forth-er’

About a month ago, I accused my Samsung hard drive of creating my many problems with Gentoo and then Arch Linux. At the time, the errors I received seem to indicate that I was having problems with my SATA hard drive.  After reviewing several forums, I decided to buy a new Western Digital SATA drive.  I reinstalled Arch and had a nice stable system for nearly a month.

Then this week I got another unusual error with my new SATA drive.  When booting up, I kept getting an error message stating it could not find the boot loader, insert a system rescue disk.  It was odd, I then used the Arch LiveCD to chroot back into my system and reinstall grub.  I could reboot into Arch no problems.  I even restarted several times to see if the problem repeated itself.  Everything was fine.

Next morning I received the same error.  Sometimes even after turning off my desktop for two hours, the problem returned.  Each time grub-install fixed the problem but I could not pinpoint what the actual cause was.  My friends felt it was something wrong with my Gigabyte motherboard.  I thought about updating BIOS.  We even thought that my power supply may be bad.

In the end, don’t laugh, it turned out I just needed a new battery for the motherboard.  A French Ubuntu user pointed that out immediately after hearing what happened.  He asked me to check the clock in BIOS to see if it had the correct time.  When he said that, then everything made sense.  I remember getting an error during bootup that a block was mounted in the future.  I thought I fixed that by syncing my computer with a time server but since Arch boots up in 19 seconds, I missed it the repeating error.

I went to a computer store in Saigon, bought a new battery, inserted it into my motherboard.  Everything has been okay since.  Turns out that the battery that came with my motherboard was replaced with a cheaper Chinese version.  I replaced that with a Maxwell battery but I want my friend to bring me back some higher quality batteries from the US next month.

Now I am back running Arch Linux, my favorite distro for the last two months.  I even got my second Samsung SATA drive installed in  my computer now.  I will use it as backup or possibly install Debian Lenny on it for a project.

I was using pacman to update my Arch Linux Desktop this morning.  As it was downloading OpenOffice, I was shocked to see how fast the downloads were.  The average was roughly in the low 200s KB/s but I would see short spikes to 600 KB/S and then to 700 KB/s.  It went has high as 1100 KB/s which was something I had not seen for a couple years.

I headed to Speakeasy which tested my current download speeds at 1717 kb/s on the Seattle server.

Sometimes you can get these early morning spikes for bandwidth.  The best times are normally between 6-8 AM on weekdays when everybody begins to head to work

OpenOffice ended up downloading in less 3 minutes, the whole binary package.  That never happens very often here.

I think this could be a small sign that the internet infracture may be getting better here.  Then again, I have said that many times in the past

Arch Linux has been added to the Vietnam BSD/Linux Mirror at the following URI’s:

1. ftp://ftp.indochinalinux.com/archlinux/

2. ftp://202.78.230.5/archlinux

From Distrowatch:

Arch Linux is an independently developed, i686-optimised Linux distribution targeted at competent Linux users. It uses ‘pacman’, its home-grown package manager, to provide updates to the latest software applications with full dependency tracking. Operating on a rolling release system, Arch can be installed from a CD image or via an FTP server. The default install provides a solid base that enables users to create a custom installation. In addition, the Arch Build System (ABS) provides a way to easily build new packages, modify the configuration of stock packages, and share these packages with other users via the Arch Linux User Repository.

The IP address and bandwidth was kindly donated by GHP Far East Co., Ltd. in their efforts to promote open source technology in Vietnam. The Vietnam BSD/Linux Mirror is maintained by the volunteer efforts of the Vietnam Professional Linux/Unix Group and Vscapeone.

Cross-posted at: http://www.vscapeone.com/?p=34