Woo hoo! I finally have an up-to-date working installation of Ubuntu on an old Dimension XPS!

[struggle4progress]

Updated the ancient BIOS driver. The box originally had 128 MB RAM which I upgraded to 640 MB (nearly maximal). After several days of hair-pulling (WTF! What is going wrong), I pulled the old 12 GB IDE hard drive, slid it into an enclosure and ran diagnostics off another OS, which showed hundreds of consecutive bad sectors -- so I replaced it with a refurbished 130 GB IDE. Getting internet was an unnecessary nightmare: the original box has an ancient US Robotics winmodem for which I searched (unsuccessfully) for linux drivers; next I mucked about with wvdial and gnome-ppp to try to get a UM150 broadband card working -- all a total waste of time, since I finally learned that clicking on the network icon and punching the broadband radio button does everything you might hope it would do. And then -- off once again into Update Manager land, but this time without the old flakey hard drive

Advice for anyone who might be as lazy and careless as I am: replacing the friggin BIOS battery FIRST is a good idea, since otherwise you'll have to reset the date and time after every cold boot, if you don't want the system confused by insane time stamps

[struggle4progress]

1. Put in a 10/100/1000 D-link DGE-530T ethernet card. Worked right out of the box.

[struggle4progress]

2. Adventures with modems

The old thing has a win modem. So I optimistically spend days trying to find a driver until I realize the modem is so old that nobody has ever heard of it. I want a dial-up option, so I wander through a wasteland of lists of pulled modems and linux drivers until I throw up my hands and buy an external hardware modem with a serial connector. Then I realize (oops!) I'm still using AOL dial-up as my back-up for when my other ISP is down, and AOL does not play nice with PPP or anybody else. No problem, I think, I'll just use some nice linux product like Penggy that has Ubuntu support. But wait! Ubuntu no longer supports Penggy in canonical cuz Penggy was too irremediably buggy. Well, what about the Linspire AOL dialer? Nope, haven't found a working link to it. Sigh

[RoyGBiv]

3. WinModem ...

Sorry I didn't see this earlier. I don't check here as often as I once did.

One may get a win modem to work on a Linux system, but only if they sacrifice a penguin precisely 3.2 years old, born on the third Sunday of the first month in which temperatures in the Antarctic never rise above zero degrees F and which has one foot precisely 1 centimeter shorter than the other.

More seriously, I remember some discussions back in the day of people trying to move to Linux trying to get one of these things to work. I never saw an actual success story that could be repeated by anyone else with any consistency.

[struggle4progress]

4. Yeah, my excitement at the prospect of spending a $1 for a pulled modem and finding

a driver quickly paled after I realized that, although it might be possible in principle, I might be dead before I succeeded

[SKKY]

5. Actually that's not accurate...

...since the 2.4.37.5 kernel went stable, it was 3 centimeters LONGER than the other.

[RoyGBiv]

6. Ah ... my bad

I missed those release notes.

Really sad they never figured out how to allow the sacrifice of a Republican to serve as a substitute. :)