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First Ubuntu Journey
Several years ago, my brother gave my mom a laptop with Ubuntu 16 installed. It had pretty much just sat around and done nothing. I wanted to give my mom a laptop, so she can have her own space. I turned the laptop on at the beginning of this journey and it started making noise out of nowhere and got progressively worse. I had to open the laptop to see what it was. Probably shouldn't be running it with that strange griding noise. I suspected something was stuck in the fan. The laptop in general was quite filthy and gross, so I gave it a decent cleaning. The fan vent was blocked by a wall of debris in addition to having a piece of tape stuck inside it. Noisemaking culprit Blocked vent All cleaned up I also went ahead and gave the keyboard a good cleaning, and took a quick peak at the underside of the motherboard. I saw that the optical drive was taking up a lot of precious real estate in the case, which gave me some quick thoughts about changing that situation. I decided I needed to calm down and do a simple task first. I put everything back as it was, and start the laptop. Yay! It turns on Ubuntu 16 did not wanna play nice. I accidently uninstalled some important packages at one point. I recovered using the earliest recovery mode. I couldn't even update until I fixed my current broken packages. So first, I had to clean up ubuntu 16, which turned out to be an hours long process for me. Lots, and lots, of updates. Once fully updated, I went through the process again with Ubuntu 18. Then Ubuntu 20. When I got to Ubuntu 20, I think I installed the wrong graphics driver, and I was having issues LOL. After many ctrl+alt+deletes, escapes, and restarts, and what seemed to be generalized button mashing, I somehow managed to get to a terminal. I have never appreciated the terminal as much as I did at that moment. Hurry! Fix it quickly before the screen goes black again! After frantically typing questions at the speed of light into google and chat-gpt, I get to the graphics driver selection interface once again. At that point I was able to fix the graphics driver and continue moving forward. Learn by breaking. It's real LOL. Ubuntu 20 GUI - so much cleaner! Ubuntu 20 files and folders look so much nicer than Ubuntu 16. At the end of the day, my proudest moment was to see that through all of it the super old files that were on the laptop were still accessible. I have grown a fondness for this disasterpiece of a machine. We are trauma bonded. So my mom is gonna have to get something else. XD So I am rehabilitating an older Dell Laptop we had laying around. (But actually newer than the Ubuntu laptop.) The i5 will be more than adequate for her needs. I was able to manually transfer her iphone pics to the Dell, something that she wanted. I ordered the max RAM that the laptop can accommodate and will be popping that in later for a more user-friendly experience. We don't want a frustrated mom now do we? Been waiting all morning for Ubuntu 22 to install on the first laptop. Wish me luck!
Several years ago, my brother gave my mom a laptop with Ubuntu 16 installed. It had pretty much just sat around and done nothing. I wanted to give my mom a laptop, so she can have her own space.
I turned the laptop on at the beginning of this journey and it started making noise out of nowhere and got progressively worse. I had to open the laptop to see what it was. Probably shouldn't be running it with that strange griding noise. I suspected something was stuck in the fan.
The laptop in general was quite filthy and gross, so I gave it a decent cleaning. The fan vent was blocked by a wall of debris in addition to having a piece of tape stuck inside it.
Noisemaking culprit
Blocked vent
All cleaned up
I also went ahead and gave the keyboard a good cleaning, and took a quick peak at the underside of the motherboard.
I saw that the optical drive was taking up a lot of precious real estate in the case, which gave me some quick thoughts about changing that situation. I decided I needed to calm down and do a simple task first.
I put everything back as it was, and start the laptop.
Yay! It turns on
Ubuntu 16 did not wanna play nice. I accidently uninstalled some important packages at one point. I recovered using the earliest recovery mode. I couldn't even update until I fixed my current broken packages. So first, I had to clean up ubuntu 16, which turned out to be an hours long process for me. Lots, and lots, of updates. Once fully updated, I went through the process again with Ubuntu 18. Then Ubuntu 20. When I got to Ubuntu 20, I think I installed the wrong graphics driver, and I was having issues LOL.
After many ctrl+alt+deletes, escapes, and restarts, and what seemed to be generalized button mashing, I somehow managed to get to a terminal. I have never appreciated the terminal as much as I did at that moment. Hurry! Fix it quickly before the screen goes black again!
After frantically typing questions at the speed of light into google and chat-gpt, I get to the graphics driver selection interface once again. At that point I was able to fix the graphics driver and continue moving forward.
Learn by breaking. It's real LOL.
Ubuntu 20 GUI - so much cleaner!
Ubuntu 20 files and folders look so much nicer than Ubuntu 16.
At the end of the day, my proudest moment was to see that through all of it the super old files that were on the laptop were still accessible.
I have grown a fondness for this disasterpiece of a machine. We are trauma bonded. So my mom is gonna have to get something else. XD
So I am rehabilitating an older Dell Laptop we had laying around. (But actually newer than the Ubuntu laptop.) The i5 will be more than adequate for her needs. I was able to manually transfer her iphone pics to the Dell, something that she wanted. I ordered the max RAM that the laptop can accommodate and will be popping that in later for a more user-friendly experience. We don't want a frustrated mom now do we?
Been waiting all morning for Ubuntu 22 to install on the first laptop. Wish me luck!
