The Linux Attempt Pt. II

[Caution: Technical post follows, ignore if not interested!]

Well, it turns out the old NEC PowerMate has only 96MB of RAM and that's short of the 128 required to run the Live CD and Installer for Ubuntu. Also, it takes old PC100 RAM which is kind of hard to find. Esther and I went to the "Silicon Valley" of Paris, the street with all of the computer hardware sellers and found a 256MB module of PC100 for 35 euros. It was more expensive than I was hoping, but given how few systems run PC100, it makes sense that it is more expensive per MB. Anyway, got home, snapped it in and ran the MemTest86 that comes with the Ubuntu CD and it started generating all sorts of errors.

So, it's possible that the stick of memory itself is faulty (it was stored loose in a drawer for who knows how long) or that the system can't properly deal with a single module of more than 64 or 128MB. The solution will most likely be taking the whole computer into the store and having them try out a few different memory modules of different sizes and see if it works.

Once the RAM gets sorted out, everything should go relatively smoothly (probably not now that I've said that) though Ubuntu will take up 3GB of our 5GB HDD. Oh well, .odt files typically aren't that big.