this post was going to be titled “hello square one” because after getting the soundblaster live! card to work in linux for all of about 5 minutes, i rebooted to play some Guild Wars and when it came back, it didn’t work anymore. that has changed, however, since i am not even reaching square one. square one, at this point, would be welcomed.
right now i’m completely screwed.
as stated above, the sound worked from the transplanted card for about 5 minutes. i figured it was good and left it at that. when it came back, all i could get by twiddling the volume meters was feedback. i started from the beginning, retracing my steps. uninstalling and reinstalling all the stuff i had done already. the document i was going off of said that one of the steps (uninstalling and reinstalling everything related to sound) might break gdm (the desktop manager). so in addition to reinstalling all the sound stuff, i reinstalled that, too. but that step didn’t work anyway, so i went one step further and reinstalled the driver from the source. that still didn’t seem to have an effect so i rebooted.
the computer never came up after that and, when i kill stuck processes to see wtf it’s doing, i eventually get a, surprise, gdm error.
so, i know what needs to be fixed. however, when the computer finally boots up to a terminal screen i either don’t have internet access or my drives aren’t mounted because when i try to reinstall gdm it says it can’t find the package.
i boot from the ubuntu live cd, but i can’t install gdm from that, either, because that just installs it to the temp drive it creates to run the live os, not my actual hard drive.
i can’t reinstall ubuntu without reformatting my root drive, thereby losing everything i’ve done (at least not from the live cd).
so i’m screwed.
as i see it, there are three possilities:
1- attempt to mount my drive as the root drive and then reinstall gdm. i don’t know if this is possible. but if it is, it would be ideal.
2- find a way to reinstall the root directory without reformatting. this might be possible from the alternate install cd (the non-live cd). the downside is that i only have one that’s an older version (6.06 vs. 6.10), but if it works, i’ll take it…
3- purchase or find a hard drive that i can install as a 3rd drive and install ubuntu on that. then boot to that drive. nothing would be lost except applications. at that point i could either try to figure out what needs to be fixed, or, if it’s a new or at least working drive, i could just deal and live with that setup. there’s a possible alternative to this which is fast forward my plans on getting a backup device and back up everything i have on both drives and then reformat and reinstall, but i don’t think that’s a viable option at this point.
you wouldn’t think you’d need to be a computer genius to participate in a music competition, would you?
Leave a Reply