For previous entries in this series, check out part 1 and part 2. As usual, you can click on the pics to see them full-sized, so you know what I’m talking about.

Alright, last time we figured out what flavor of Ubuntu to install, downloaded it, successfully burned it to a disk, and loaded the disc boot screen. The next thing I did was use the “Check CD for Errors”, because, why not?

Awesome, no errors found! Also, good lord my screen is dirty. Sorry about that. Ok, so I press any key, and the disc reboots the computer and we’re back at the boot screen. This time, I pick “Start or Install Ubuntu”. I don’t know why running the disc live or installing the OS are both on the same option, but I can tell you that Ubuntu used to ship with two separate discs, one for each function. Now they use one, and these conditions are probably related. Anyway… here’s what happened.

I got a pretty little boot screen with a happy little “I’m Thinking” bouncing indicator… thingy. Then, text boot functions scrolled across the screen, and I started seeing the word “error” and “failure” pop up. This is the definition of not good.

Crap. Crappity crap on a crap cracker. Ok, this looks bad, and it kind of is, but it’s actually a pretty excellent result for a failure. When something in a computer breaks, you want it to return an error message, because the error message should hopefully give you some information on what’s wrong. Here, Ubuntu is telling me straight out that X window system, also known as my graphical interface, won’t start, and please try to run GDM later when you’ve figured it out.

This is good. The error told me that the programs are running as well as could be expected, but it can’t display the pretty, user-friendly GUI we’ve all come to expect from our computers, and explains this next screen.

Time for a history lesson. Remember MS-DOS, and computing from the MS-DOS prompt? You’re looking at something fairly similar, the LINUX command prompt. They essentially work the same way, but the structure and the commands are pretty profoundly different. MS-DOS came with a proto-graphical-user-interface called DOS Shell. It looked like this.

Primitive, huh? All it was designed to do was give the user a less abstract interface to the computer by displaying the DOS output in a pretty manner while accepting your input, translating it, and running DOS underneath. See? Shell? Pretty thin layer overtop? Exactly.

This shell concept combined with the intuitive inspiration of the Macintosh’s icons’n'windows interface to birth Windows 3.1. Win3.1 was just a really fancy DOS shell that also introduced it’s own Window’s native rules and protocols into the mix. (Incidentally, it’s my understanding that all the subsequent Windows editions through the Millenium Edition kept using this setup, refining it each time, using less DOS and more Windows stuff. XP took what existed and tried to completely eliminate the DOS and succeeded in reversing the process by making DOS run in Windows, and Vista finally succeeded in banishing DOS entirely thanks to being completely redesigned from the ground up. Sort of.)

Anyway, this is all to fluff your memories to remind you that layering programs on top of each other shouldn’t be an entirely foreign concept. That command line shows that the underlying LINUX structure was working. You’ll have to trust me, but I typed some commands in and it responded like it should. X window system is supposed to sit on top of that and give the computer the basic skills and tools to run a pretty graphical user interface. When that failed, GDM also failed. GDM, otherwise called Gnome, is a massive modification of the relatively primitive X and refines it into a really awesome GUI.

All of this is to say, since I got kicked out of the boot sequence when Ubuntu tried to fire up the fancy-pants graphics, the problem is probably an incompatibility between Ubuntu and my video card. Now that I’ve got a good idea what the problem is, I can try to fix it.

That’s a good place to stop, I think. Part 4 will let you know exactly how far I get.