[this is a part 2 post, continued from "Bandwidth Monitoring and..." I'll assume you've read it]
When we last left our intrepid hero, he had just realized he was 7 years behind the curve and was infatuated with a nifty little tool called ntop. With this new knowledge, there was only one thing left to do…
Now that I had ntop up and going on my little Linux laptop, I realized my next task was to cobble together a Linux box to keep at the office. Fortunately (debatable), I have a handful of old machines sitting on the shelves — and I knew just the machine to use. My glorious 1998 vintage dual Pentium II 450mhz monster! 512MB of ram and a mighty 10GB drive.
Hey, if you had that much raw power on the shelf, you’d be looking for excuses to tap it too…
Tossed in my Xubuntu CD and booted. Once it was up and running (quite nicely, considering it was running from CD I might add) I fired up the installer. Answered a handful of questions and turned it loose to work magic upon my aged silicon.
It responded with, “The ext3 file system creation in partition #1 of IDE blah blah blah.”
Hmm. Buzz kill. I restarted the installer, but this time opted not to let it automatically setup the partitions and manually did it. Same error.
Muttered under my breath and grabbed another machine off the shelf. This one, a mighty PIII 700. Damned if it didn’t do the same thing (twice)!
Here’s a tip from your wise old Uncle Chris: When prompted, read the dang release notes.
The installer prompted me to read the notes several times — But gee, I’m far too wise and smart for such things though. Know how I happened to read them?
They were the second site listed when I did a web search for that error. Heh. Talk about a *blush* moment. In them, towards the top even, was a nice simple little workaround to get past the error I was seeing. Summed up as, “hey dummy, go uncheck two boxes.”
Shocking as it may sound, from there the install went swimmingly and I spent the day monitoring traffic!
Oh, I did try to get that dual PII machine going, but it locked up during the install. Several times. Probably some boot parms to get around that, but I figured I’d save that for the next project…
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July 18th, 2007 
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That’s why I’m one of those weird geeks that do read errata and release notes of every distro before the first install attempt…I like my installs to work the first time
You seen the flaw in Samsung printer drivers? http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/18/0319203
@Vox – I definitely am going to spend more time looking at such things in the future. I’m a convert to your weird geek club.
@Contract – yeah, scary. I had just purchased a samsung workgroup laser about the same time that came out.
For now, my office linux box doesn’t need to print…
Glad to know your install went well. I’m a huge Ubuntu fan, I think you will really like it.
Not sure if its available on the Xubuntu or not, but there is a studio theme that is just knock-down gorgeous!
Hey Rob, I’m a huge Xubuntu fan (except when trying to get it going on that dang Tecra…)
I tend to run xfce or flux — all my xubuntu boxes are under 1Ghz. I keep ‘em pretty minimal.
Once I get ubuntu going on the Tecra, I’ll drop a note for that theme though.
I love Ubuntu more than Kubuntu and Xubuntu, but I couldn’t resist to have them all… but for my HP Vectra 500 (1995?) I use Damn Small Linux, and it works!!
Anyway, is great to know you enjoy Linux