I had finally gotten all my settings down perfectly, so it seemed, except that I was having a tiny bit of trouble with streaming video online. With all the funny YouTube and other files I’ve been trying to load lately, I thought I might as well fiddle with the settings in Firefox, to see if some video settings would load better.
And the next thing I knew, Totem (the main video player in Ubuntu Linux) stopped loading. Totally stopped. No idea why.
So I fiddled more — and messed a few more things up. Then I looked online. Found a few more things to fiddle with and mess up. I even installed a program called Kaffeine, which then turned my computer into a turtle, as in, taking five minutes just to start up. It was shocking and horrifying. I had to go into System Monitor and disable it.
So now, it seems, I am back close to square one. I have to reboot and see if Totem will run now, but it probably won’t. At least now I know what might have messed it up, anyway. Argh. And I’m very BUSY, I don’t have time to worry about all of this stuff right now, what with two huge piles of midterm exams and a several piles of other assignments to mark this week.
I’m considering this, well, a lesson learned.
UPDATE 26 April 2006, morning: Well, the reinstall was relatively painless. I deleted a few easily re-downloaded files, mostly public domain films, backed up everything else, reinstalled Ubuntu, did the few necessary tweaks to get it running, and ran the wonderful Automatix script overnight (it doesn’t take that long, I was just tired). Now I am copying my crucial data files to the hard drive, and I’ll have to install a few things including Korean language support for Openoffice and the Nabi application so I can switch from English to Korean, but it’s not going to be much work at all to get this system back to where it was, or better.
I hope. I still have yet to test a DVD. And this time, I think i’m going to try make sure wireless is working. It’s possible, I just need to actually do it. Later, later… but I think I’ll post some links here for my own reference, and for anyone else who is installing Ubuntu on a Compaq Presario V2000. Later today, maybe.