[nzlug] update: no dns - no more problem.

[Simon Bridge]

Looking for something else, I discovered that I may have sent this to
the wrong place... apologies if you've seen this twice.

Thanks everybody - 

>From the replies, it was clear that something subtle was going on.
I ended up taking charge of the machine (Dell Precision 410
Workstation).

This machine came with 8GiB PATA drive, which someone had wedged upside
down in the middle of the SCSI enclosure (This is *Dell* - the interior
of this thing is wildly over-engineered - but very tidy), 128MiB SDRAM,
and a single 550MHz P3 (the board will take two - so a memory upgrade
with an additional CPU may be worth the effort...)

Added, at users request, a 40GiB PATA. Had to remove and reinsert the
previous drive so it would fit (the IDE bays are *labelled* for goodness
sake - user insists that only professionals have been inside this
thing!)

High points in the HW:
nvidia RIVA/TNT2 graphics
C-Media Audio
Broadcom Ethernet
Has USB, no modem - use expensive external analog modem from D-Link.

This was the users second box - kept the first back so he wouldn't be
internetless while I was fiddling. This one previously dual-booted Win98
and Xandros (Xandros had an ext3 boot partition and a reiserfs root).

Installed Ubuntu 7.10 from the alternate CD
(Aside: Need 320MiB RAM to use the standard one - I didn't have an
alternate ISO for gutsy, so I had to go get it. And just then, I max out
my broadband limit and speed went down to 10k1! It took 30hours in two
tried - don't use the ihug mirror. You may express sympathy now :)

sda1 = root (7GiB), sda2 = swap (1GiB - overkill)
sdb1 = usr (10GiB also overkill, but this is the one that tends to max
out) sdb2 = home (30GiB)

Installed successfully despite failing the checksum - neat.
(Gave me the option to skip the install step - which I did - went
through to the grub install, came back, and successfully completted the
failed step.)

Ubiquity even detected and configured the modem!

Everything is supported out of the box. I had this thing hooked to my
LAN (via the broadcom nic) for the updates.

Considering the slow speed (ubuntu is usually sluggish at first but
550MHz... I wasn't expecting much) I installed the Xfce desktop, JIC.
Turns out not much of an improvement... need to know what to switch off!

Installed the nvidia-legacy driver to see if the GPU will take some load
off the CPU - had to wrestle it into submission: upon install, screen
lost resolution despite the modes being available in xorg.conf

This is something I've only seen happen to other people... turned out
the driver wasn't "activated" and the wrong monitor was showing in
system > administration > screens ... (I was puzzled that the correct
resolution was used at gdm login but not in gnome or xfce).
dpkg-reconfigure the xserver added a pile of modelines I've not seen
outside of openSUSE. Activated the driver, and forced the correct
monitor.

Switched composite off.
Removed compiz - on the off-chance. It's not being used and there are
like 30 security updates for it.

User has a CRT - so I've added an entry for that too... I'll have to
supervise the hookup.

For all that, there's not much improvement there either.

There are lots of updates for mono as well - what uses mono? Novell
Evolution uses it with the exchange server don't it? Is it safe to
remove? (We're talking about maintaining this via dialup.)

I'm beginning to think I should have done the server install and added a
desktop with aptitude (deliberate pun). So, come on, what should I
remove to boost performance? What don't I need here?

fstab partition entries are all noatime already. Where are my tricks
notes?

Modem: edited /etc/wvdial.conf to include the phone numbers etc - and
lo: she worked. DNS and the works. Everything that ought to connects.

This box had the same issue as the other one, so user had messed
something up someplace.

Installing a whole distro to get DNS is not optimal, but the previous
was Edubuntu 6.06 (about to end it's LTS) or Xandros 2.0
(legacy/commercial). So the upgrade was in users best interest. Would
have preferred something like puppy or wolvix for this machine... user
wanted ubuntu. Oh well...