[PLUG] HELP! Totally hosed my laptop! X won't start!

[John Jason Jordan]

On Wed, 31 May 2006 22:29:58 -0700
"Michael M." <nixlists at writemoore.net> dijo:

> > So now I'm gonna reinstall them from the same instructions. :)

> Huh ... I wonder if it has something to do with the "...64" part? 

I'm pretty sure that's it. Stuff not quite ready for 64-bit. 

Sadly, after my last response I tried to reinstall the Nvidia driver. No go. The instructions that I bookmarked from last time appeared to work, but when I rebooted I got the same "X won't start" problem. Had to edit xorg.conf with nano again to get the open source driver back. The open source driver works just fine for everything else -- I need it only for playing DVDs. And, having done all the 230 updates that started me on the current problem, I tried playing DVDs with the open source driver again, but same problems as before. Totem launches and then just disappears. So now I have to go figure out how to reinstall the Nvidia driver. But that is not a critical problem, so it can wait until after finals. No time right now to watch movies anyway.

> I'm curious about what advantages you get from running the 64-bit 
> version.  From what I've read, I thought the advantages over 32-bit were 
> limited to mathematical calculations and that it wasn't worth the hassle 
> if you aren't doing a lot of 64-bit calculating.  (Well, that and being 
> able to address way more RAM than I have.)  Are there other benefits 
> that I don't know about, or is it that you're doing these kinds of 
> calculations?

Actually, from everything I have read, it does run generally a little faster than the 32-bit version, although I suspect the difference is pretty trivial. My first reason is because this is my first venture into Linux and I wanted a baptism by fire. Best way to learn software is just doing it, making mistakes, and figuring out how to fix them. Sometimes it's painful, but that way you don't forget the lesson. It's been only a year for me, but I already have a pretty impressive collection of scars.

My second need is to use this computer for my class work in linguistics at PSU. But so far that only requires a GUI word processor with all the bells and whistles. OpenOffice.or 2.0 fills that bill, although there are occasional font issues -- it can't use OTF fonts, but that's also true of the 32-bit Linux version. If I couldn't run OO.org in 64-bit Linux I would be forced to use 32-bit. But since OO.o does run in 64-bit Linux, then running 64-bit helps with my goal of learning Linux. 

There may come a problem this fall when I will need to run Treeform (http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~donaldd/treeform.htm) for drawing syntax trees. I can do syntax trees in OO.o, but it's tedious. Treeform is written in Java, and it is supposed to run on Linux. I "installed" it, but can't figure out how to launch it. No documentation, of course. Most people use Visio on Windows for syntax trees. I tried Kivio, supposedly the Linux equivalent, but it's nowhere near the "equivalent." You can't create your own templates even. I could run Visio under Wine or something, but I don't want MS stuff if I can avoid it. Besides, you can't run Wine in 64-bit yet either.

I noticed on the Ubuntu forums that the release of Dapper Drake is imminent. I've been reading the comments from users of the 64-bit beta, and it looks like it will solve a lot of the above problems.