My file server has been ill recently. It's been freezing. It has other problems, too, like a loud northbridge fan, but these seem minor in comparison to failing to function at all.
Well, after having it freeze on the login screen, without the screen saver on, I noticed some screen corruption. This says to me that it's graphics related. It's hard to tell if it's drivers or hardware, or a combination. I'm not a fan of manufacturers overclocking their boards by default. Instability is the result. One explanation for the suddenness of the increase in freezing frequency is miscellaneous updates to Ubuntu. Or, perhaps my GPU is just gradually melting and becoming less stable. The problem here is that when booting in Windows, things remained unfrozen for three days before I tried Ubuntu again.
Either way, I figured a good way to test the graphics card problem would be to run in command line mode for awhile, and see if things freeze. Getting Ubuntu to run in command line mode isn't terribly easy, though. Most linux distros have runlevel 2 mapped to command line mode. Ubuntu has levels 2-5 all mapped to the same standard experience. So, I had to do an "apt-get install rcconf" and "sudo rcconf" and then find a site that talked about what each service does.
It makes me feel inadequate and a bit sad that I'm such a linux newbie. I think I'd be embarrassed if I ever had to have conversations about linux with a real techie. Luckily, at work, I have the excuse "I work on .NET, which is Windows only. So, I need an answer for Windows. Oh, I have a linux file server at home, though." I am simply ashamed.
Also, I've had this damn thing for many months, now, and I still haven't even installed apache. I meant to have this thing functioning as an FTP server, website, and collaboration tool for family software projects. I need to get on this, and soon. Once I buy a house, anyway.
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