ubuntu Live CD's Installing ubuntu desktop

[Martin McCormick]

Rather than installing ubuntu8 and then attempting to upgrade to
9 and then 10, I downloaded ubuntu9.10 and tried that to see if
it would work. Part of the problem turned out to be that the
monitor I am using appears to not be able to handle anything
but standard VGA signals. When the boot process starts, the
screen goes completely random with all kinds of colors and
squiggles but I did get orca to speak and one could almost feel
a palpable optimism until a few minutes later when the whole
system froze up and I had to start that whole bootup process
again.

	This appears to be a rather frequent state of affairs as
it took multiple runs at the installation process before it
seemed to finally complete without just going off in to
never-never land.

	What I have is a system that almost works except for
these intermittent crashes that may happen 5 minutes or 5 hours
after startup. One will be typing along and then you don't hear
a keystroke echoed nor anything else and it's game over and
reboot.

	The notes on upgrading from 9.10 say the following:

     * Significant numbers of people with NVIDIA and ATI graphics boards
       have been seeing problems, so you might want to delay your upgrade
       until the following issue is resolved:
       https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/464591

I haven't gotten there yet to read that report, but this system
has an NVIDIA board in it.

	My experience with ubuntu, so far, has been fabulous so
I have faith that this problem will be resolved, but right now,
it's driving me nuts.

	Is it okay to ssh in to the system, using a
command-line, to do the upgrade process as I just don't trust it
to stay up long enough to complete tasks that, if half done,
mean a complete restart from scratch again.

	This all looks like it is going to be really great if it
can be made stable.

Martin McCormick