help needed!

[Mumia W.]

On 07/31/2008 12:14 PM, guoqiang jia wrote:
> First of all, I would like to thank you all for the wonderful job you have done on UBUNTU.  Thank you very much indeed! UBUNTU is great!
> I consider myself as a unskillful PC runner and have no spacial skills to work in computer field, especially, on UBUNTU. This letter is not about how to improve on UBUNTU, but is looking for the help from UBUNTU because my laptop encountered a serious problem during the installation. 
> The following is the story. I work with windows XP pro for a few years, it gave me a lot of rough time and unpleasant  experiences. Since I don't know too much about computer and its programming, I cannot use some OP system as LINUX, which needs a lot of skills to run it.  Last week, my laptop crashed down again, I decided to search a new OP system. I tried REDHAT, BLAG-600000, XFLT, and several versions of LIVE CD, however; their preferences were very disappointed. By a chance, I tried UBUNTU out. With a pleasant surprise,  I have found what I am looking for. UBUNTU's high resolution display, fast speed, and good network connection really amused me and I decided to switch to UBUNTU from windows XP.
> Before I installed UBUNTU 8.04, I checked the UBUNTU. ISO DVD disc and my computer hardwares, they are all good. During the installation, I double checked my laptop by using program MEM test +86 provided by UBUNTU, the tests took about 3 hours and it made 3 passes without any failures. After UBUNTU   being installed, I downloaded a lot of programs, such as Firefox 3 with its add-ons, gcc, g++, g77, etc. My download work wasn't done yet, I received a warning message, it read:
> " _cache_open(  ) failed, please make a report." 
> My computer is the first generation of dual core TOSHIBA A105 S4019, ( 1.8 GHz with CPU, 1024 MB with memory, and 100GB with hardware),even its cache isn't open, it still behaviors as normal one. When I used system monitor to check its processing, I found out that one core runs at 98% speed while the second one at 3%. Meanwhile, the memory and swap shows two flat lines, 51% with memory and 1.3% with swap. These dates convinced me that my laptop is really in the trouble. Since these is no cache open within it, CPU has to be very busy to transfer dates to the hardware by itself, that is why the warning message showed up. The second fact is that all kind media player acts wired. For example, VLC log shows that all “ lated pictures ”, which means that the movies are like high speed slide-shows, not moving pictures. Youtube has no web connections too. In the past week, I tried to find  solutions in the web sites, but it dosn't work.
> I don't know weather  I make myself clear  to you or not,  but I highly respect to your expertise and really need your help at this moment.  I would like to thank you all in advance, any suggestion is appreciated. 
> Please contact me at shen_zhen_china at yahoo.com 
> Sincerely yours,
> UBUNTU new user, Guoqiang Jia 
> 

I'm having a lot of difficulty understanding you.

I think you're trying to say that you weren't able to download some 
packages. I tried googling for "_cache_open failed," but that didn't 
turn up anything I could use.

I recommend using aptitude[0] to install packages and update the O/S, 
and it's always a good idea to run aptitude from within a "script"[1] 
session. If you get an error from aptitude, script will have recorded 
the error message exactly, so you can google for the error message more 
precisely.

Your hardware is probably okay. Whatever "cache_open failed" is, it 
probably relates to an intermittent bug or configuration error.

Good luck.

--------------
[0] Read "man aptitude" for more information.
[1] Read "man script" for more information.