Hi! I'm new to UBUNTU!

[Maurice McCarthy]

Hi Jorge

OK I'll do my best to keep going. My home desktop is an AMD64 running
Ubuntu 1.4 also, so perhaps I can find something if I look hard
enough. I will try making a usb installer with persistency enabled and
that way I can see if I can reproduce your fault here or at least go
through the process pretending my location is us rather than gb.

>> So, bzip2 itself is not corrupted?  Actually, that would be
> preferable
>> as I could just "aptitude remove bzip2" and then download a *.deb for
>> bzip2 from http://packages.debian.org, right?

If you want to try then do this

aptitude purge bzip2
aptitude install bzip2

the second may have to be

aptitude --with-recommends install bzip2

if the purge removes other packages. I have not found anything helpful
in the aptitude documentation so far. (aptitude-doc-en)

>
> OK, so its a corrupted file that was downloaded by aptitude?  So, doing
> a cd-test won't help I guess.
>

There appears to be a series of errors of this kind. To be clear, the
error occurs after issuing the command aptitude update and not after
aptitude safe-upgrade?

> I tend to doubt its a cd burn error as I installed two Linux boxes with
> two separate CDs burnt on two different burners from the same *.iso
> that passed the md5sum check and both Linux boxes have the same
> problem.

So the CD looks good. Do both boxes have the same ethernet card?

>
> Can it be that the 64bit version of Ubuntu 10.04 has buggy drivers for
> my ethernet card?  Maybe the files are corrupted during download due to
> an ethernet error.  Should I try the 32bit Ubuntu liveCD?  That would
> be a shame as part of what I'm trying to do is get a nice 64bit base to
> build an MPI cluster on....
>

Which ethernet card do you have on your machines? And are we speaking
of wired connections? You can find this with

dmesg | grep eth0

after booting. My machine gives

[    1.932806] eth0: RTL8168d/8111d at 0xffffc9000067a000,
00:19:66:e8:65:04, XID 081000c0 IRQ 28

as the first line. And

nm-tool gives several lines including the driver

- Device: eth0  [Auto eth0] ----------------------------------------------------
  Type:              Wired
  Driver:            r8169

The command ifconfig (interface configuration) will tell you if there
are a lot of errors in the transmission and reception e.g.

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:19:66:e8:65:04
          inet addr:192.168.1.2  Bcast:192.168.1.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::219:66ff:fee8:6504/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:41795 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:32953 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:45838202 (45.8 MB)  TX bytes:4618280 (4.6 MB)
          Interrupt:27 Base address:0x8000

> Please help this old professor, I'd really like to get the Ubuntu
> desktop working for my students!
>

I'll do my best but seek help where ever you can.