Building a New Computer: Installing Software

By mid-2016 I wanted to retire Juno, my computer from early 2010. It had received an upgrade in the form of a larger SSD, but all the photos were still on a hard drive, and the 4 GB of memory wasn't sufficient when I was doing heavy photo editing, leading to interminable delays and annoying clicks as programs were swapped on and off the hard drive. It was time for a new computer.

A previous post covers the December 2016 hardware assembly for the new machine.

This post discusses software installation, and the next will describe my performance tuning efforts. Sneak preview: overclocking an i5-6600k in a small case with a 92mm cooler can be a challenge!

I hadn't installed Linux onto a computer for a few years -- I once had to restore the OS on my old computer after a botched upgrade to Ubuntu 15.10 -- so I stumbled a few times. In the rest of this post I'll run through the issues in roughly chronological order.

First I created a bootable USB stick with XUbuntu 16.10 on it, using the unetbootin utility on my old computer. (16.10 is code for 2016/October.) The first ISO image I downloaded didn't work, so I tried another source; that .iso file was larger and booted.

The BIOS/UEFI interface gave me two choices of how to boot from the one USB stick. My first choice didn't work, of course. The other did.

I followed my old procedure of creating a separate root and home partition, but the installs kept bombing out with errors such as "firmware started installer in UEFI mode but it looks like maybe the OS is already installed in BIOS compatibility mode." To make a long story short, I didn't realize I had to create a bootable UEFI partition. I dsicovered this by abandoning my attempt to do a custom install and accepting the installer's defaults, which worked, and then I could examine what it had done.

I decided I wanted to try running without a swap partition on the SSD, having a generous 32GB of RAM, so I disabled the swap partition. The SSD now has a 0.5 GB EFI system partition, a 915 GB main partition, and a 16 GB unused partition.

I tried to copy my files over to the new machine via FTP from the old machine, but the FTP process kept stumbling over odd file names. I finally used grsync to copy my files from a backup HDD.

There was BIOS/UEFI tweaking to be done. By default turbo mode for the CPU was disabled, for example, and the i7z utility was handy to verify the state of the system. Also, I had to enable memory "overclocking" for the RAM to be run at its rated 2400 speed rather than the default 2133. (Another reason for using a Z series motherboard.)

At a certain point the motherboard stopped recognizing DEL at the "Press DEL to enter BIOS" prompt. Mr. Google revealed that many people were forced to reset their motherboard to restore this, which I wasn't crazy about. I have an old PS/2 keyboard, with which the motherboard did recognize the key, but I preferred the modern USB keyboard. Fortunately the GRUB bootloader has an option for "system setup," which takes you back into the UEFI/BIOS.

I also set up a prettier GRUB splash screen (the Orion Nebula). I ended up changing several settings in /etc/default/grub, including GRUB_TIMEOUT, GRUB_BACKGROUND, and GRUB_GFXMODE. After updating /etc/default/grub it's necessary to sudo update-grub for it to take effect.

I encountered a race condition that prevented Dropbox from connecting at system startup. Mr. Google pointed me to a solution, and I added these lines to my startup shell, which stop and restart Dropbox:

# work-around dropbox/dbus bug 
#
( sleep 2; dropbox stop && dbus-launch dropbox start) &

Several times I needed to register the new computer with a service (Google and Dropbox come to mind.)

Something odd was happening with the audio. The monitor (also new) was connected to the computer via a DisplayPort connection, but there was no audio unless I fussed with the entirely separate "PC  audio" ports, disconnecting and reconnecting them. I eventually discovered that the monitor sensibly was expecting its audio through the DisplayPort cable, but the pulseaudio software on Linux was somehow defaulting to "PC audio" until some external event forced it to reconsider its options. The easiest thing for me to do was to change the monitor settings so that it used the "PC audio" instead.

Eventually I'll write the performance tuning post, discussing overclocking, changing voltages, torture testing, and cooling the CPU. It takes time to collect all that data!