Week of 06/08/2008 - 00:00 to 06/14/2008 - 23:59

I recently rebooted my desktop, only to find it painfully slow on restart. It took about 20 minutes of investigating to figure out what was going on, but finally I stumbled on the answer.

The first thing I noticed with top was that there were 10 instances of "identify" running, all using around 10% of the CPU.

If I killed all the instances of identify, they would immediately come back. It was driving me up the wall. With nothing else running on the desktop, these things would constantly pop up.

Finally I noticed that trackerd was the last process started. After killing it, the problem went away.

Tracker is a Linux search and indexing utility. One that I never use. Apparently it was trying to index the thousands of images I have stored on mounted NFS shares to a server.

Since my search utility of choice is "slocate", I uninstalled Tracker and the problem was solved.

I'm still not sure what the problem is. I'm attempting to install Ubuntu 8.04 on a new machine and it keeps freezing up during the install. So far I've tried disabling virtualization in the BIOS, a different hard drive and now I'm trying the built-in video instead of the GeForce card I'm going to use.

Update:
Things I've tried:

boot params: noapic, nolapic acpi=off
Multiple hard drives
Removed PCIx video card and used onboard video
Setting BIOS SATA controller to "Legacy IDE"
Native SATA Mode
Standard IDE hard drive
Another DVD reader in case it was a bad source drive
Memtest, just to make sure it wasn't bad memory
Booted into 8.04 live CD and tried to partition the drive - still froze
Tried different SATA cable and port (even though the IDE drive failed too)
I finally booted a 7.10 32 bit Live CD and was able to partition and format the drive
Still no luck installing 8.04 on top of that formatted drive, however...
Tried setting SATA mode to RAID

Well, I gave up on Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron". It refused to format the drive whatever I did. I did format the drive once with a 7.04 disc I had lying around and then tried to install 8.04 on it, and it still failed.

So, obviously it didn't like my motherboard chipset. Basically if you have a Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard (AMD 690G Northbridge) then don't try Ubuntu 8.04.

I ended up installing Ubuntu 7.10 on the system and it went on perfectly first try!

For the record, here's what I have:

Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H Motherboard
AMD AM2 X2 64 bit 5600 Brisbane CPU (fastest 65 watt CPU they have)
8 GB of RAM
160 GB SATA Barracuda
160 GB SATA Raptor
Asus GeForce 8600GTS with Dual 20" widescreen monitors

After installing Ubuntu 7.10 on my machine that refused to install Ubuntu 8.04, I then updated it to 8.04.

Things seem to be working... we'll see.