So I have managed to put together my new computer and install Ubuntu 11.04.

Some things that I have found.

My Samsung SyncMaster 910T monitor does not work with the new computer. I can’t see the BIOS boot screen when booting up. I get a floating incorrect ‘non-optimum’ mode warning on the monitor but I can’t change anything about the resolution in the BIOS or anywhere so I have changed to a Benq T2200HD and it works. My presumption is that the SyncMaster is a 4:3 or 5:4 monitor and the Benq is 16:9.

I think it’s something to do with the video card being too modern and not detecting that the monitor needs a lower res or something.

I am going to try and get some DVI cables instead of the D-Sub (the old style monitor cables) and hope that the video card can reconfigure itself to work with the older monitor. It’s really annoying to have two 19″ monitors that don’t work with my new PC.

The other thing that’s been interesting with the new graphics card is it won’t run Unity / and or Mutter (the gnome 3 version) unless you install the propietary Nvidia driver this is easy with Ubuntu just go to System ==> Administration ==> Additonal Drivers and it will prompt you to install the Nvidia 3D Drivers. The download takes a while though.

Ran into a complaint about the new 2TB Western Digital Drive partition being misaligned 3072 bytes so to had to Google and find the answer http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-4kb-sector-disks/. In short used fdisk and set it to “sector” mode (the ‘u’ key) to create the partition. If I had of left the partitioning the same as the Ubuntu installer created I could have been afflicted with bad write performance