Using Ubuntu on a hdd that is being used on multiple machines
 

Hello everyone, I guess I should and make the issue as clear as possible.

I am a 3rd year computer programming student at a local college. Part of our curricular requirement is to use a hard drive in a removable hard drive bay to basically have a drive that we can experiment on in labs. We then take the hard drives home and use them in our own machines to do further experimentation / work.

I installed Ubuntu 6.06 using my computer at home. As such, all drivers would be configured for my system (I would think anyways). I updated all the drivers and made sure everything was working great, and then I took the drive to school today. Now it fails to start X with a whole bunch errors mentioning xorg.config and other configuration stuff and tells me to restart GDM when I have fixed the errors... I wish I had a logfile to post but I am back at home and didn't think to save what the message said.

I figure it must because Ubuntu either doesn't like the hardware in the rigs in the lab, or simply because Ubuntu is looking for the hardware found in MY system.

Is there a way to tell Ubuntu what hardware configuration to use similar to the "Hardware Profiles" in Windows?

My system specs:

AMD Athalon XP 2800+
MSI Motherboard (forget model, Sorry :confused: )
Radeon 9200 128mb Video card (8x AGP)
Integrated NIC and Sound card
Acer Al1711 17" LCD Screen

I'm not sure if my question would be a misc, a hardware, or a software problem, but since I figured the problem was with Ubuntu differentiating between hardware I chose this one...

I'm willing to hear anything :p

ah well, your xorg.conf file will have your computer stuff listed, when you go to school you will definitely require to change the conf to match the hardware of your school comp.
what you can do is keep a backup of your xorg.conf as xorg.home when you go to school this xorg.conf will change to backup of that and keep it as xorg.school, and now you can change the conf whenever required.
although not a good solution but this will work, hopefully :D

Well, Thats what I was thinking, but for some reason Ubuntu is not rebuilding the xorg.conf ... Is there a way to invoke some kind of a device redection and installation?

As you said you're willing to hear anything... ;) In your situation I would set up a dual boot system, ie. install a 2nd Ubuntu on a spare partition when you're in the lab (and have the time to do it). I know it's not always practical to have for instance preferences in apps set up twice but at least you can make sure it'll work.

:twocents: