I blogged a couple of weeks ago about ditching Windows XP on my laptop and performing a full install of Ubuntu Linux. As it turned out, I installed the wrong version of Ubuntu. My HP Pavilion dv6000 has the AMD Turion 64 processor chip. That meant I could install the regular 32-bit version of Ubuntu, or the 64-bit version.

I chose the 64-bit version. That turned out to be a mistake.

I had a problem installing certain applications such as a flash player. This meant I couldn’t do important things like watch YouTube videos.

I decided to go ahead and install the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 8.1.

The install went very smoothly.  I did though run into a slight problem unassociated with re-installing Ubuntu.  The night before and earlier that day, we had some very high winds in our area.  Electric power was fluctuating through out the day.  That day at work, I had to log into my PC five different times because of power dips.  Evidently, my wireless router didn’t like these power fluctuations and reset back to it’s factory default settings.  When I tried to connect to my wireless router, I didn’t see it among the list of available wireless routers.

Evidently, quite a few people living in out apartment building have wireless routers.  There is even one named Neverland Ranch.  How creepy is that?  I used to think I knew who’s wireless router that particular one belonged to, but the weird pasty looking guy down the hall moved out last year.

It was not him.  Go figure.

It turned out my wireless router was the one named linksys without any security in place. Once I realized what was going on, I was able to log on to my router from my desktop PC and reconfigure everything.

Once I got that wrinkle straightened out, I was able to go online and download and install new applications like Wine. I had a hard time doing that with the 64-bit version of Ubuntu.