I've been running my head into this wall for about a week now, any help would be appreciated. I'm trying to rescue this old ubuntu machine that I have, but I'm not making much progress. Let me fill you in on what I've tried.
Years ago I had tried wiping the OS by installing Fedora from an ISO that I put on a CD, but I didn't know what I was doing and somehow managed to get the computer into a state where it was saying that there was no OS when I went to boot up the machine. Recently I came back to my computer in this state. I tried to continue with the Fedora installation but apparently I still don't know what I'm doing and couldn't complete the installation correctly. But when I tried rebooting to the hard drive, the computer booted up my old Ubuntu OS which I thought was gone. I was able to sign in and take the files I wanted off the machine before I messed with things any more because at this point I don't care if I'm starting from a blank slate. I tried using the Update Manager to fix things but the first thing I see when I opened it is this:
"Your Ubuntu release is not supported anymore" - "You will not get any further security fixes or critical updates. Please Upgrade to a later version of Ubuntu Linux." with the option "Close".
When I click "close" it then shows this:
and when you scroll to the right it says:
I'm guessing this has something to do with the whole "release is not supported" issue, but I don't know what to do. In the Update Manager, I see that there's a section that says "New Ubuntu release '14.04.6 LTS' is available" and when I click "Upgrade", it looks like it downloads two packages real quick before doing... nothing. When I try going online it says:
"Secure Connection Failed" - "An error occurred during a connection to mail.google.com. Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s). (Error code: ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap)"
whenever I try accessing a site with HTTPS. I know these are some separate issues. I'm just painting a picture here about the state of things.
I had enough of all of this and decided to install lubuntu-18.04.5-desktop-i386 from a USB memory stick. I used rufus-3.16.exe on my Windows machine to setup the ISO on the USB stick. Here's my Rufus settings:
Now, maybe this next detail is the issue, but I don't suspect that it is. Apparently I have no USB sticks that are large enough to contain the ISO file. So I found a micro SD card that's large enough. I had to put the micro SD card into a micro SD to SD card adapter, and then put that into a SD card to USB adapter. Then I was able to get Rufus to setup the USB stick correctly. I got the Ubuntu machine to see the USB stick and it shows the lubuntu install screen. When I try to install it, I get kernel panic messages such as these:
I tried updating Initramfs on my machine before attempting this again and it seemed like it attempted to update. I'm not sure that it did.
Today I found my way to this menu:
and attempted to "repair broken packages" and saw this mess:
which looks a lot like what the Update Manager was doing so I think I'm just running in circles at this point. Here's some info from my Disk Utility:
You can see the hard drive, it's partitions, a USB stick that I used to get the screenshots from the Ubuntu machine to my Windows machine, and the 10+ yr old Fedora CD.
*-cpu
- description: CPU
- product: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz
- vendor: Intel Corp.
- physical id: 4
- bus info: cpu@0
- version: 15.2.7
- slot: WMT478/NWD
- size: 2400MHz
- capacity: 3060MHz
- width: 32 bits
- clock: 133MHz
- capabilities: boot fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe up pebs bts cid xtpr
- configuration: id=0
I hope this is enough information to help with at least what my next steps should be.
