Overstretched IT support

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The problem: Crash during boot

More than a year ago, a few weeks after receiving my new work computer, it failed to reboot after a system update and got stuck early in the boot process. I soon realised I could still start the computer using “safe mode”. Strangely, nothing seems to be wrong because when I manually exit safe mode at the end of the boot process, the computer works fine. Our IT department has tried to fix the problem many times without success. I even had to work without a computer for about 3 weeks while it was “under repair”. You probably know how much work you can get done without a computer: close to zero.My computer runs Cubbli 20.04.06LTS, an unofficial Ubuntu spin maintained by the University of Helsinki for internal use. Although you can do bioinformatics on a Windows or macOS computer, Linux is hands-down the first choice. Many bioinformatics developers don’t even bother to release their software for Windows. MacOS works mostly fine (since it is also UNIX-compliant OS), but I would have to pay twice the price for the same calculating power.The computer is a Lenovo P350 with an NVIDIA T1000 graphics card, which I use to address two screens. I mainly need the graphics card for 3D modelling, phylogenetics analysis and similar tasks. This graphics card may have caused the trouble. I initially did not want to buy this model, but since there was a shortage of graphic cards at the time, IT convinced me to swap out my original choice against the T1000.

20.04 on Michael’s Domain

Overstretched IT support