After great trial and error, I was able to successfully install the Desktop version of Ubuntu 14.10 i386 on my PC, which is an old DELL Pentium 4 OptiPlex 210L. It was a case where an installation step was failing, similar to the problem described in "Error installing Ubuntu 14.04..." for the Server version, or the problem described in "errno 5 - input/output error..." for the desktop version after successfully booting it from a USB stick (which was a drama in itself, since this often resulted in the problem described in "Ubuntu 14.04 LTS live USB boot error...")!
This, however, was not the end of my problems. More often than not, web browsers like Firefox and Opera would crash for no apparent reason, while Chrome would simply Snap! Also, Ubuntu updates were a nightmare since this, more often than not, would resulted in some internal error which, when reported, would open up the default web browser with the ticket number of a bug that had been previously reported. While I was able to resolve the internal errors by cleaning and re-installing the apparently faulty Debian files, the checksums of other apparently faulty files that I had downloaded were different from what was reported on their respective web sites.
I discovered that the cause of all my problems was due to a faulty DDR2 2GB memory card, which I determined by running MemTest86+, according to the feedback given in response to the problem description, "Try to install Ubuntu - MD5 checksums different". Since removing the faulty memory card, I discovered that the correct checksums are now being reported for those files that I had previously downloaded.
Because I have downloaded many files since I installed Ubuntu, and because I do not want to go through the trouble of re-installing Ubuntu from scratch, my question is if there is a way of determining whether or not Ubuntu was installed correctly? And, although the journaling features of ext3 and ext4 circumvents file corruption, is there a way of determining the integrity of the file system?
Question Revised by Author - 24th Dec 2014
After following the advice given by @psusi, I installed and ran debsums on my Ubuntu installation. I received the following output.
vasilios@OptiPlex-210L:~$ sudo debsums -a -s
[sudo] password for vasilios:
debsums: missing file /etc/default/chromium-browser (from chromium-browser package)
debsums: changed file /usr/lib/firefox/browser/omni.ja (from firefox package)
debsums: changed file /usr/lib/firefox/libxul.so (from firefox package)
debsums: changed file /usr/lib/firefox/omni.ja (from firefox package)
debsums: changed file /usr/share/locale-langpack/zh_CN/LC_MESSAGES/gtk30-properties.mo (from language-pack-gnome-zh-hans-base package)
debsums: changed file /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/gb24st.pcf.gz (from xfonts-base package)
Not being certain whether or not these changes were due to updates, I also ran the following dpkg commands on the affected packages.
vasilios@OptiPlex-210L:~$ dpkg-query -W -f='${Status} ${Version}\n' chromium-browser
install ok installed 39.0.2171.65-0ubuntu0.14.10.1.1106
vasilios@OptiPlex-210L:~$ dpkg-query -W -f='${Status} ${Version}\n' firefox
install ok installed 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.10.2
vasilios@OptiPlex-210L:~$ dpkg-query -W -f='${Status} ${Version}\n' language-pack-gnome-zh-hans-base
install ok installed 1:14.10+20141205
vasilios@OptiPlex-210L:~$ dpkg-query -W -f='${Status} ${Version}\n' xfonts-base
install ok installed 1:1.0.3
vasilios@OptiPlex-210L:~$
Judging by the output, it would appear that the packages have been installed correctly. Is there any reason to believe otherwise? Any advice/feedback would be appreciated.
