The Linux Distro Thread (maybe)

[ej-solutions]

Thought I'd start this one off, rather than continue on another thread.

As a quick catch up for others:

Have a look at Unetbootin, as a means to try out different versions of Linux, without producing numerous coasters (unwanted CDs).
I haven't tried the method of installing to hard drive, only the USB flash drive method (so far).

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[ej-solutions]

BTW: That's "the beauty part" of Virtualbox: I got scunnered rebooting to Windoze to "try things out". :8}

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[ej-solutions]

Been going round in circles, trying to disable IPv6 to see if it resolves a few wireless connectivity issues.
Allegedly it speeds up the internet for non IPv6 users (most of us) and I'm now off to see if I can find some info. for Windoze.

I've adapted what I found to include more than one interface, so should cater for most circumstances - In case someone else needs to try it:

How To Disable IPV6 in Ubuntu 9.04
Change /etc/rc.local as follows

#!/bin/sh -e
#
# rc.local
#
# This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel.
# Make sure that the script will "exit 0" on success or any other
# value on error.
#
# In order to enable or disable this script just change the execution
# bits.
#
# By default this script does nothing.

IFACE='eth0'
IPV6=`ifconfig $IFACE | gawk '/inet6/ {print $3}'`
ifconfig $IFACE inet6 del $IPV6

IFACE='eth1'
IPV6=`ifconfig $IFACE | gawk '/inet6/ {print $3}'`
ifconfig $IFACE inet6 del $IPV6

IFACE='wlan0'
IPV6=`ifconfig $IFACE | gawk '/inet6/ {print $3}'`
ifconfig $IFACE inet6 del $IPV6

exit 0


Reboot to activate.

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[ej-solutions]

For some sites there's a big performance boost - your mileage may vary. :-)

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[grumpy-cook]

Phew, what a palaver! I've been playing with this DL install for several days now and read reams of wikis, forums and other worthy works, but I've been able to devote most of today to it and finally have it properly installed.

There were two main problems. One seems to be a fundamental mistake in the DL-Gnome distro release in which root is allocated ownership of man-db, when it should be owned by man. The second nasty problem is that neither the preinstalled, nor any of the many Synaptic ATI driver packages actually work. They screw up xorg every time. The answer was actually quite simple and I'm red faced to admit I didn't think of it before now. I simply downloaded the linux catalyst drivers from the AMD site (a .run file) and ran it as root. The driver instantly worked and it only needed a minor customisation of xorg.conf to let me enable Compiz.

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[ej-solutions]

A blast from the not to distant past - you used to have to install the nVidia drivers the same way.

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[otherego]

I'm having a bit of a Windoze week (good resolution - get all the poor old creaky relics up to date, and I'm talking about the computers, not me!)

I've started using MyDefrag, simply because its "slow optimise" function actually seems to make a noticeable and significant performance difference. Waiting patiently for it to finish (nearly two hours so far, although Vista claimed that there was no need to defragment), I tried to find out more about defragmentation and came across this comment on some forum or other:

I wonder if they'll develop software that prevents your hard drive from getting fragmented in the first place. So if you had a defragmented hard drive you could use it for months and the need to defrag it would never arise because it would remain defragged. There's probably a logical reason why this wouldn't work but perhaps there's a way around it that no one has ever thought of.

What about Linux? Do I need to think of doing some defragging of the trusty Linux partitions? This one has less than a gb of space left on it - I'm really not sure that Windows's nearest Mint equivalent - XP or Vista, I suppose - would still work in that state.

So perhaps the answer to that poster's question is simply "Linux" ???

[grumpy-cook]

There's quite a nice explanation here OE.

http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting

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[otherego]

Bookmarked! Thanks very much!

[ej-solutions]

Slow just now - I'm benchmarking this widescreen nonsense. Unless you don't have a telly, or are doing a side by side comparison, I still don't get the attraction. In the minority again, methinks.

Note: cloned HDD from running lappy, installed in widescreen, clacky keyboard machine. Linux Mints goes "ahh, what's this?" and just works; WinXP - BSOD (quelle suprise!) - will get to it, eventually.

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[grumpy-cook]

I have given up with Dreamlinux. The main problem is that it is just too flaky. I've plodded my way through quite a few problems and overcome them, and in the beginning I reinstalled more times than I've had hot dinners. Every time you think it's running nicely, you install or change something and then have to spend hours getting it right.

The final straw was that late yesterday I did a load of updates via Synaptic and this morning it won't boot into the desktop. I can't face the prospect of wading through what could be wrong on the recovery console, even less reinstalling it all again. I've lost confidence in it ever being stable, shame because it's a nice distro in many ways. Perhaps in a year or two.....

I'm going to give Mandriva a try. I ran it for a while a couple of years ago, so it will be interesting to see how it has improved. I considered OpenSUSE, but the 4Gb download put me off and it still sounds a bit old-fashioned.

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[ej-solutions]

Shame it didn't work out.. Back to yer old sig 😞
I should maybe give Mandriva another go; it's been sometime since I last looked at it. Should fit on my 'secondary' linux partition ;-)

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[grumpy-cook]

Well, that was painless! Since my last post I have downloaded Mandriva, burned it, played with the live cd, installed it, filled in their survey, and now I'm typing this on it.

Now to play about and see if I can break it. ]:)

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[otherego]

Mandriva IS nice. (I found the KDE version harder on old, slow computers than the Gnome one, for some reason.)

It seems to be "just work" even better than Ubuntu/Mint. I've yet to have a real problem with it, at least as a live CD. It works nicely on an old T22 Thinkpad with 256mb of RAM, although it does use the swap-file fairly heavily.

Does anybody else notice a tendency for periods of fairly intense hard-disk access by Mandriva? They seem to last for a good ten or twelve minutes - I've not been able to figure out, from the system monitor, what it's up to. It does this both installed and running the live CD. (Mandriva One 2009, Gnome edition.)

It was one of one of the things which made me persevere with Mint during my recent adventures with my new/very second-hand Fujitsu - coupled with the fact that I like Mint even more than I like Mandriva, even though Mint has major graphics difficulties with SiS hardware.

Not urgent, but if anyone else notices Mandriva energetically talking to the hard drive (or CD, in a live session) for no apparent reason, and can find out what it's up to, I'd be intrigued to know. It seems to happen most noticeably when you've left the computer idle for a time.

PS Even I have yet to break Mandriva! DL, for all its charms, seems to delight in "auto-break".

[grumpy-cook]

ONly just getting to grips with it OE, but I will watch out for strange HD activity. Not noticed anything so far.

What did impress me is that I had to do no hunting for ATI drivers, it recognised my card and worked out of the box, and what's more I haven't had to go near xorg.conf because it also recognised my monitor and put all the correct res and refresh settings in. A breath of fresh air after DL.

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[ej-solutions]

Disc thrashing is indicative of insufficient memory and/or swap space. Check that swap is running.
swapon -s

[Linux memory management relies on 'pushing out' idle processes to disc fairly regularly]

Use top to monitor what things are getting up to (and have fun fathoming out what all the stats mean ;-)).


EnvyNG is the business for ATI/nVidia drivers, I believe (having neither on any of the laptops 'lying around').

Did notice that an auto-update on Mandriva installed a swathe of languages for Firefox, in its' wisdom. :-(

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[otherego]

According to the system monitor, the swap space is in use. It took nearly two hours for the HDD activity to start - it then carried on for about fifteen minutes. All I could see on the system monitor was quite high activity by gnome-system-monitor (about 12% CPU), with nautilus joining in from time to time (also about 12%) - yet CPU utilisation varied from about 45% to 95%, with nothing else clearly visible.

RAM use was fairly steady at around 65%, with swap at around22%. This machine has 256mb of RAM and 369mb of swap.

All very strange. Perhaps Mandriva have gone into the hard-drive business, and need us to wear the b*****s out!

If I find anything out, I'll post back with the gen.

[ej-solutions]

B-)
I'll try to give more time to the newly installed Mandriva and see if I notice anything but with 1Gb RAM, I don't see that swap will come into play much. [Could maybe supply a mem=256M to the boot up command line ;-)]. It's the Gnome edition that I'm running, which should still give an indicator (roughly) to the KDE Edition.

My previous non-widescreen lappy trashed three hard discs due to thrashing by Windows XP (or some component of it; driver etc.), so your concerns are not unfounded.
[Note: the drives as still used for other applications - with their bad sectors.]

Continuing another theme and somewhat topical with another thread:
Anybody got to VirtualBox OSE yet and are running their Windows (XP/Vista) within it?
[Note: it's easy if you're just running a 'live' CD but a few step more, to do a full install. One could setup Mandriva to run in a Virtual Machine...]

A quick question, for OE:
Could you look for system (hardware) information, to identify the motherboard chipset? It's possible to make VirtualBox emulate a couple of different chipsets. Might be useful, for experimentation.

Should this thread be trashed in favour of a blog??? 😮
[Who's willing to start again? :-)]

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[grumpy-cook]

I'm running the Gnome version of Mandriva as well. I have the same "problem" as EJ though, the PC has 2Gb of ram in it, so I'm not likely to see any thrashing.

I want to have a go with virtual stuff some time, hopefully sooner rather than later.

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[otherego]

I'll certainly check on the hardware info - the old T22 had already been packed up by the time I re-checked here, but I'll dig it out on the morrow.

Curiously, it did the same when I had it installed on the long-suffering Compaq desktop - which is not in great condition, but increasing its RAM from 256 to 768mb. In any event, the T22 installation was only using about 65% of its modest RAM during all this, and 75-80mb of the 369mb swap available.

I wondered if it was updating, but it wasn't. Just the hard drive rattling busily away, and the HDD light on.

A similar thing happened during an extended live CD session with the Fujitsu V5535 while I was debating using Mandriva on that,to sidestep the Mint graphics headaches. I don't think it's a swap issue, as it seems to happen if the computer's been running for a couple of hours and is then left idle for more than ten or fifteen minutes.

Google's not been that helpful, so far. I'm obviously asking the wrong questions!

Not serious, but intriguing. Might be worth burning another CD, in case there's something funny about the one I've been using for all these months.

[otherego]

Strange the bit about the Compaq should read "increasing its RAM... made no difference to this phenomenon."

Must be bed-time...