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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[otherego]

I like Mepis - is there a remaster possibility?

Have you had a chance to look at Antix yet? It would be interesting to see what else could be done with the basic Mepis. It has the advantage of starting out surprisingly light on software resources - I've managed to run the live disk (sedately) on 256mb of RAM. Must learn all this remastering stuff. I see there are one or two apps to help with it. A major project in due course!

This evening's plan is to try to get Linux (Antix, in fact) onto the Toughbook. What makes this a challenge is the fact that the Toughbook lacks a CDROM drive. What I see in various forums suggests there would be little promise in plugging in a USB drive, even if I had one.

It would be useful to do this without taking the hard drive out of another laptop, temporarily installing the Toughbook's drive in that laptop and installing Antix - then moving the drive back to the Toughbook. (Presumably before completing the end-of-installation restart - shut it down, put it in the Toughbook and try to start it - hoping this'll address hardware detection/configuration worries.)

W98 was successfully installed. Using a W98 boot floppy, I ran fdisk /mbr then sys c:,then placed the hard drive in an external enclosure, plugged it into the desktop, formatted it to FAT 32/marked it bootable with Gparted, copied the W98SE CDROM contents across to it and replaced it in the Toughbook. It booted to a command line, I entered C:\ setup and away we went.

OK, that is the shortened version. I'm not entirely proud of my language at times. But it eased the blood pressure no end.

Much googling hasn't really helped much. If anyone happens across this - might I be able to do something similar by formatting my spare 6gb drive to ext3 (setting the boot flag - I've yet to figure out what that actually does) plus, say, a quarter-gig of swap, and copying the Antix iso to the ext3 partition? Without putting something in the drive's MBR, I don't see how it would boot - unless the live CD iso does this trick - fooling the machine into thinking it's booting off a CD?

I'll have another quick look for Linux boot floppies, in case a boot floppy would do the trick. I've encountered a couple of difficulties - PlOP, for instance, seems to depend upon GRUB already being installed to the drive being booted. I'd need something like WakePup that identified the distro's boot files (but WakePup only seems to see Puppy; I had the same problem trying to use the DSL boot floppy with an unrelated distro.

Ouch. Another long post. All suggestions gratefully received!

[otherego]

Double ouch. I formatted the drive to fat32 before running fdisk /mbr and sys c:, if memory serves correctly.

Must be some way of doing the same with Linux - W98 is slowly driving me to distraction.

[ej-solutions]

I have a floppy disk that will boot from USB & CD. Can't quite recall its name - will try to remember to 'dig it out'.
Universal boot disk or Smartboot disc, possibly. I have a number of boot floppy images stored in my software repository but unfortunately it's not clear which one that I used.

Briefly(& roughly):
Assume multiple primary partitions with DOS (for simplicity) and *NIX.
Fdisk/GParted controls partitions and switches boot flags.
The MBR looks for a bootable partition and reads from the 1st sector of the partition. This boot loader then opens the required boot files for the Operating System.
Sys writes the boot loader which points to msdos.sys etc. This can be combined with the format command as "format c: /sys", for example.
The equivalent for *NIX is mkfs
Grub can be installed in either the MBR, or as the boot loader on a partition. Fdisk /MBR will overwrite Grub, if installed in the MBR but not if installed in a partition. If Grub is installed in a partition, then it is possible to use a partition editor to mark the Grub installed partition as bootable.

(Enough typing)
HTH

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[otherego]

Ta!

The latest question:

I finally install Antix to the hard drive by attaching it via enclosure/usb to a desktop - when the installation got to the reboot, I shut down and shifted the hard drive back into the Toughbook.

The first problem was that it came up with two fatal errors relating to "fan" and "thermal" - the Toughbook doesn't have afan, which may be the problem here. Trying to restart with "nofan" and "nothermal" added to the boot line options at the bottom of the GRUB made no difference.

Then it couldn't find the sda1 which the distro was installed on - mainly because it was now hda (no longer a USB drive!) - presumably.

Changing both instances of sda to hda in the boot line options temporarily solved this, but in exasperation, and after some googling, I removed the drive again and changed all references to sda in /boot/grub/menu/lst and /etc/fstab to "hda."

OK - it now boots from "hda." A problem I can't seem to resolve is that it doesn't boot into a GUI, and demands that I log in on a text screen. (If I try the option "Press Ctrl-Alt-F7... for graphical login screen," the screen goes black with a blinking cursor in the top left corner and stays like that until I force a shutdown with the power switch.)

If I go ahead and login, it requires a further command - and I have no idea what it wants. I simply end up with "toughbook2 $" or something like that.

I tried "startx" - bash command not found. Tried logging in as root rather than user - same problem.

Any idea what command it might want in order to actually start the ******* thing going? I'm hoping that if I can actually get the operating system running, I might be able to find some options/settings to get into normal graphical boot.

(By the way - the "Boot Options" line on the initial grub screen reads "root=/dev/hda1 nomce quiet nosplash vga=788 resume=/dev/hda2." Any clues there. That "nosplash" for instance???)

As always, all suggestions gratefully accepted!

[otherego]

Sorry - it also seems to like "irqpoll" added to the end of the line - a suggestion that came up during a boot attempt.

[ej-solutions]

You're nearly there - it'll be the xconfig file that's the problem - don't despair.
Too much in the way of 'alcoholic lubrication' to provide real constructive help at the moment (see timestamp of post ;-))
You done very well to realise the change in device names BTW - top of the class! 😄
"Splash" is just the fancy graphics instead of the scrolling text telling you what's going on.
You'll probably have to rerun xf86configure to allow X windows to determine the graphics capabilities - some distros aren't very 'nice' in recognising a change in hardware.
Fan & Thermal are modules that can't be controlled directly at kernel boot time - noacpi or noapic are more likely options.
I think that maybe startx is invalid and slim is used instead - a lighter alternative. Grey area here, sorry.
that fact that you have a shell prompt at all shows that the OS is indeed running, it's the windowed environment that isn't. (Just a point of order ;-)). Think of DOS and Win98, for a comparison.

[[Grabs another sip of 15yr old Dalwhinnie. :-)]]

TTFN & a Happy New Year to all who choose to follow this.

EJ

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[otherego]

And a very Happy New Year to you, too, ej.

That tipple sounds seriously nice...

The installation from another computer was driving me mad. Fortunately, I'd extravagantly (over £60!) ordered another ancient Toughbook, one with a DVDROM, and it arrived - so I've been playing with that. (The only DVDROM I found was, admittedly, new - but would have cost more than I paid for the whole computer.)

Antix really impressed me as a live CD. It even ran on the Toughbook.

Installed, it's proving absolutely horrible. Everything I try results in an error of some sort or another; the wireless is erratic, to say the least. Reinstalling wicd seems to have made it easier to reconnect, though.

I've no idea how one's meant to update it - apt-get produces errors, I cannot for the life of me figure "aptitude" out, and Synaptic is proving a right pain. The reinstallation of wicd was achieved through a terminal, which also advised running "auto-remove." Good-bye gnumeric, and goodness knows what else.

Trying to reinstall gnumeric resulted in a demand to enable more repositories. Enabling more repositories resulted in a apt cache size error. It doesn't understand the "gedit" command which is the only way I know to get at and edit files from a standard account, so I had to sign in as root. Groovy. Not.

I think I've installed OpenOffice. At least, there were no error messages (in itself cause for suspicion with this distro, I suspect) and a whole lot of disk space has vanished - but I can find OpenOffice nowhere in any of the menus.

And I see the wicd daemon has just shut itself down again, during the latest attempt to update - fortunately after the downloads - hopefully the installation of updates will complete.

After all my initial enthusiasm, not a nice little distro at all. A shame, as when it does work, it is incredibly light on resources. I may persevere a little longer, but Wolvix is looking better all the time, dated tho' the non-beta version might be.

And still too icy and slippery out to wander down to the pub. *Sigh*

[otherego]

Amazingly, I'm still persevering with Antix. The Mepis forum is a friendly one - I remembered that I'd joined it when I had questions about Mepis a few months ago - and there seems a fair amount of enthusiasm for Antix.

It occurs to me that it could be a really useful learning experience. One of the posters over there pointed out that one of the reasons it is so lightweight is that a great deal has to be done manually that one has grown accustomed to happening automatically with Mint and the like. The command line, especially, features more prominently.

So - between this forum and the Mepis forum translating Linux to English, I hope to get it working yet. It's certainly impressive in its use of resources. With Iceweasel running, Conky says it's using 61mb ram and 18mb swap. Opening an eBay page increases that to 68mb ram - still pretty impressive. Although CPU use shoots briefly to 100% while pages open, it seems to idle away happily at about 5% with a page just sitting open.

Now if I can just find out how to get that ****** wireless card up and running...

[otherego]

One of the things I've enjoyed about Linux - and which has both infuriated and delighted in equal measures - is the fact that it demands a certain user participation. Mint, Mandriva and Mepis 8 do keep this to a minimum, and are probably no more trouble to those of us inexperienced in computing matters than dear old Windoze.

Actually, that's not quite true. I think I've learned a lot more from the various distros than my ventures in W95-Vista - which is not to denigrate these, but does suggest Linux might just be better for my brain.

Antix has been quite a wake-up. It's the first distro I've actually installed which makes quite such demands on the user. Faced with anything complicated, I've tended to scuttle back to Mint and the like.

There are still moments when I want to hurl the poor old Toughbook against the wall (not sure it's that tough), and I have never had so many things simply-not-work - but goodness, I feel as if I'm actually learning something. The experience has reinforced an awful lot of what I've been taught here.

Those on the board who encourage people to actually use their minds - so unfashionable! - might be interested in its potential as a teaching aid. It would tie in perfectly, for instance, with ej's willingness, in response to queries, both to provide the necessary tools and to allow those he helps to then find their own way as far as possible before the next helping hand is needed.

And my goodness, when it works, Antix does a fine job of reviving an old eBay P II.

So - although I'm finding a love-hate relationship, I think folk might find this clever little distro, for all its lack of some of the mod cons, a worthwhile addition to the Linux experience - and the its is one of the friendliest I've found yet.

[otherego]

and the forum is one of the friendliest I've found yet that should have read at the end. Blame yet another momentary interruption to the internet connection - trying to update Windoze anti-viruses and things this evening has been a joke.

Couldn't possibly be finger-trouble...

[ej-solutions]

😄

Unfortunately, from your perspective, I've become deeply involved in the development of a certain open source e-commerce package. This is needing what's left of my lateral thinking at the moment, so not devoting as much to your (combined) ventures. 🙂

As I'm sure you already know my doctrine of helping people to help themselves, it's giving me plenty smiles to see the progress by you guys. Keeps you from the pub - kinda! :-p

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[otherego]

Hope the development work's going satisfactorily.

doctrine of helping people to help themselves - what's the old saying? Give a man a fish and you've fed him for a day; teach him to catch fish and you've fed him for life?

Starting to enjoy Antix and Mepis (continuing with my inexplicable preoccupation with trying to make ancient computers run Linux.)

Mepis claims that its minimum CPU requirement is a Pentium III. The Toughbook CF-27 has a 300 mhz P II, but runs Mepis - not fast, but quite usably.

Interesting. Installing from the Mepis 8 CD resulted in 175 upgrades being applied to update the distro. These included updating Firefox from 3.0.6 to 3.5.6 and, more massively, OpenOffice from 3.0.0 to 3.1.1.

It all went smoothly with not one restart required. Can you imagine an MS equivalent? A bit like updating you from XP to XP SP3, simultaneously upgrading your Office 2000 to 2003 and your IE6 to IE8 all without a restart. And with no credit card details changing hands.

I rather think not...

[ej-solutions]

Thus you see my liking for *nix. 😉
[Amongst other reasons.]

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[otherego]

The start of it all? (found this on the CrunchBang site):

http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/51043/#p51043

[ej-solutions]

:8}

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[otherego]

Just downloading Mint 8 (slowwwwly). I'm hoping against hope that it might cope with the dreaded SiS chipset on my main "working" laptop. If it doesn't, Gloria can hang in there a little longer. The thought of all that nonsense trying to find a graphics driver again doesn't entirely appeal - 'tho I guess the same one I found last time would do, it'd be nice to have 3D graphics and be able to play around with Mint's smart desktops.

If anybody else who's bought one of the old Toughbook CF-27s going on eBay at the moment has found a distro that works comfortably on them, do tell.

Puppy is fairly reliable on old equipment, as is DSL. Neither of these really lends itself to the easy addition of software such as OpenOffice.org, and their out-of-the box wireless driver support is limited.

I think my ideal old-computer distro would be one that ran comfortably with 128mb RAM and a Pentium II (or even mmx or mxx or whatever they're called), and which had an easy-to-use package manager to add software once the basic distro's up and running. Hard drive space is rarely the limiting factor, after all. Something which in its basic form needs minimal hardware capability but which can then be expanded in scope and performance until the computer's own limits are met, I suppose.

AntiX is probably the best I've found so far from this point of view, although installing anything not in the repositories is too much like hard work - and after Mint/Ubuntu, the wireless networking is not great.

The Toughbook just about copes with Mepis 8, but despite a couple of reinstallations, there always seems to be another major hiccup. Just a little too much to ask of the hardware, I think - in all fairness, Mepis 8's not really meant to run on a Pentium II.

Need to learn the art of remastering, I guess. (Just give me another 10 years.) A seriously stripped-down Mint with Fluxbox and the ability to easily add stuff once it's in, perhaps.

Hey, one can dream. And it would be nice to think that all those CF-27s could be revived with something a little more modern and internet-safe than W98SE/2000.

[otherego]

Having burned a Clonezilla 20100108 CD very soon after it was offered for download, I finally had a chance to use it.

The plan was to clone a 11.2 GiB hard drive (yup, the dreaded old Toughbook again) with AntiX and W98 to a vast 27.9 GiB HDD. Each hard drive went into an external drive enclosure - thank goodness they're so cheap now - and these were plugged into the long-suffering desktop. This booted off the Clonezilla CD very quickly, and it took about forty minutes to complete the task.

No problems at all - no unrecognisable partitions, no re-ordering of partitions, nothing. Almost a shame I don't have something needing an NTFS clone. My last problem with Clonezilla involved transferring NTFS and ext3 FSs. I got the impression that once it had done the necessary with the NTFS boot partition, it couldn't get its head around the Linux partitions - just produced error messages and odd partitions unrecognised by GParted.

Still - my quick impression is that although it looks just the same, it's probably worth burning the newer CD. The ability to proportionately resize partitions when cloning to a larger drive is very useful, and was easy to use. Looks like a straightforward path to a larger hard drive (and the now- spare original drive for backups and such.)

A slightly intolerant view of the comparison between the Linux-user and the unenlightened Windows-user from a susceptibility to malware point of view - some interesting points, although they might have been more tactfully, if not necessarily more clearly, expressed:

http://linuxgazette.net/170/starks.html

The title, The Thin Line Between "Victim" and "Idiot" , pretty much sets the tone!

[ej-solutions]

Might've been written by me then.?:|
:-D
[Off to have a nosey.]

Noticed the recent update to Clonezilla (2 days ago) & the 'leaked' inkling of Mint 8 Fluxbox (Yeeha!).

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[grumpy-cook]

I'm just trying out the new 2010 release of PCOS in VirtualBox at present. It seems quite good. I'll play about with it for a while, with a view to switching to it as my main PC - I'm getting a bit browned off with Mandriva.

I'll let you know how I get on.

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[ej-solutions]

It was the over 1Gb download that put me off: 2009 OpenWorkstation version is CD sized.
[Reminds me to try Mint 8 Fluxbox - wouldn't run in VBox ;-(]

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