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).

---

Just skimming the surface

Opinions/guidance expressed are intended to benefit the reader (mostly) but no responsibility should be assumed for the accuracy and no warranty is implied/expressed or given - so eBay may pull this post

[*scyllabub*]

There's one p/w required when I boot up and another when I want to do admin... one of them's a Keyring. I just complied with everything it asked me when I installed - probably too nervous to read things properly at the time :|

[ej-solutions]

This is the main difference between Windoze and *nix - proper security. To bypass the asking of a root password for administrative purposes is just asking for trouble. Live with it: use auto-login to save you the trouble of the login password.
Menu|Administration|Login Screen in Mint 9 (for example).

---

Support VulcanToTheSky

Firefox "Safer Browsing" pack available: follow my page for the link to my website.

[otherego]

All this talk of firewall problems on another thread. After messing about with the Windows machines, it's always something of a relief to just start the Mint desktop up and simply do what I want to. I don't have to wait for the anti-virus to finish updating (or have to update it manually if it's the Avira machine and Avira's having one of its days), or wait fifteen minutes plus for CIS antivirus to update then demand a restart (only one rarely-used old EI, thankfully), or watch everything sloooow down, then start working after Threatfire self-importantly announces that it has updated, or have MS tell me just as self-importantly that, "Updates are ready for your computer. Click here to download these updates" (which other updates, for goodness sake? What part of "pronoun" does MS not understand?)

Having said all that, Mint seems to have an awful lot of updates at the moment. All polite, all making sure that nothing happens until you sign in and authorise it and, so far, not one restart. Very painless.

Who says (modern) Linux is more difficult to use than Windows?

(Be warned - may be back later with a Silly Question about Mint's firewall, if googling gets me nowhere...)

[ej-solutions]

For most users, just turn it on and forget about it. :)

---

Support VulcanToTheSky

Firefox "Safer Browsing" pack available: follow my page for the link to my website.

[ollie_octopus]

test

[otherego]

Good grief - something very odd happened as I was composing a post. I'll try again.

Ollie - I think you've wandered onto the wrong thread. Would you be so kind as to self-button-push that "test"?

Linux firewalls - as far as I can see, the firewall is on anyway (as in iptables blocking unsought inbound connections - have I got that right?)

The simple user interface is just that and not doing anything with it doesn't mean that one is unprotected - is that right?

Interesting - Dell has not only shown that it has a spine, but a very considerable one. Interesting article in The Register

http://forums.ebay.co.uk/thread.jspa?threadID=1100235695&tstart=0&mod=1276629148399

They link to Dell:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/ubuntu?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~ck=anavml

To be on the safe side, the Reg provides a link to a PDF version in case that one should disappear...

The more local Dell pages (I think - might be mistaken, but had to enable dell.co.uk to find this) is a little more cautious, offering a disappointingly wishy-washy comparison between the Ubuntu and Windows systems:

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/windows_or_ubuntu?c=uk&cs=ukdhs1&l=en&s=dhs

I can't really agree with their suggestion that Ubuntu might prove too much for Windows users, nor for new users. I found Linux about a year after starting to use these computer-gadgets (as I've said before, I somehow managed to avoid them for over four decades), and would honestly not consider Ubuntu significantly more difficult for a beginner than Windows. Indeed, the very friendly and accessible forums (not only Ubuntu, either - most distros) provide lots of help, and for the "I just want to take it out of the box, surf the net and compose some documents and spread-sheets" user, I'm not sure that such things as the command-line need ever be encountered.

Also a shame that they didn't mention OpenOffice's compatibility with its Windows counterpart. Nor the relative ease of installation and updating Ubuntu (if it's not bought pre-installed). And you sure don't have to be interested in programming in order to reap the considerable benefits of Linux.

Still - a bold and most interesting step on the part of a major manufacturer.

[otherego]

Sorry - the other slightly wishy-washy page:

http://www.dell.co.uk/ubuntu

[otherego]

Oops.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/linux-infection-proves-windows-malware-monopoly-is-over-gentoo-ships-backdoor-updated/2206

[otherego]

"Linux doesn't run any useful applications."

"Linux is really difficult to use."

And so on.

I've said it before - I came to computers later in life. I'm not a natural. I lack general computing experience and
background.

I've got a "new" second hand computer. (2GB of RAM - nothing in this day and age, but I reckon it a luxury.) I'd like to run both XP and Mint. So far, I've been having a Windows week.

And it's driving me batty.

Hopefully tonight or the weekend will see the installation of Mint on the second hard drive. It's a 465 GiB drive, and in addition I've already allocated 165 GiB of the Windows drive to a NTFS partition to be shared between the two systems as required - I was thinking of iso files in addition to everyday data I might conceivably need to get at from either. (Of course, Mint can get at the Windows files any time - but the other way round is a problem - and I'd rather not give XP any ideas above its station by messing about with drivers for Windows to read ext file systems.)

Just as I've been plaguing the board with requests for Windows partition schemes, so I'd appreciate suggestions/experiences for setting up the Linux drive. Ideally, I'd prefer to keep it simple - although I do see the merit in a separate / partition. My usual set-up is /, /home and Linux Swap.

Apart from being very hazy regarding the advantages of more complex set-ups, I'm concerned about incorrectly estimating the needs of various partitions - leading to wasted space on some, and to others running out of space in a few months.

One of the reasons for getting the slightly younger machine is that fitting a larger IDE drive and more RAM to my trusty old Optiplex would have cost about what I paid for the newer machine, and contributed towards the cost of the big (by my standards) SATA drives I've fitted in it. And what is really chewing up disk space on the old machine is Virtual Box.

It would be nice to be able to play with several distros on reasonable sized virtual drives, without having to keep deleting distros to make room for new ones.

Otherwise, no special plans for the new installation - other than keeping it as simple as possible without wasting resources in the process.

All suggestions/personal experiences with repsect to successful (and other!) Linux partitioning schemes will be gratefully accepted. Off to do real life stuff, but I'll certainly look in this evening.

[otherego]

Having muttered about just how annoying Windows updates can be, I suppose it's only fair to acknowledge that Linux does have an awful lot of updates by comparison.

39 yesterday and today (so far) on the Mint 9 machine.

What's amazing is just how quick and painless they tend to be. I've not, so far, had an update cause any problems.

Is that tempting fate, or what?

I particularly like the lack of nagging. If something needs a restart, it simply seems to wait until that particular app is next restarted. Yesterday's upgrade to Firefox 3.6.6. is a case in point.

Must mess around later on and see whether Brasero has been fixed - I see that was one of the more significant looking updates. (A problem with unmet dependencies in the version provided with Mint 9, I think - but when one tries to install them, the next error message just says that something's missing - not what. A few mentions in forums - frankly, installing K3B did the trick just fine! Of course, it cost nothing and involved no activation.)

And the sheer mass of updates does suggest that the open-source community does a pretty good job of spotting and rectifying problems, and providing upgrades where appropriate.

I've been messing around with Peppermint in VirtualBox. Worth a look, if anyone has the time - I see there's a new one out. The theme is a little overwhelmingly red for my taste, but I quite like the idea of a very basic installation allowing the user to decide what exactly to add. Using the Mint package manager makes this simple, and I had no trouble adding Open Office, for instance.

I'm still not convinced that on-line apps are for me, but this might be a good time to play around with them. Means giving Google yet more personal information... wonder if it's legal to fib when setting up an account?

It runs very happily with 256mb of RAM, and has the usual relatively modest hard-drive requirements. All very interesting. A sort of Mint for the younger set.

[ej-solutions]

Going to revist WattOS, when I find enough time to play. The previous version ran quite well on the low-spec tablet, so will be interesting to see if there's any improvements.
:)

---

Support VulcanToTheSky

Firefox "Safer Browsing" pack available: follow my page for the link to my website.

[otherego]

Not particularly urgent, but I'd be interested to know whether anyone has any ideas.

I'm running Mint 9, and like to mess about with VirtualBox. Whenever I've been using VirtualBox, Mint takes forever to shut down.

Additionally, it uses a lot of RAM - typically 850 out of 1001.8MiB - plus a fair amount of swap. (That's with a virtual machine allocated 384mb memory.)

When VBox is shut down, the memory usage drops - but something continues to use about 150-160MiB of swap.

The only left-over I can find in the System Monitor is something called VirtualBox Zombie (hope I've got that right) - and even that eventually disappears, although it ignores attempts to "end process." (Or maybe it didn't - maybe it just took its time.)

Anybody else had any odd behaviour associated with VirtualBox and if so, any idea whether one can stop it hogging resources/keeping some process or another running on shut-down?

[grumpy-cook]

Not noticed anything OE, but will do some checks when I next use it.

---

Click on logo or me for free Apps, Utilities, Antivirus Removal and System Backup Tutorial

[otherego]

Thanks, g-c.

As I say - not at all urgent - just wondering vaguely what's going on.

[otherego]

From this article:

ttp://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2010-03-05-022-35-OS-HL

UNIX administrators have colourful names and descriptions for things, especially when it comes to processes. For example, when one program or process starts another process, the original is referred to as the "parent process" and the new process is called the "child process". When a child process is finished its task it "dies". The parent process is notified of its child's death and the child's information is removed from the system.

"But sometimes a child process dies and the parent process doesn't stop to collect the information. When that happens, the child process itself is removed from the system, but a marker or "death certificate" is left behind, waiting to be collected. These uncollected death certificates are referred to as "zombie processes". These are rarely problems in themselves as they take up very little memory, but finding zombie processes usually means there's a bug in the parent program."

Good grief. And there are, of course, various other references out there.

Still not sure I've entirely grasped the concept, but I really don't see how zombies could cause slow shut-downs - unless the slow shut-downs are related to the coding errors resulting in the zombies in the first place.

VBox keeps offering an update (which could just take care of whatever's encouraging it to leave a zombie lurching on when it's shut down), but it's not in the repositories yet, so I'm inclined to hang on a little while. .

Give me a chance to figure out how to back up my virtual machines in case an update trashes them.

[grumpy-cook]

figure out how to back up my virtual machines

You could just make copies of the Vbox hard drive .vdi files.

---

Click on logo or me for free Apps, Utilities, Antivirus Removal and System Backup Tutorial

[otherego]

Thanks, g-c. I'll do a little more homework.

By the way, how is PCLinuxOS working out? I'm using Mint 7 on a laptop with the dreaded SiS chipset. Getting a (strictly 2-D) driver working on it once was fun, but I'm not sure I could work up the enthusiasm to do it again in order to install Mint 9. I tried the current PCLinuxOS live CD a couple of days ago, and it looked very promising.

(Looks very Mandriva-ish, so I'll try the current Mandriva, too - couldn't get wireless working on the old Thinkpad, though.)

And out of curiosity, are you using the GNOME or KDE version? I imagine I'd go for GNOME, but the KDE is ... pretty. Just not convinced that it's quite as usable, but one must guard against prejudices and preconceptions.

[grumpy-cook]

It's based on Mandriva, but is a big improvement (in both usability and stability) IMO. I ran Mandriva before this, so I can compare quite well. I'm actually very pleased with it, so much so that I finally got rid of the dual boot XP entirely and live on Linux for everyday computing now. I have XP and 7 in Vboxes so I can try things, and still use XP on my laptop.

---

Click on logo or me for free Apps, Utilities, Antivirus Removal and System Backup Tutorial

[otherego]

Interesting - a strong vote for PCLinuxOS, then.

GNOME or KDE, is the next question. I might just stick with GNOME because I'm more comfortable with it (and I prefer its system monitor, which I use surprisingly often) - but it's always worth looking around and seeing what other folk are using.

[grumpy-cook]

Actually, although I have always been a Gnome fan in the past I decided to try KDE4 this time, and it seems excellent.

---

Click on logo or me for free Apps, Utilities, Antivirus Removal and System Backup Tutorial