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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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

[otherego]

And even if you tell it just to advise you when updates are ready, then once you done them, it nags you incessantly to restart - and that schoolmarmish, "You must restart your computer..." in XP. And the little balloon that keeps erupting to "remind" you. Vista is slightly better - you can tell it to b* off - but only for four hours.

Windows has its strengths and it failings, and one of its very biggest failings has to be that it can be so very, very irritating. Linux distros are somehow just so much pleasanter to know, even though they're by no means infallible. Thank goodness they avoid that dreadful automatic update option.

You could do the pretty neighbour a real favour, of course, and replace her Windows with something less infectable, or refuse to ever fix her computer again unless she restricts her offspring to Linux from now on.

(And somehow can't get a picture out of my head of a pretty woman frantically trying to remove a half cooked turkey from her suffocating son's head after g-c's decided to use him as stuffing, and stomped off to find something more interesting to do.)

[otherego]

And so to another year and another irrational project ...

I still have a vague hankering to get ancient computers working on Linux. Not easy. I even had another look at Linux from Scratch:

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Looks like my enthusiasm continues to outpace my ability.

An interesting discovery was this:

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=connochaet

It seems to have taken over from DeliLinux, and looks really quite promising. (ConnochaetOS - who said that one of the things that keeps Linux from general adoption is the er, snappy names? Who cares?!)

It runs nicely in VirtualBox, despite a lack of GuestAdditions, and the Dillo (I think) - based browser is very fast. Midori is also available in the modest repository already developed, and is also pretty quick. I've only given the VM 96MB RAM.

It installed easily enough to the old Toshiba Satelllite 320CDT, unlike those otherwise amazing lighweights AntiX and Peppermint. They grind to a halt at the lack of CMOV, whatever the heck that is, in the MMX processor.

Only trouble is that it doesn't even see the Xircom PCMCIA ethernet adaptor, which gave Puppy no trouble. Presumably it's possible to do something about this - bit beyond my capabilities.

Otherwise, though, it's quick and pleasant, with Abiword and Gnumeric loading up just fine. Fair selection of games, too, if one is into that sort of thing - low-resource stuff, presumably - variations on Solitaire and the like.

I really hope they keep at it - it really looks like one to watch for owners of grotty old kit. W95 and 98 seem hard to beat on low-spec equipment, but ConnochaetOS seems quicker than the W95 it booted off the mighty 4GB hard drive - and quicker than Puppy, but at least Puppy found the old Xircom card and connected through it.

I also downloaded the latest "quarterly" PCLinuxOS CDs, to try to avoid the 400+ MB updates which followed my last installations.

The new Gnome CD defaults to a desktop very like the KDE one. I actually liked the smart and shiny grey theme of the older Gnome desktop, the footprint in the middle notwithstanding - but have to say I'm taken with this.

Time to frighten the old Fujitsu with a new distro, I think. If I have my usual luck (non-existent) with the KDE version, then I'll be very happy to try out the new, blue Gnome.

Hopefully a good year ahead on the Linux front!

[ej-solutions]

http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=02057

[grumpy-cook]

There's a useful little "Tips & Tricks" guide on Gizmo's which any new Mint users may find useful.

Here.

[otherego]

Thanks for those links, gents.

I've actually been battling to get Puppy "Wary" onto the old 320CDT, but with no joy at all.

The live CD grinds to a halt with something like ldm_validate_partition_table ( ) : Disk read failed. Seems to have afflicted a lot of Mandriva users, if google is to be believed - but found nothing to help. I even tried one suggestion that involved making sure that, as soon as it got past BIOS (almost instant) and started to boot from the live CD, one quickly plugs something into everything that can read any sort of a drive - in this case, a floppy, a CD and a USB (amazingly) in case it was tripping up over something that didn't have file system 'cos it wasn't there. No luck.

I tried copying the 3 files for a frugal install to the existing ConnochaetOS installation, but no joy. Just for fun, it varies between the above error and two different "file not found" - forget the exact GRUB code, offhand.

Since the files were copied off a Puppy CD from within ConnochaetOS, I wondered whether the more normal method of using the universal installer from the live CD expanded the files, and copied those from a successful frugal installation on Connochaetos in VirtualBox - same RAM (96MB), but a less ancient CPU - a 2GHz P4 as opposed to the old Toshiba's MMX (233MHz, I think.) Same result. Grrrr.

The old Puppy 4.3 "retro" works fine on the antique, but the point is that it would be nice to use more modern distros with access to more modern software packages *sigh.*

A shame AntiX can't boot from an MMX (hope that's right) CPU - wish I knew how to mess about with the kernel - one of these years ...

There is some relevance to this beyond my own occasional enthusiasm for trying to revive old computers. When you're bored, browse the laptops offered on eBay - amazing how many are old machines with 24, 32 or 64MB of RAM. There are evidently more of these out there than most people like to accept - and doubtless many of them end up connected to the internet.

I realise (thanks for pointing it out, O*A) that most modern viruses won't work on pre-XP (or 2000?) versions of MS's OSs, but can't help feeling that the internet eco-system as a whole might be better off if were possible to run a modern Linux distro on those antiques still finding buyers ...

[grumpy-cook]

Zorin have just announced a Lite version for "low-spec machines". Unfortunately they don't seem to define low-spec anwhere, but it may be worth a look OE.

http://zorin-os.webs.com/apps/blog/entries/show/5701868-zorin-os-4-lite-has-landed

[otherego]

Ta - a bit of a dig through their site suggests that it should work with 128MB RAM (sometimes seems to mean a distro will work with less, if one's patient) and a 266MHZ CPU.

I wonder whether it could cope with an MMX? My money would be on boot halting with complaints about cmov and please use another kernel...

I downloaded it, anyway. Interesting, for a "lite" distro that its iso won't fit on a CD. It was only while I was burning it to a DVD that it slowly dawned on me that the old Toshiba has no DVD-ROM, and is highly unlikely to boot from a USB DVD.

Sometimes I'm so clever that I frighten myself.

Getting into its BIOS to mess about with boot options remains a mystery, too - fortunately it's pre-set to floppy, CD then hard drive.

Actually, I think I need to look into installing Linux without a CD or DVD-ROM again. It's one of the things that's fairly easy in dear old Windows (the older ones that I've played with, anyway) but looks nigh on impossible in Linux. Not much on the internet and what there is goes pretty much over my head - a little more research is needed. This is one of the more promising pages I've found:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromHardDriveWithFloppies

I think I ran into trouble with that one 'cos I couldn't figure out one of the sites it referenced for essential software - might try again.

Installing to a hard drive on a different computer hasn't worked for me - even using very similar hardware. I installed AntiX to a Toughbook CF27 which had a DVD-ROM, and transferred it to one with only a floppy - sort of worked, but all sorts of little bothers, as I remember.

(Yes, I know I could simply have borrowed the DVD-ROM from the Toughbook so equipped and plonked it temporarily into the one which normally had a floppy - but that wasn't the object of the exercise...)

Yet another new version of Puppy out, too:

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=06447

Bet it won't boot on an MMX CPU, but other than that, I think it's time to look more closely into Puppy. I believe I may have under-rated it, considering it a useful low resource live CD but put off by lack of easy software choice and my continuing failure to understand how something that apparently runs permanently as root even when installed can be secure.

It's actually looking more and more like a useful thing to have, especially as a "frugal install" - could easily be fitted into an elderly Windows machine for web-surfing and the like.

[ej-solutions]

http://www.plop.at/en/home.html

http://linux.simple.be/tools/sbm

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/use-a-floppy-to-boot-usb-pendrive-linux/

[grumpy-cook]

Plop is quite useful - I've referred to it in the past on here.

[otherego]

Thanks, ej - I'd forgotten about plop - must have another look at it and those other links.

Zorin lite doesn't seem "lite" enough, alas. Probably worth playing with it. I got fed up trying to get it running on VirtualBox - seemed to demand a lot of RAM for a lightweight, and wanted force_addr=0xaddr adding, or a BIOS update. No idea what it was on about and anyway, it didn't improve the erratice booting.

My success story from last night is PCLinuxOS KDE. I seem to have been jinxed with this distro, but the latest quarterly CD (which meant only about 45MB of updates compared with the over 400 last time I tried, and much quicker than that process) installed fine on the long-suffering ThinkPad.

With OpenOffice installed, it's using about 3.5GiB of hard drive space, which compares very favourably with the Windows 2000 originally inflicted upon the T23.

Apart from sitting and thinking for about twenty minutes when it said it was installing the bootloader, the installation went smoothly. Wireless connection with the live CD was very easy, and it remembered the encryption after installation - didn't retain my Firefox preferences, but those are but a couple of minutes' work anyway.

Bit of a song and dance changing from the default English-US to English-UK locale, and it needed a depressingly Windows-style restart, but at least it worked.

OpenOffice installed easily, too, via the GetOpenOffice icon - once I'd responded to its message that I should only have activated one repo after the useful repo speed test. Hey, how was I supposed to know?

The Gnome version also lacks OpenOffice and uses the same system to install it, but at least includes AbiWord and Gnumeric.

I still find KDE curiously clumsy after Gnome, but this is doubtless just a matter of getting used to it. I need to do some googling about the firewall settings, but for the time being, it can hide behind the router.

And there must some way of setting up a screen-saver...

[grumpy-cook]

OE, another that may be worth a look, wattOS -

http://www.planetwatt.com/

New version just released. They say, "It works well for old computers and systems with low power and or memory".

[otherego]

Worth a look - thanks! Last time I tried wattOS, it seemed that their idea of old/low power pretty much matched my better equipment - may have changed by now.

Trying to install Linux without a CD-ROM is driving me doolally. As an exercise, it certainly reveals the true depths of my ignorance.

Of course I'm grateful to the providers of the various boot floppies - just wish there were clear instructions somewhere.

Smart Boot Manager - boots, but can't find anything on the hard drive to boot.

GRUB boot floppy - much the same.

All In One Boot Floppy - tantalisingly close, but still no cigar.

SuperGrub2Disc - at least it sees the partitions; just nothing on them that interests it.

PLOP (plpbt.img - which I thought was the bit for a floppy) - so far, the Plop Floppy has flopped - doesn't even boot. I'll have another look when I can stand it.

I removed the might 6GB HDD from an ancient Toughbook (CF27, which was running happily enough on AntiX - 300MHz CPU, I think, with RAM mightily souped up to 256MB), and stuck it into an external drive enclosure.

Goodness, but those are useful things.

Based on the elderly guide to installing Ubuntu:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromHardDriveWithFloppies

but trying to keep it simpler for my tiny mind, I used GParted on the desktop to make three partitions - one swap (at the right hand end), about a 650MiB partition in the middle to hold the .iso, and a 4 point something GiB partition at the beginning to use as / during the installation.

I initially tried ext2 (sometimes seems better with really slow processors; I may be wrong) - couldn't copy anything to it - the "paste" function was simply greyed out.

Reformatting to FAT32 allowed me to copy the iso to the small partition, and the vmlinux and initrd.lz files to the large partition.

Replacing the drive in the Toughbook and trying various boot floppies has exercised my vocabulary, but little else.

The All-In-One floppy seems to start things, then drops to a shell (way beyond my abilities, curse it), starting initramfs - I've no idea what it would like me to tell it to do.

Apparently this happens because /dev/sda1, /dev/hda1 and anything else I try to label the first partition does not, as far as the floppy is concerned, actually exist.

And this is the short story. Believe me.

So - ideas are requested. What I have is an old Toughbook with no CD-ROM but a floppy drive. The hard drive is easy enough to remove and format; it is likewise simple to copy an .iso and needed boot files to its partitions from the desktop computer.

What I need is some way of getting an iso on a hard drive booted from a floppy. I've tried the floppies mentioned above, plus Puppy and DSL versions - which promptly look for their own kind.

Any suggestions and guides would be most welcome. I've found next to nothing so far, and obviously need a real step-by-step guide - and not one which gives approximate commands assuming I'll recognise which of them need adapting to my circumstances and how ...

All good fun - tho I might just try something else for this evening's entertainment. In the interests of sanity.

[grumpy-cook]

So - ideas are requested. What I have is an old Toughbook with no CD-ROM but a floppy drive. The hard drive is easy enough to remove and format; it is likewise simple to copy an .iso and needed boot files to its partitions from the desktop computer.

OE, it's not the ISO you need on the hard drive. You need to unarchive it (or burn to CD) and copy the contents to a partition on the hard drive, then boot from that.

[otherego]

I guess that's the next thing to try. It's a simple enough matter to copy the contents of a CD (or simply to mount the iso file which lives on the desktop's hard drive, anyway), and copy its contents - presumably to the "dummy" (small) partition from which one would launch the full installation.

What I was hoping was to find a way of fooling a floppy-based boot manager into "thinking" an iso on a hard drive partition was a live CD, running that, and using its "Install" function to install to the drive's other partition. I think that's what that Ubuntu article was trying to do.

You'll have gathered I'm still blundering about in the dark here - which is what makes it entertaining.

Next stage is to try copying the CD contents to the HDD, then - we'll see how that goes!

[otherego]

The joys of a mildly obsessive streak combined with massive ignorance and a complete lack of aptitude for command-line syntax and the like.

No way could I get anything booted - extracting the iso contents to a partition and messing about with the various boot floppies turned the air blue, but little else.

Managed a very partial success with Unetbootin. With the hard drive back in its external enclosure for the nth time, I installed Peppermint to a partition on it with Unetbootin.

This made it bootable, and it ran as a flash drive would have done. (Peppermint lacks support for the old Xircom PCMCIA ethernet card and the wireless cards I tried; otherwise it ran fine.)

Trouble is, the installer simply couldn't install it to a different partition on the same drive. It says it may be possible - but not that I could manage.

The next stage is to find some way of getting the machine to boot from an external CD-ROM. Smart Boot Manager sees nuffink; I've yet to figure out an option on the All-In-One floppy. It's pretty old, and I can find no tutorials on it.

The answer probably lies in PLOP, but the only bit of it that I've managed to get onto a floppy only offers the option to install the boot manager. And I can only use a floppy, unfortunately - no internal CD-ROM. The full version of PLOP is rather too large for a floppy(about 20MB, I think). (Side note - the old Thinkpad saved the day when it came to floppies. PCLinuxOS - installed on the Thinkpad - can handle floppies. Mint9 can't. How irritating is that?)

To make the floppy, I went to this page:

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#plpcfgbt

Downloading, extracting and exploring plpbt-5.0.11-2.zip. allowed me to copy plpbt.img to a floppy with the command (modified to suit the actual file location - cue more blue air):

dd if=plpbt.img of=/dev/fd0

It booted fine, but only offered the ability to install PLOP to the hard drive (or other destinations as appropriate.) I need the bit that tells the old computer to boot from an external CD-ROM.

I think I now need this bit, but haven't the faintest idea what they're on about:

You can configure the plpbt.bin on the floppy with plpcfgbt

How does one configure the one with the other? Simply extracting plpcfgbt (and the variations on the theme within the directory created on unzipping the download) to the boot floppy simply stops it booting - does one simply copy the plpcfgbt  text to the plpbt.bin file, or what?

I still run into trouble with sites that take a certain expertise for granted - long way to go yet!

Other neglected stuff awaits me, but I'd like to have another bash at this in a day or two. Any suggestions, or useful guides, would be much appreciated.

[grumpy-cook]

Here's a thought OE. Linux distros can sometimes be very adaptive to hardware changes. I have seen reports of entirely different motherboards being installed and Linux picking it all up ok with out any reinstallation.

Why don't you try installing the hard drive in another system and doing a full install of a distro to the drive. Then put it back in the thinkpad and see if it will boot. You never know.

[otherego]

Thanks for the suggestion, g-c - might just end up giving that a try. It would be a useful experiment.

This is a largely academic exercise - I really would like to figure out how to do the installation without benefit of a built-in CDROM - ideally, in fact, without involving a CDROM at all.

It's fairly easy with older versions of Windoze - I've tried it with 98SE (actually, pretty sure I've done it with W2000 - had to add some go-faster file to make it load quickly) - essentially copy the Windows iso to the hard drive, plonk it back in the computer, use a W98 boot floppy to sys c: and fixmbr, then navigate to the iso and hit "install" or "winnt" or something and away it goes.

Still, I'd better put it aside for a couple of evenings and do some earnest and overdue stuff on the desktop. (Late with course assignments at my age - some things ain't changed in 40 years ...just sure I used to be better at bluffing my way through these things in a couple of hours, with the aid rather than hindrance of suitable "tonics"...)

[otherego]

Interesting article on the Beeb's site today:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12205412

It deals with the attempt to get more folk on-line who've previously been unable to afford it, through the provision of refurbished computers, subsidised (I assume) broadband packages and even telephone support.

Sounds excellent, and I was intrigued by this bit:

The cheap computers will run open-source software, such as Linux...

My own feeling is there is a strong ethical imperative for public services and for initiatives of this nature to move to open source. Apart from giving talented youngsters (and oldsters?) exposed to the programme a chance to (perfectly legally) play with and learn about code etc, it helps to avoid the dreaded "vendor lock-in," with both public bodies and, in this case, people who really aren't in a position to pay avoiding the high initial cost of proprietary software, and a continuing reliance upon expensive "upgraded" versions 'cos that's all they know, or what all their systems have become dependent upon.

But I have my doubts...

I recently moved to PlusNet (touch wood, what an improvement so far) - they are running a remarkably similar initiative. And guess what?

We’ve teamed up with Microsoft to offer the opportunity to gift the web to a friend or family member and get them online for the first time.

More here:

http://community.plus.net/blog/2010/12/06/get-someone-online-with-plusnet/

How long do you give it before Microsoft makes the government an offer it can't refuse to provide software for those refurbished computers? Couldn't blame them - they're a business, after all - but I look at the PlusNet/Microsoft scheme, and can't help comparing it with giving children free cigarettes...

And no, I don't think the comparison unfair. There might be a charitable motive involved, but I think what is really intended is making people dependent upon a product for which they'll end up paying large amounts of money in the future.

Be interesting to see whether the government scheme sticks to its guns and to open source, or whether it switches to proprietary software in the face of offers it believes it can't refuse ...

Or - who knows? Perhaps Microsoft (and in fairness, other providers of proprietary software) will remain uninvolved.

[ej-solutions]

You cynic, you. 😉

Witness what happened with the OLPC initiative and similar.

Linux laptops were 'priced out' by non-free software.

[grumpy-cook]

Another "lightweight" distro for you to look at OE -

http://www.salineos.com/about.php