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

[oxieman]

Must say, I now stick with whatever version of VBox is available in the repositories.

Sorry OE

You are no doubt using VBox under Mint.
Poor old Oxie has an XP Host. Will consider being the other way round one day.

So I had to download these two...
VirtualBox-4.1.20-80170-Win.exe
Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-4.1.20-80170.vbox-extpack

Been trying/using Pi on my old 2nd PC - did not want to screw-up my existing VBox - did not know what to expect.

will post about it on your other Thread.

Oxie...

[otherego]

VBox on Windows is something I've yet to try. (I've given up hope of ever becoming a Rational Being. I "upgraded" to a hyperthreading-but-still-Pentium 4 Dell desktop, treated it to two hard drives, put XP on one and Mint on the other. About every three or four months I fire up the XP partition, spend a couple of hours updating it, shrink its data partition a little further, enlarge the meant-to-be-shared data partition on the drive for more distro isos which upset VBox by being on NTFS, and forget about the Windows bit for another three months. It'd be simpler to either wipe the Windows installation, or to actually use it occasionally.)

I digress. As usual.

I suspect it might be worth my trying the latest version of VBox occasionally, but anything still in the repos tends to be "safe."

I finally got W8 working after a fashion. An elderly laptop turned out, for all its shortcomings, to have the only visualisation-friendly CPU I have, and W8 won't work on VBox without this. The laptop's maxed out at 2GB of RAM, and VBox spouts dire warnings about the fact that I've allocated more than half the available RAM to the virtual machine.

Mint ambles along quite happily on what's left, however - slightly unusual spectacle of <300MiB unused RAM during W8/VBox operation.

For some reason, my curiosity persists about distros for slow/old/limited computers (empathy? Who said that? How dare you???)

An Eee PC 2G has had me tearing my hair out. Its 2GB/1.86GiB SSD is very limiting these days, especially as the SD card reader is broken.

I tried two versions of Leenux for the 2G (two different archives; they've defeated everything I can find to try to unpack them.)

I tried installing Debian, but the installation kept failing - perhaps I was doing something wrong.

Reasonably modern Puppy Linux and derivatives couldn't handle the 800x480 screen resolution.

Slitaz to the rescue (it's available through Distrowatch links.) I'd not had much luck with it previously, but decided it would do no harm to give it a try.

Not an "easy" distro, but a very impressive one. I've added Firefox, LibreOffice, Abiword and Gnumeric - the last two 'cos I didn't think I'd figure out how to get LO installed. Patience proved key to that...

According to GParted, 333 MiB of the 1.86 GiB SSD has now been used. Incredible.

Apps are a touch slow to open, but run quickly once they're launched.

It took care of screen resolution all on its own; connecting to the wireless router involved a slightly non-intuitive but, once I'd figured it out, quick and effective wizard. No driver problems so far - admittedly, I've not tried sound yet. With just GParted open, it's idling along happily at 4-8% CPU and 48MB RAM out of 493.

Run from a live CD, Slitaz loads into RAM (only needs a quarter of a gig, I think) and is very fast indeed. I assume it wouldn't be feasible to install apps into RAM, given their sluggish installation onto a hard drive, but I could be mistaken. The ideal might be a persistent install to a USB flash drive allowing the whole thing to run in RAM, but also allowing additional packages to be installed.

I may, of course, be talking complete rubbish again.

So the weekend's early Linux embotherations seem to be taking a turn for the better.

Now, if I could only sort out Mint's date and time configuration...

[otherego]

With Firefox and Writer open, Slitaz is using 170MB of RAM. Idle CPU sits at 4%.

Obviously, the "mighty" underclocked 800MHz CPU will work an awful lot harder when anything's actually being done.

Impressive, for all that.

[oxieman]

Hi OE - Just a quick post.

Alot to assimilate to your previous post/s.

Never heard of Slitz or Gnumeric, will have a butchers - Wonder why the Debian Install is failing, we are the other-way round, my hardware [On new Mobo has probing problems] whereas you are squeezing into a pint pot.

Odd on the time/date format and strftime [yet again will have a look].

The thing I like about my present set-up is on VBox, can take snapshots and use Macrium for a complete and quick image to 2nd drive for everything. Never checked for equivalent in Linux as yet, also would be a massive change, unless I use a new Disk. I could disable in Bios but that's a lot of messing about.

On the group change, as far as I remember I used to use chgrp - not sure on Linux - although that might have been a script, also you have to be careful of 'shadow' files as in/for the password file. It's a long while ago...

Got to go...

Oxie...

[otherego]

Gumeric's a spreadsheet - not something I ever use, but representative of the typical applications found on a home computer - I like to include at least a word processor and spreadsheet in any installations I'm messing around with.

Slitaz is well worth a try, especially as it runs so fast from a live CD. My live USB didn't boot; perhaps it's not Unetbootin-friendly. I didn't really investigate, and just plugged a USB CD-ROM into the trusty Eee PC.

I'm just trying out Liberte Linux (see Distrowatch for details). It claims to be a highly secure live CD "with the primary purpose of enabling anyone to communicate safely and covertly in hostile environments."

Sounded like fun, so I've sparked it up. It's quite a slow starter, loading its full 208MB self into RAM - so probably not ideal for ducking into an internet cafe to summon aid when you have a gang of assassins hot on your heels.

Once loaded, it runs fine. I'm typing this from the Eee PC 2G, with its sedate CPU, 512MB of RAM and 800x480 screen - which the gentoo-based distro deals with automatically, suggesting broad driver support.

The browser is Epiphany, which I've not used before. Either dom.storage is enabled by default or it doesn't exist (haven't really explored), as the eBay sign-in link is in clear sight.

(So, alas, is that awful cow in pink in the buyer protection blurb.)

Third-party cookies are disabled by default; so far I've found no evidence of anti-tracking software. In all fairness, everything evaporates on shutdown, anyway.

All internet connections are "torified" by default, which is presumably a good thing. Doesn't exactly speed things up, though, and it warns you that it ain't foolproof (something to do with exiting non-https pages or something.) Surprisingly for one given to tinfoil-hat tendencies, I know next to nothing about TOR.

Apparently ethernet card MACs can be randomised - not tried this, but it seems that this tends to drop the connection resulting in a need for manual reconnection.

Wireless MAC addresses "are automatically changed during boot." On that note, wireless just worked on the Eee PC, with easy connection via the simple and intuitive wizard.

All rather impressive, but not the easiest or quickest way to surf the internet.

Glad I'm not a Secret Agent.

[grumpy-cook]

Well I've built my new box and it's sitting on the bench whilst I play with it.

After a lot of mooching around trying distros I think I'm going with Chakra. It's Arch-based, KDE, semi-rolling releases. I have it running at the moment and no surprises, glitches, or major problems. I'm currently loading it up with software I will need. If all goes well and nothing untoward leaps out I will probably bring it into full use next week sometime.

[otherego]

Look forward to hearing more, g-c.

I suspect one thing which will precent GNU/Linux becoming more widely used is the sheer bewildering choice.

Not tried Chakra yet - bet it flies on modern equipment.

[grumpy-cook]

I swapped systems over yesterday and am now running on my new Chakra box. I'm pretty happy with it so far, very responsive almost clean-looking and it's removed a few annoyances I was living with on the PCLOS system which had slowly built-up.

I had a few problems with the audio, but that just needed a bit of head scratching and googling and is fine now. My printer went on without fuss, but I haven't got my scanner working yet (I will though, same thing on my previous distros).

Chakra has an interesting system for non-KDE software in that GTK and other non-KDE applications are presented as "bundles" with a sort of seperate package manager called the Bundle Manager. Things like GIMP, Firefox, Thunderbird are handled from there and each installed to its own little virtual hard drive. It was quite unnerving when I first opened Dolphin to see all these small hard drives, until I understood what was going on. Each application basically has it's own filesystem with all it needs to run installed therein.

Chakra by the way only comes in one flavour - 64-bit with KDE.

[otherego]

Each application basically has it's own filesystem with all it needs to run installed therein. That would certainly have confused me mightily.

Are the virtual drives (if I've used that right) dynamically resized files that vary in size with  with demand? Must be something quite clever happening there.

A couple of questions, if I may.

I rercently established that my slightly less ancient desktop (a Dell GX 620 with 2.8 gHz P4/hyperthreading) is theoretically 64-bit capable - must one of the earlier efforts.

BIOS describes the CPU as Intel EM64T; googling suggests this was early (64-bit) days indeed.

The Mint 13 64-bit live CD runs beautifully, and I'm tempted to upgrade the current Mint 9 (32-bit) to Mint 13 (64-bit.)

Obviously, I'll back things up first - way overdue, anyway.

Is there any reason not to retain the current /home partition, as I would do were I simply upgrading to Mint 13 32-bit? In other words, tell the installer to go ahead and format the current / partition, but to ignore /home.

I've no idea whether this might lead to difficulties getting the new 64-bit system partition to talk to data organised under 32-bit. (I could just try it - if it doesn't work, then wipe the current /home, replace and then copy the backed up data back - bit tedious, though.)

The current set up is as per the attached screenshots. /dev/sda runs Windows XP (or does when I get round to using it - bit of a waste of space at the moment); I also use a couple of NTFS partitions on it for storing shared data (as in shared with Mint - not used, so far), and distro isos (not a good idea, it turns out - F 32 would have been better; I suspect ext3 would be better yet - VBox moans about booting off isos stored on NTFS or ext4 - changing that can be a project for later).

/dev/sdb is essentially Mint 9's partition, with /, /home and swap, plus an arbitrary partition for trying out new distros.

Another question mark concerns the live (64-bit) DVD's use of RAM. It only seemed to see 3.4 GB, although there are 4 GB of RAM installed - just like the 32-bit system. I can see no options in BIOS for enabling PAE or anything esoteric like that. In fact, BIOS offers very little customisation (and no virtualisation, bah.) The 64-bit live DVD runs pretty fast; odd that it only uses 3.4 GB of RAM - have I misunderstood something, or is there something I should change?

My usual waffling - sorry. In essence - any reason I can't just upgrade my current 32-bit Mint 9 / root partition to 64-bit Mint 13, without changing anything else?

And does the live DVD's insistence on only seeing 3.4GB of RAM imply any problems ahead?

Off out shortly, and it'll be a few days ere I try this - but I'll keep looking in from time to time for brilliant suggestions - TIA!

[otherego]

Why do I always forget to add the blessed screenshots?

[grumpy-cook]

I can't see why it wouldn't be ok to retain your home partition OE, but I can't speak from experience because as I was moving to a new PC I just ssh-ed in and copied my data. It was also an opportunity to lose a lot of rubbish I had built up.

You 3.4Gb ram is slightly puzzling as this is around the max you can get with 32-bit addressing. You may find that the installed system sees the whole 4Gb or you may find your motherboard robs you of the extra for various purposes.

[nice_bow_tie]

If you have onboard video, that will probably take up a chunk of the RAM to use as video memory. Would that account for the missing 0.6GB?

[otherego]

IIRC, BIOS only showed something like 8MB committed to the onboard video. In any event, it's using an Nvidia card quite happily - as far as I'm aware, this has its own RAM. (Only 256MB, but better than anything else round here *ahem*)

Looks as if the best thing will simply be to back up and give it a whirl.

Time to get started on a back-up, then.

[otherego]

Mint 13's now running happily on the less ancient desktop.

Just to be on the safe side, I backed up all my data first, and used to Remastersys to create a reinstallation DVD if I decide to go back to Mint 9 - up to date until today, and includes all the programs I've added.

No  major installation problems with Mint 13, although it does help to remember to mark the /home partition for use during partitioning - just remembering not to let the installer format it. (That's assuming one's upgrading from an older distro - in my case, Mint 9.)

It still only sees 3.4 GB of RAM out of the 4 available, which is a bit of a mystery. I suppose I need to find out what motherboard the computer has and what it actually supports.

Otherwise, 64-bit Mint 13 installed happily, and the old /home partition/directory remains, as far as I can see, fully accessible.

One nice surprise was the fact that all Firefox's settings, bookmarks and add-ons were preserved. I assume these usually lurk in the home directory.

A surprisingly major irritation is that a number of applications I was used to in Mint 9 are either missing or not so good. A little googling has resolved most of the bothers, but I'm really irritated at the loss of the old, simple screenshot. In Mint 9, one simply pressed Prt Scr. Now, a separate screenshot app needs to be launched each time. If anyone knows how to get back to the old way, do let me know.

I suppose things will gradually come right, but so far, it just doesn't feel as polished or complete to me as Mint 9 does.

At least the "Windows" key on the keyboard now has a use. It opens Cinnamon's menu.

Right-clicking on any program icon offers the options to show it on the panel or on the desktop. For the moment, I'm trying to keep things tidy by avoiding desktop icons, but have already started cluttering the panel up.

I'll try to add a screenshot - unfortunately, the panel icons will be rather on the tiny side. And the screenshot tool won't let me grab the menu.

[otherego]

I'm not sure I like the look of this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/24/ubuntu_amazon_suggestions/

Oh, sure, Canonical is a business. It's also done a wonderful job of providing funds and administration to bring Ubuntu to the masses - like it or not, this must have helped it gain its current "market share," and has resulted in lots of people using Linux who wouldn't otherwise have known where to begin.

Doesn't alter the fact that Ubuntu has not, by and large, been developed so much by Canonical as by an international army of unpaid developers (I think I'm right in that.)

And anyway, cramming ads (no matter what they're called) into a Linux distro is just so ... shabby.

It also seems horribly hypocritical to claim to provide something free (in whatever sense of the word) and then stuff it with the very sort of commercial-flavoured annoyance that likely users might be trying to avoid. I rather though Canonical's business model was support/training for the commercial sector. One can't just commit to providing something free then perverting the way it is used, surely. Reeks of vendor lock-in - perhaps not quite as bad as handing out cigarettes in playgrounds perhaps, but really... More of what Ubuntu claims to be about, and trying to do, here:

http://www.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/why-is-it-free

Some interesting discussion in el Reg's article, and it's not, I concede, a totally straightforward matter.

[otherego]

Fortunately, most of my kit is incapable of running the lens, nor the graphics-heavy Unity desktop - or even Gnome 3. Let's hear it for Xfce, Lxde, and such - not to mention all the other distros still out there, including some fine Ubuntu-based ones which manage to avoid the Shuttleworth-benevolent-dictator thing.

I admire the man, and respect most of what he's done for open-source (it might actually come as a little bit of a shock, but I also respect Bill Gates and co for their role in bringing practical computing to the masses.)

What on earth happens to them when they become successful?

[otherego]

I'm not making much sense tonight, am I?

I was referring to space tourist/Canonical boss Mark Shuttleworth above.

No denying he's achieved an awful lot - I only hope he avoids Going Over To The Dark Side.

[nice_bow_tie]

I'm not sure I like the look of this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/24/ubuntu_amazon_suggestions/

Me neither. 😞 (Not that I'd ever install Ubuntu these days; this latest move seems to be about par for the course.)

From one of the comments in the Reg article:

"Have we already forgotten what Ubuntu stands for? Its not just a name; its a philosophy."

Like most 'philosophies', it turns out it's ultimately about making money for someone, preferably in as sneaky a way as possible. Sad, but not really unexpected.

[ej-solutions]

I have to agree with you. A far cry from the way that Ubuntu was promoted, in the early days. Looking on the bright side (cue for a song?), it did bring the Linux 'experience' to a larger audience.

[grumpy-cook]

Here's a bit of news on EUFI and how you will be able to work around it for Linux installs on secure boot systems.

http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/56980-linux-foundation-offers-workaround-for-secure-boot