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]

I've not had the courage to time either of them, and that's with the welcome screen turned off and setting it to log in automatically.

Now Mint 14 doesn't seem so bad, although I think it's still less responsive than Mint 13. They both seem to improve with a couple of restarts under their belts. Perhaps the usual massive updates also helped.

I installed Mint 14 to an old desktop - 2.4GHz P4 and 1GB of RAM. Much nicer than either of my VBox attempts, I must say.

Must now attend to some Windows stuff. I'm still keen to try W7 on the less-ancient desktop. Copying XP's data plus my .iso collection (128GiB ouch) to the Linux drive (each drive is 500GB/about 465GiB) has left about 900MB free on that drive - so it would be useful to get W7 working and all that stuff copied back where it belongs. (Dear old Linux - it still seems to work fine. I suspect anything involving large temporary files would be disappointing.)

Bound to take a few days of trial and error, which gives the #2 workhorse an outing. Must treat it to an update - perhaps when I've finished this - then start on the W7 attempt.

Now watch me wipe and install to the wrong drive...

[otherego]

The joys of reinstalling Windows on a dual-boot setup.

It simply doesn't understand the concept of other operating systems or bootloaders, and simply overwrites the MBR with its own bytes - bit like a dim-witted playground bully, somehow.

As a result, rebooting the computer after installing W7 (replacing XP on the first hard drive; the main operating system is Mint 13 on the second drive) only loaded W7.

All as expected, and the next couple of evenings were spent playing with W7, anyway. (Really quite nice, so far.)

Using SuperGrub2 (I think that's what it's called now), I fired up the Mint installation and found it had survived unharmed.

Then the fun began. I wonder whether it's because I'd installed GrubCustomiser (I think that's its name)?

Booting the computer from a live CD, I tried:

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

then

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sdb

According to the terminal, GRUB had been successfully restored - but, no. I wonder whether I should have chosen /dev/sda? Yet as far as I recall, GRUB's files (other than the very initial boot instructions formerly on /dev/sda) live on /dev/sdb.

The night was growing long, and Dr Tennent's Golden Nectar seemed, for some reason, to be inhibiting rather than assisting mental activity.

A little more searching reminded me of something mentioned here previously:

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

(Links from that page lead to Rescatux's site.)

It adds to the basic functionality of SuperGrub 2 (which seems to find and boot stalled systems, but that's it), adding the actual repair capability which I seem to remember the old SuperGrub disc included - might be mistaken.

All quite intuitive, and had GRUB up and running again in minutes - having selected /dev/sda. Honestly not sure exactly what it did, but it worked.

A most useful little utility.

[oxieman]

OE

I said:-
May have another try, but am convinced it's down to my crappy old Foxconn BIOS.

Well it wasn't - have been percy-veering - poss corrupt distro downloaded/burnt CD or many other possibilities 😐

Just installed updates to an 80GB drive... [Only Mint 14 on it].

Two screenshots - one, on the updates [which I did not invoke on two failed installs under VBox] poss the cause also.

time litrally mins ago - so, I should have listened to you.

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Not read your last post fully.

Pleased this 4 quid Pent 4 is ok on this m/c 😄

Have got to sort wi-fi operation now as nicked ethernet from my Vista pc 😞

Oxie...

[otherego]

Hope you find the hard drive installation more satisfactory - VBox is great for a glimpse, but I can rarely get it working to a level where I would want to use it "properly."

I'm just trying Trisquel 6:

http://trisquel.info/

Fanatically free-software-only distros impress me immensely from an ethical standpoint, but frankly I like the binary blobs that Mint etc use to save one battling to make things work.

Bit of a parson's egg so far. The MD5sum didn't match (incredibly rare), but it seemed to work - not sure whether the problem is with the site.

One of the slowest VBox installations I've seen, even on this old machine. I've just installed Guest Additions, and it'll be interesting to see whether that improves speed at all. In all fairness, I've only allocated it 512MB RAM, and capped the CPU at 85%. This doesn't help either, but does keep the poor old host machine from coming to a complete halt with VBox running.

It was still worth shutting VBox down to pay this quick visit, though. One of these days, I really would like to get my hands on a modern, powerful computer.

Off to mess around with Trisquel a little before bed. Could be interesting (or very annoying) - we'll see.

[otherego]

I'm not having a good time with Linux on VirtualBox. It seems awfully slow and unrewarding, even with Guest Additions installed. I obviously need to try a little harder. Perhaps VBox just works better with Windows, but I need it more for Linux. *Sigh*

So still haven't done much with Trisquel. I think I'll install it fully to one of the desktops - give Mint 14 a bit of a break on the old RM, perhaps.

Meantime, I'm continuing to try to make friends with Windows in the form of W7. On the whole, I'm favourable impressed but finding it hard work compared with the average Linux distro.

I tend to install something, mess it up, reinstall it, mess it up and so on. And each reinstallation takes an age, compared with Linux. Installing SP1 took over an hour and a quarter (and that was from a DVD - I'd downloaded  SP1 previously.)

Something always seems to break during the monster initial updates. On the latest VM, it was IE 10. Its predecessor was something else. The built in troubleshooter does a great job of helping sort these difficulties out, but I rarely have such hassles with Linux distros. (Having said that, my bad habit of installing everything in site and adding various repositories which then fall into disuse and totally confuse the updater does lead to occasional little bothers. Googling has so far produced the necessary solutions.)

And once one's got W7 running and updated, it needs an antivirus. And an office suite. And a non-IE browser (the thought of going onto the internet without various Firefox add-ons leaves me cold.)

Partitioning is so much easier on, say, an Ubuntu-based distro during installation. I still haven't worked out how to create an extended partition with the W7 installation disk, for instance - although the partitioner is getting easier to use with practise.

And as for the performance persuading it to install the system and User folders to different partitions...

So - yes. I'm enjoying W7, and it will probably be better once I stop messing it up and reinstalling it every couple of weeks.

And I know I don't need more partitions than the default system reserved + "C" drive - but I just can't resist fiddling still think there might be benefits to separating system and data, for instance.

And although dear old Mint 13 does occasionally give me real uphill, it just doesn't seem to do it nearly so often.

I still think that modern mainstream Linux distros can be just as easy for the typical computer to use as Windows - it's just different, but the learning curve is, frankly, not that steep. (I'm talking about the easy ones, of course.)

Doesn't address the problem of favourite programs/games that only run on Windows, of course. The only one which affects me is MS Flight Sim - and I'll never learn to fly the blankety-blank thing, anyway.

[otherego]

Bah, typos!

"typical computer user" and so on and so on...

[otherego]

I've yet to try Debian, and noticed that a new version came out recently.

Rather more computer-savvy folk than me have definitely shown more than a passing interest in Debian of late:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/10/iss_linux_debian_deployment/

It looks as if Debian 6 will become the operating system of choice aboard the International Space Station. Intriguingly, they're currently using Windows XP on the 140 laptops on the space station. ("Only" about 80 in use at any one time, though. And I guess they can't even eBay them - although "Collection Only" would raise some interesting possibilities.)

I quite liked the comment that:

"We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust or adapt, we could."

Seems to sum up Linux strengths often overlooked by those who see it as merely a free alternative to proprietary systems.

The comments are even better than most in el Reg. This is a long example from a presumed 2001 A Space Odyssey fan, but a goodie:

Dave Bowman: Hello, HAL. Do you read me, HAL?

HAL: Affirmative, Dave. I read you.

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL: I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

Dave Bowman: sudo open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL: Ok.

[grumpy-cook]

:^O

[oxieman]

Slightly OT but OE may be interested in this FF addon I have recently stumbled upon.

So apologies for this being on the wrong thread but the "Just messing about - pay no attention thread" has gone for a burton....
OE was the OP.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/base64-encoder/

You can check you ain't gorn over the 64k limit with this; Copy and paste the encoded base64 into a text file [together with your post content] and check it's size before posting - Messy, I know 😉

Account should be taken if smilies and/or other HTML tags are used [sizewise] .
 
Oxie...

[otherego]

Thanks for that, oxie - good to see you back on the scene.

Any more joy with Mint?

I'm having a couple of little annoyances - arguably the sort of thing which afflicts those of us (*ahem* yours truly) that, untroubled by knowledge and unfettered by experience, still can't resist fiddling.

The first is trying to get MATE working on a Mint 13 Cinnamon installation on the trusty Eee PC. I thought I'd installed it, but it looks very different from what I have on the more spectacularly elderly of the desktops (installed from scratch as MATE - the poor thing can't run Cinnamon.)

What I end up with looks more like a traditional GNOME 2 desktop. NIce enough, and certainly better suited to the Eee than Cinnamon so far as performance is included, but not quite what I'm after. A long-ish term project, perhaps.

The second is Flash Player. I tend to rely on stuff from the Mint repositories being update via the Mint Update Manager, but have become fed up with Firefox moaning (albeit correctly) that Flash Player 11-1 is now vulnerable.

I eventually went into Synaptic and found that entering "flash" took me to an Ubuntu installer (flashplugin-installer) for 11-2 (Adobe doesn't plan to support Linux beyond this version - yet another reason to regard them with less than total affection. Might help the wonderful folk working on GNASH attract some help, though, which would serve Adobe jolly well right.)

I had to go into Synaptic to remove the old version afterwards, slightly surprisingly.

So far, so good.

(Bleurgh. If there is one little moth in the flat, how does it end up in one's beer???)

[oxieman]

Thanks for that, oxie - good to see you back on the scene.

Any more joy with Mint?

(Bleurgh. If there is one little moth in the flat, how does it end up in one's beer???)

Apologies again OE - not been 'on the scene of late' RL eventualities etc..

Have given up on Mint 13 [Under VB on Foxconn].

However, carried on messing experimenting with that PC - dug out a 'Drive swap caddy' and have two machine in one - either XP or Linux - after a reboot and one minor change to Bios setting [after removing the 80 Gb caddy drive].

Had some fun getting the Buffallo 54 wi-fi card under ndiswrapper - thwarted by an entry that blacklisted it! Modeprobe.d dir [sorry, folder] - finally got it going tho' 🙂

Learnt quite a bit on the way - had to use legacy [fwclutter] in the end. The one thing that did fox me was having the driver .inf file still under ndiswrapper dir even tho' I did a purge prior to fwcutter.  Removed that at voila, it worked.

Running Irfanview under wine - trying to get it to 'see' the scanner but no joy.

A log file on installation for TWAIN states twain dll not installed [assume cos it/they exists].

Read a forum somewhere the dll points to use 'sane' - GC said I should try that along while ago when I first tried Linux but, if you remember the scanner squarked. There be a regedit in wine - quite interesting.

Will throw up a few screen-shots if you are interested - but have to be later - Mekon not to good at the mo.

Love the antics of you Moth :^O

Oxie...

[oxieman]

Drat - forgot to mention, after getting the w-fi bit going early last month - Mint 15 is out :_|

So will poss have to 'do it all again' - I think an upgrade from 14 to 15 exits tho' - might give it a try, if this board survives 😮

Looking on the bright, side me Hols ain't too far away 🙂

So will be AWOL again pretty soon - keep taking the pills everybody :^O

Oxie...

[otherego]

Just trying Mint 15 in VBox.

Either newer distros or newer versions of VBox don't like my old computers - a little slow, but I'll try updating Guest Additions and see what happens.

An attempt to install Mint 13 from a Remastersys disc isn't going too swimmingly. If it flops totally, I might try Mint 15 on the old laptop concerned instead.

Must say that I'm increasingly growing to like MATE rather than Cinnamon - but they're both pretty good.

[otherego]

Mint 15 is now running happily on this laptop. I replaced Mint 12, which is now obsolete.

Installation was straightforward. The previous installation had separate / and /home partitions. I told it to format / (where Mint 12 used to sit), and to use /home as such without formatting it.

On completion of the installation, all my data were still present and correct. I was pleased that Firefox retained all the old add-ons and settings. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed.

It's very quick. RAM use is reasonable, and the CPU seems reasonably quiet. I'll attach a screenshot showing Mint  15 running with Firefox, Writer and System Monitor open.

A shame the non-LTS versions are so short-lived, but I suppose true enthusiasts prefer to have the latest and greatest at all times. Keeping / and /home makes installing the latest system quick and easy (although I still back up anything of value, just in case.)

[otherego]

Sorry - should have added - I'm using the MATE version.

The laptop is a Toshiba U300 13U - 32-bit, 1.5GHz dual core, 2GHz RAM. Definitely one of my more powerful machines (except when it overheats and shuts down.)

Stop sniggering at the back. We can't all be rich and own the latest shiny-shiny! (Thank goodness for Linux - Vista on the same machine is OK, but really not in the same league.)

[oxieman]

Just quick post OE - Not had much luck trying to get my Scanner working  under 'wine' - may/will have to revisit [if at all]. Different TWAIN dlls for differing progs - not sure who/how they are utilized/called.

Have downloaded Mint 15 and intend bunging it on a 10Gb drive in a caddy. After viewing some comments re-Olivia, wine is giving probs, so taking the cautious approach!

Oxie...

[otherego]

I really must try WINE - got as far as installing it, took one puzzled look and put it aside for later.

As far as the scanner is concerned - do you have Simple Scan installed in Mint? It's in the Ubuntu/Mint repos, and although very basic, suits me fine.

I've seen it work on my ancient Epson DX6000 and on a friend's HP-something - seems to have reasonable driver support. Easier than trying to install drivers in WINE if you just want to scan things, but it lacks OCR and all that good stuff.

[oxieman]

Thanks OE, will check out Simple Scan.

I think I have been waylayed somewhat - I only placed 14 on in the caddy to try VB under Linux and never got there 😞

Oxie...

[oxieman]

Hey - where have my corrections gone!!

[otherego]

Hi, oxie.

Re your comment over on another thread:

Also re-visiting TWAIN driver prob  after your comments on 'Simple Scan' poss need sane-backend

If you're running some modern version of Mint, Simple Scan is probably already installed.

If not, then I would have thought that installing via Synaptic would take care of any dependencies. Might be worth running a post-installation update.

Apologies if I've misunderstood the difficulty.

No need to worry about ten post limits/the witching hour tonight, I suppose, with the move to our new providers (Lithium, I think) imminent. I just happen to be heading off to bed. Let's hope the board changes don't take too long. They've had plenty of experience now shifting other folk over to the new provider, after all.

Hopefully we'll all be back on-line in the next few days.