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]

Onto more cheerful things - I decided to give WattOS a try. I tried it years ago with little success, but that was a while back. More detail here:

http://www.planetwatt.com/

Installation to an EeePC 900A was quick and painless. The initial installation (without running apt-get clean") took the 3.6GiB the installer asked for, and might just squeeze onto one of the 4GB Eee PCs. (Mind you - Peppermint did. Until I updated it...)

It's a very basic OS, and one adds what's required. The familiar Synaptic Package Manager makes this easy, and LibreOffice and one or two other bits and pieces installed happily. Total disk useage so far is 4.4GB - a little big for the smaller-drive Eee PCs, although one could probably use apt-get clean fairly ruthlessly, and avoid anything as hefty as LibreOffice. Abiword would do nicely; if a spreadsheet's needed, perhaps Gnumeric could also be squeezed in.

I suspect that Bodhi still has it beat so far as minimal hard drive and general resource use is concerned, but I'll try to mess around a little more over the next few days. With Firefox and LibreOffice running (but idle) it uses a little under 400MiB of RAM, with the CPU idling happily at <10%.

Watt is nice and quick, too, especially considering the little Eee's low specs.

[otherego]

Something very worrying for people like me - I just tried to obtain the latest version of PCLinuxOS, and found that it's only available in the 64-bit version.

Even worse, a comment on their forum suggested that Ubuntu (which most of my preferred distros is based on) is considering dropping 32-bit support.

Perhaps that applies to most distros now. I know that Distrowatch has for some time only offered direct links to 64-bit versions of distros, but visiting the maintainers' sites has always revealed 32-bit alternatives.

Until now.

I suppose I'm in a rare minority, but I have a flat full of older computers, and annoyingly, am in no position financially to replace them.

Linux's ability to keep older hardware working has always been greatly appreciated, but I wonder whether the end is in sight?

[otherego]

That's interesting. I  tried PCLinuxOS 64-bit live on the notorious Fujitsu V5535, and it ran beautifully. I honestly didn't know that some of these old warhorses could handle 64-bit systems. A shame the system board only accepts a maximum of 2GB of RAM, but better than nothing.

Absolutely no joy on the Eee PC I tried, though - very mucn a 32-bit only machine. As a bit of an Eee-holic (the early SSD ones), I've a whole pile of them.

Never mind. As far as I can see, Ubuntu/Mint should be OK with 32-bit for at least the imminent Long Term Release.

I hope.

[otherego]

It looks as if I'm not the only one who's a little concerned about the way Linux is heading. I'm principally concerned with its progressive loss of support for older equipment, even as I understand (I think) maintainers' reluctance to expend effort on what they see as obsolete gadgets.

Igor Ljubuncic ("dedoimedo") writes regularly about his testing of new distros, and he seems to find an increasing number of problems and regressions. Perhaps the pace of progress is being forced artificially, and developers might usefully slow down a little. More here:

http://www.ocsmag.com/2016/07/13/linux-2017-the-road-to-hell/

A couple of extracts:

One, old problems are rarely if ever fixed, especially hardware-related problems...

The other part is, the distroscape is accelerating. There are more and more changes being added to the desktop, and as a whole, the desktop is becoming more complex. The typical cycle of about six months might have been sufficient to review and QA the distributions, but it no longer applies for the modern crop of systems. I believe that it has become too difficult to keep pace with the rate of change and provide high-quality results.

The answer is simple. Slow down...let’s trying slowing down to one release a year. That gives everyone twice as much time to focus on fixing problems and creating beautiful, elegant distributions with the passion and love they have, and the passion and love and loyalty that their users deserve. Free does not mean you can toss the emotions down the bin.

I believe that Microsoft's behaviour at the moment makes it especially important for people to have an alternative. Not everybody can afford Macs, neither do they necessarily want to be afflicted with yet more proprietary software. I just hope those stars who maintain the various distros keep us lesser mortals in mind, and cater to our less exotic needs (and even to our ancient equipment.)

[otherego]

Those smart telephone thingies...

(Full disclosure - I honestly loathe telephones, and I'm more interested in the idea of a pocket PC which can be used for communication when it so suits me. The only pocket tablet I ever tried was awful.)

My nearest and dearest came to visit recently, which was absolutely brilliant.

They tend to communicate via Whatsapp. I dug out the cheapo Windows telephone I purchased a year ago (took a bit of finding - not one of my more compelling purchases), and sort-of learned to use Whatsapp. Very useful.

Trouble is, to get any of these clever apps onto the telephone involves logging into the Windows Store (or whatever it's called) with a Windows account. There seems no way to log out. This is just as bad as Android and the Google Play Store keeping you permanently logged in - presumably the better to slurp up all your activity in the process.

Recently, I was able to get my hands on a second hand Aquaris E4.5 telephone, running Ubuntu. I realise that Ubuntu for telephones is still somewhat beta, but hoped for great things on the privacy front.

Guess what? To download any of the three apps available in their store, you have to sign in with an Ubuntu One account. I can find no way of signing out.

Hopefully, they're not slurping personal data up while I use the machine, but who knows?

The operating system itself seems pretty limited, as do the available apps. No Firefox, for pity's sake.

Now I see that they're not planning to do great things for the older telephones (mine's bottom-of-the-line.) Development towards "Convergence" (essentially, allowing telephones and things to run normal desktop programs, preferably while plugged into a monitor and keyboard/mouse) is probably not going to allow anything for the older machines.

Why bother to be an early adopter in hope of "supporting their efforts"? And why on earth don't they at least offer the usual privacy/anonymity of a Linux-based system? Permanently logged into the store, indeed...

(Oh, and it doesn't do Whatsapp. Probably no loss with the latter having being absorbed by Facebook, but I know that when I ask my relatives to install Telegram, they'll just tell me to add a couple of layers to my tinfoil hat and to go back to using my Windows telephone. I'll miss them. I really will.)

[otherego]

I ventured onto Distrowatch for the first time in ages. An interesting news item mentioned that the Manjaro distribution was now offered "preinstalled" on certain laptops. More here:

https://manjaro.org/hardware/

The machinery they use comes from UK-based Station X:

https://stationx.rocks/

Some nice-looking kit there, but frankly, eye-wateringly expensive. They're not limited to Manjaro - Station X offer a variety of distros and I doubt whether there's any reason not to install one's own preference. Unless I won the lottery, I'd be more inclined to go for a cheaper (much cheaper) but similarly performing Windows machine and simply replace Windows with the Linux distro of my choice.

I wonder whether this is yet another obstacle to Linux becoming more widely accepted? Surely it would make more sense to offer a bunch of netbook-type machines for, say, <£150. Folk would be more inclined to pick one up to try this unfamiliar operating system out than they would be to spend upward of £800 just to have a look-see. Since the splendid little Eee PCs and their like, I don't think that there have been any Linux-based computers offered at prices to tempt the masses from their familiar subjugation by arguably exploitative but familiar proprietary software.

A similar thing happened with the Ubuntu mobile operating system. The smart telephones and tablets they offered came at pretty up-market prices - presumably pitched at buyers who already knew they preferred Linux.

Fine for enthusiastic developers with money to spare and wanting to wring the most they could from their software - but hardly likely to tempt a member of the public to say, "Oh, that's interesting and affordable - why not give it a try?"

I  honestly suspect that a whole lot more people would have tried Ubuntu telephones/tablets had a bunch of cheapies been available (I recently bought an admittedly unexciting Android handset for £27 delivered - not great but OK for just trying things out, and it actually fits into a shirt pocket. One's less wary of "taking a punt" than one would be of spending well north of £150 or whatever the last Ubuntu machines went for.

It doesn't matter how good the distros are. If Linux-specialised machines are only available for huge prices, it's unlikely that Joe Public will feel disposed to give it a go.

For the truly free-software enthusiasts, I suppose more standard machines with a customised free BIOS might be the answer - this site caught my eye:

https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom

Still not exactly cheap, though. If Linux is to attract wider interest, it would surely make sense to try offering it on much cheaper hardware that lots of people can afford to take a chance on.

*Sigh.*

Still - at least those who know Linux have some pretty good distros to choose from. I'm finding Mint 18.2 very pleasant on an elderly Thinkpad T61, and gave the recent AntiX 16 a try on a virtual machine. Very nice, very fast, but flatly refused to boot on an ancient Toughbook CF 27. (I might look into the whole thing more closely and have another go - might be a way, yet.)

With Windows 7 expiring in under three years, and a lot of people reluctant to use Windows 10, this might be a really good time to let friends know about what's available in the "Linux world." Sure, it might not be for everyone - but honestly, with very little effort, I believe most folk could shift to Linux 100%. The killers, of course, remain Windows- or Mac- centric programs which users have become dependant on - vendor lock-in, anyone? Most of us can learn to use the GNU/Linux alternatives (or FreeBSD etc - I've only tried Linux), and enjoy the benefits of relatively secure, stable and - dare I say it? - ethical computing.

[otherego]

Goodness. This board really has an abandoned look to it - and my favourite thread hasn't been visited in ages.

If anyone from the "old days" (which nowadays means more than a few months ago) still visits - it would be really interesting to hear how everyone's getting on with their operating systems, and especially with their Linux distros.

The fact that this board is so little-visited now is probably a testament to the reliability of current software (and hardware, I suppose.)

I recently treated myself to one of those little netbooks (second hand, of course) with Windows 10 on it to see what W10 is like to actually use, as well as providing myself with a slightly less ancient portable machine than my dear old Eee PCs.

W10 seems to work adequately, but I found it very irritating on various levels - more of that on another post, perhaps. It DID inspire me to start looking into current Linux distros, and I've ended up sticking with dear old Mint on my everyday desktop and laptop. Even thought the computers are ancient, Mint 18.3 and 19.1 installed with no difficulty, and run beautifully.

Having said that, modern distros do seem to have bloated somewhat, and current versions of Mint would be difficult, if not impossible, to shoehorn onto an old Eee PC. I thought I'd take a look at AntiX - now on version 17.3.

The live session launched and ran very fast, and I was most taken with it - until I tried to install it. In all fairness, I'm using VirtualBox which I'm fairly clueless about - but I THINK my problems arise from the AntiX installer. It moans that it is unable to set up a root user (after one has reached the bit asking for a root password to be entered) - and that's that. I could get no further.

Has anyone else tried AntiX recently - and if so, did you have similar problems?  I suppose I could just try it on one of the old Eees if I can clean enough dust off, but there must be a way of making it work on Vbox, too.

Enough for now - I suppose I'm just hoping nostalgically that on of the old regulars might still happen by from time to time! And any experiences/advice with AntiX (or other super-lightweight distros) would be most welcome. If I make any headway with any of them on Vbox or really netbooks, I'll also post back - at risk of talking to myself.

(Walks sadly off amid the blowing tumbleweeds.)

[cee-dee]

A hello to the stalwart of the board, I miss your contributions anyway. I look in every day to an empty board.......

However, now you've looked in can you explain just why you use linux? What do you use your computers for? Why is linux "better" for what you do?

Thinking about "computers" in general, isn't mucking about with all that stuff a bit like the chaps who just love mucking about with old cars when the majority of people just want them to be reliable and to get in, drive off and drive them?

I know you've mentioned "privacy" a lot and have concerns about what MS & google might be recording about users but when you think of the numbers of people using those systems, doesn't the sheer amount of data rack up to be such a huge amount that they just can't cope or do anything with it unless a person has been "up to something" to attract attention?

I see you've now got a Win 10 machine? Which browser are you using with it? Have you found it to be f a s t?

Lotsa questions up there? I'm looking forward to what you say.

[otherego]

Hi, CD.

Bed-time's approaching - but yes, it would be good to get some activity going here again.

Lots of questions indeed! And deserving of their own threads, I think. If you'll forgive me for the moment, I'll certainly stop by over the next few days.

Very briefly - Linux isn't for everybody, but it works very well for me. Windows doesn't seem to suit  me nearly as much. More another time...

I still think this board has potential use for an inernet based community. This particular thread, for instance, is a useful place to mention experiences specific to various Linux distros (operating systems) - even where no answers are forthcoming, it offers Linux users a quick look at what others are finding useful, what works for them and what doesn't, and even occasional solutions to problems.

But yes - plenty to discuss!

I'll be back...

[otherego]

AntiX continues to drive me bananas.

I found one vague reference on the internet to a bug (I assume it's a bug) in the installer which prevents it recognising a hard drive of less than 4gb. Sure enough,  as soon as I allow it 4gb or more, I can install it. Goodness knows how this affects the can't-pass-the-problem-with-the-root-password thing, though. Perhaps that's still lurking in wait for another time. Meantime, fatal error /dev/ is not a block device is just as irritating.

The problem is that I would like to install it on the faithful old Eee PC 4G, whose 4GB drive is only 4 giga-marketing-bytes, which works out at about 3.72 giga-binary-bytes. Looking at my successful VirtualBox installation - AntiX should fit. Not much point if the installer bombs out on seeing less than 4GiB of space, though.

It's a delightfully light and fast distro once one does get it installed on something.

I've also had a quick play with MX-18 - a near relative of Antix, and the result of a collabortion between the former Mepis and the AntiX communities.. Polished, fast and really, really nice. Too big for the little Eee, alas, but fine on an 8GB drive.

Perhaps I'll take a little time out to play with the Windows 10 netbook again - then get back to finding easy-to-use distros. (Wish I could actually do that command-line stuff, or even a little programming. It's tedious being interested in something for which one lacks any aptitude whatsoever.)

[cee-dee]

How about some comment on #1528? I've been really dying to know what you've got to say.

[otherego]

Give us a chance! Actually - as I mentioned previously (I think), your questions are worth another thread. I'm not feeling too clever just at the moment, but look forward to further discussion pretty soon.

Back to Linux matters. It turns out that there is, in fact, a way of installing AntiX to a sub-4gb drive. Buried deep in the installer code is a line or two telling the installer not to continue if the drive is less than 4000 MB. A whole heap of internet searching revealed that this can be changed.

While running the live session, and before starting the installer, one needs to edit a file. The file is /sbin/partition-info, and needs to be edited as root. (Hopes ej no longer follows this - he would cringe at my continuing inability to use the command line, and at the sheer lack of elegance of some of my problem-solving...)

I simply used the file explorer to locate the bit I needed - right-clicking on the actual "partition-info" file allowed me to open it as Root. Funnily enough, it actually needed the User rather than Root password (default "demo" and "root" in an AntiX live session, IIRC.)

It was then a matter of searching - as per the instructions I'd found - for line 145.

Bother - no line numbers! I just had to search for the second iteration in the file of:

# Allow options before and after the command
read_params "$@"
shift $SHIFT

and add:

MIN_SIZE=

I actually made that MIN_SIZE=3500 - so the affected section read:

# Allow options before and after the command
read_params "$@"
shift $SHIFT

MIN_SIZE=3500

That seemed to persuade it that a 3500MB hard drive would be sufficient, and the installation succeeded on a VirtualBox 3.72 GB drive - mimicking the size of the Eee PC 4G's internal drive - which proved JUST big enough. After updating and running apt-get clean, I think I had about 800MB of free space.

No idea if any of that will be of any use or interest to anyone else - but, hey - I had fun and perhaps even learned something.

[otherego]

And I wish this ghastly site would stop losing my posts with an "authentication failure" or some such rubbish in a revolting pink background. Wouldn't be so bad if it didn't bin everything, giving one a chance to try again.

I've learned, if composing anything other than the briefest of posts, to save a text copy until the post has appeared successfully - but my word, this site can be soooooo irritating!

[cee-dee]

Ha ha, you sound sooooo indignant. Doesn't your system auto-save?

Sometimes I get that pink text on about invalid HTML, I just either click "preview" or click "post" again.

[otherego]

I finally got round to trying AntiX 17.3 on a real, live Eee PC 4G, with its 4GB sort-of SSD and 512MB of RAM - not to mention the mighty 900MHz CPU (which I seem to remember is underclocked to try to make the battery life look marginally less awful.)

It took a bit of messing around, especially the "hack" mentioned previously - but installed and with all updates done, there is still over half a gig of hard drive space left. Not much, I agree - but this is a current distro, and I installed the full version which includes LibreOffice. There's also a version without, and one could always use something lighter like AbiWord, and save a little disk space.

Not exactly speedy, but it works, and I had Firefox and LibreOffice running together.

Firefox really has put on some weight, hasn't it? Slow, but at least just about useable.

Bear in mind this is a little like trying to put Windows 10 onto an eleven year old computer with - I don't know - I suppose a 16GB hard drive (and 512MB of RAM with a 900MHz CPU). The probable difference is that this works.

Can't remember whether the SDHC card reader on this particular Eee works, but if it does, that would take care of the storage problems. Indeed, one could install with the SDHC card in place, and use it for the /home partition.

No hugely practical reason for all this, other than that it is there... Good fun, though, and impressive that Linux can still keep some old equipment running.

Once I can get a little more personal energy sorted out, I must have another go at the more modern netbook with Windows 10 - probably start another thread for that. Just at the moment, I honestly couldn't be bothered with Windows. Soon, though...

Back on topic (hey, I know it's the cafe, but this is MOSTLY the Linux Distro thread), AntiX looks like an excellent distro for old equipment. I will concede that it's a bit more of a challenge in some ways than, say, Mint, and in fact it has nearly driven me doolally - I love Linux but I've absolutely no aptitude for it - but well worth persevering.

One of the reasons for its tiny "footprint" is that some of the heftier conveniences of the Ubuntu-based distros have been left out - but it's not as complicated as I make out. I've just becoome too used to just using Mint over the past couple of years, and definitely benefit from a little variety now and again.

[otherego]

PCLinuxOS - some happy memories. I really liked it a few years ago. Reasonably easy to use, pretty and amazing driver support.

It stopped supporting 32-bit computers, and I rather forgot about it.

Trying to revive an old Fujitsu Siemens V5535 ( if anyone offers you one of these then, to paraphrase the late, great Dorothy Parker - it should not be lightly tossed aside but should instead be flung with great force - IMHO, of course), I tried Mint. For once, that Great Reliable was unable to help. It eventually loaded, but simply froze with some warning about 100% CPU use. From experience with the V5535 and Mint years ago, I think the problem lay with the SiS chipset (SiS  761? - something like that.) More specifically, the graphics on these dreadful old laptops computers suffer an almost total lack of driver support - except on Windows XP/Vista and PCLinuxOS.

The live session was fine. Installation went OK. It booted up fine.

Once.

Thereafter, it flatly refused to let me back in. The login screen appears. I enter username and password and click enter. It thinks about things, flickers briefly through a black and white shell page then bounces back to the login screen.

If I enter the wrong username or password, it tells me so in the normal manner. Entering the correct gen simply results in going round and round and round in circles trying to log in.

Surprisingly, I found nothing of this exact problem on the internet - tried a few things from similar or possibly related hassles on the part of others.

I have, among other things, reset passwords (via a shell pre- log-in), rechecked the installation media (hashes), installed from USB flash drive, installed from DVD, removed the existing Windows partition and installed a 64-bit version (and yes, the old monster can run 64-bit), disabled Windows fast start - all in case some weird  interaction with Windows was going on  (it's a dual-boot setup)- called it Rude Names and, since it was the weekend, taken lightly to drink.

Another try tonight proved just as hopeless.

Oddly, I tried it on one of my little netbooks a few weeks ago. I now have a small herd of creaky old Windows 10 (originally) netbooks, in addition to the mountains of much older Eee PCs and Acer ZG5s cluttering the place.... (Joys of being mildly obsessive-compulsive according to a near relative.)

These more modern netbooks  really battle with W10 taking up so much space on their 32 gb soldered (as in can't be upgraded) eMMC sort-of hard drives.

Again, the live session was delighful, and I thought PCLOS looked the way to go. The installation kept failing at the last minute - no explanation, just a flat statement that it hadn't worked.

PCLOS and I just aren't meant to get along. Thank goodness for MX-18, which is almost rivalling Mint as my favourite distro. More another time. It's late.

If anyone else has had any hassles with PCLinuxOS, do let us know - especially if you found the solutions.

[otherego]

For some reason, I've always found it hard to love Puppy Linux. It looks like a bit of a last chance for some of the little netbooks, so I'm trying again - "BionicPup."

The highly recommended frugal install just didn't seem to work on the little EeePC with its half-gig of RAM and underclocked 900MHz CPU, but a "conventional installation" seems to be working.

I'm typing this on Firefox. Sadly, swap is necessary (probably not ideal for ancient SSDs), but at least the machine is usable - so far.

Lots of annoyances getting it working, but we're getting there.

Bed-time!

[otherego]

I'm posting this from an Eee PC 4g, running Bunsenlabs Helium.

It takes about 3GB of drive space. With 512MB of RAM and a quarter-gig of swap, it's reasonably useable. Firefox frequently defeats these little machines, even on lightweight distros.

I don't particularly like using swap on the antique SSD because of all the write activity going on, but see no easy way around it. Upgrading to a gig of RAM would probably be better.

Still - it works. And a very "pretty" distro it is, too.

[otherego]

Back again. Another Eee PC 4G (the 4G bit refers to the hard drive capacity - 4GB) but with a whole gigabyte of RAM and running AntiX 19.

Antix is only taking up 2.9 GB of the SSD so far - I've installed the "Base" version, which comes wihout LibreOffice. A lightweight word processor would probably be adequate for the limited demands placed on these little machines.

I've given it no swap space, and Firefox is working reasonably well.

The 630GHz CPU isn't ideal for modern software, either.

All great fun, and nice to know that dedicated people are still supporting operating systems that allow old computers to remain useable. It's getting harder to find really lightweight distros/software, and of course, support for 32-bit computers is increasingly limited.

[tressygirl]

Have you answered a post on the right thread?

The latest update was made 5 years ago , thread started in 2009.