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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[ej-solutions]

Interesting...
Look in BIOS to change the amount of shared graphics memory.

Ubuntu 9.10, presumably 😉

[Still don't understand why, for example, Vesa mode cant be enabled for at least 1024x768]
You may get more mileage from asking in the Mint forum, regarding SiS drivers.
Bear in mind it's a Release Candidate at present, with a few bugs showing up.

Have begun investigation into a custom kernel based on Mint. Appears straightforward enough. I'll trial one geared for this laptop (eventually) and then a cut down one.

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[otherego]

Oh, rats - Mint 8 was just the same. There's quite a bit about this hassle in the Mint and Ubuntu forums. For some reason, SiS seems very reluctant to release Linux drivers. It seems that one of their employees, a Mr Lee, was grudgingly permitted to release a 2D driver. Surely M$ doesn't have hardware manufacturers under its thumb to the extend that they actively resist attempts to run their products on non-M$ software?

I'm not too fussed about the 256mb shared graphics memory - standard for this machine, and Mint is very comfortable with the remaining gig and three quarters of RAM.

Continuing the poor run with Ubuntu/Mint, I've fired up my "modern" Toshiba laptop - a Satellite A120 with 1.46mhz CPU and 1.5ghz RAM. I couldn't get Ubuntu or Mint to load at all - the initial screen appeared allowing the selection of boot options (I tried both normal and safe graphics), but pressing "Enter" after this resulted in a black screen with a blinking cursor.

Puppy 4.3.1 worked fine, although wireless connection took two attempts. I wonder whether the CD-ROM is dodgy? Perhaps Ubuntu/Mint is particularly sensitive to read errors/interruptions. Must read up on the new Puppy -a short live session didn't really reveal anything startling in the way of changes, but it's reassuring that it's being maintained. Still comes with SeaMonkey 1.1, which is a pain (few modern add-ons can run on it), and the package manager still only offers Firefox 2.4 as an alternative browser.

I'm typing this from the Toshiba, now running Mepis 8 - and very nicely, I have to concede, once I can remember/figure out things like connecting to the internet. Not nearly as nice as Ubuntu/Mint, to my taste, but I probably need to spend time getting used to the KDE way of doing things. Might just see whether the piggy-bank will allow the purchase of a larger HDD to dual-boot Mepis with Windoze.

Perhaps all the Ubuntu related distros display a harder ethical line so far as the provision of none-free drivers are concerned? And a glance through the Toshiba forums suggests that Toshiba doesn't exactly go out of its way to support Linux, either - very Windows-centric. I'll be very interested to see whether the Powers That Be, especially in Europe, ever try to limit M$'s quite extraordinary levels of influence. Surely the company has created something of a monopoly?

Nuff M$/political waffle - probably time to move on from coffee to something more cheering. And I have to say that Mepis seems a largely overlooked and under-appreciated distro.

Be interesting to hear how the custom kernel progresses, ej. Things like that sometimes make me wish I'd started messing around with computers twenty years ago and not two - must be huge fun and useful, too.

[ej-solutions]

"Surely M$ doesn't have hardware manufacturers under its thumb to the extend that they actively resist attempts to run their products on non-M$ software?"
Just believe it! 😐

What you need to look for is so-called restricted modules.
My skill set is far too rusty to delve into the intricacies of device driver coding. 😞 Too many other things have saturated the grey cells, unfortunately.

I do find it strange that the Tosh. doesn't boot. I wonder what motherboard it has.

Overheated the lappy on my first custom kernel build - I kid you not! 😮 Try again...

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[otherego]

I was surprised at the Toshiba's refusal to boot Ubuntu/Mint - especially as it seemed quite happy with Puppy and with Mepis.

Overheating Toshibas while running Linux seems a relatively common theme on the Toshiba forums. Unfortunately, these are not as intensively used as they might be. Most of the stuff I found seemed to deal with fan problems, though.

One chap found that it might be "a problem with the dsdt.dsl file used by ACPI" - then went on to investigate further. Glancing through that thread did seem to suggest that kernel problems might contribute to overheating, but to save all the links, here's the discussion:

http://forums.computers.toshiba-europe.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=43991&tstart=15

Probably nothing to do with your hassles, but could just be an interesting read if you've not already seen it.

[ej-solutions]

Actually a design flaw in this case - insufficient airflow around HDD & RAM. :-)

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[otherego]

Nice to know the problem's solved. Overheating does seem to be a common hassle with laptops. Really must get on to all my "classic hardware" with a vacuum cleaner one of these days.

(All right, so dust bunnies are more a lazy owner than a design problem!)

[otherego]

Some progress, I suppose. Mint 7 almost boots on the A120. No boot options are offered, and the initial screen (showing seconds to go to automatic boot) only occupies the middle third or so of the screen. It goes through all the motions but the final Mint desktop lacks the menu items along the bottom - and the cursor/mouse arrow ends up initially in the top left corner, rather than the centre of the screen.

Trying to trawl for a menu in the lower left hand corner didn't work - and no evident way to re-size.

PC Linux OS 2009.1 (KDE desktop) worked nicely - might download the latest and try that. (I think there's a GNOME version, which I would probably prefer.)

What is it with Ubuntu/Mint and laptops? A more conscientious rejection of non-free drivers, perhaps? Perhaps I'm just unlucky so far.

One last try - time to download Mint 7 XFCE, I think. It would be nice with the 1.4gb CPU, if the graphics work.

[otherego]

Sorry, that was really unclear - when Mint 7 finally loads, it not only fills the screen but overflows off the edges - found no way to drag it nor to resize it. *Sigh*

[otherego]

I've been trying a little cloning with "Clonezilla."

So far, I've had two 40gb hard drives in this desktop - one with Windows 2000, and the other shared between Ubuntu 9.04 and Mint 7. A little cramped...

An eBay spending spree resulted in the arrival of one 80 and one 160gb HDD. The 80gb was fitted in an external enclosure and hooked up to the computer via USB. The latest Clonezilla CD went into the CD drive, I booted the machine from it and despite some anxieties, cloned W2K onto the 80gb drive. This article was very helpful:

http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/133012-easily-upgrade-any-hard-drive-with-linux

especially the advice about NOT selecting the –r Resize the filesystem to fit the partition size of the target partition option, but remembering to use –k1 Create partition table proportionally (OK for MBR, not GPT).

The object here was to save having to enlarge partitions afterwards.

The Linux partitions on the second drive proved a little trickier. Bearing in mind all the partitions cloned were about to end up four times their original size, I shrank the / partitions as much as possible, and also resized the relative size of Mint's and Ubuntu's partitions to reflect the fact that I mostly use Mint. Since this involved moving all the partitions and shrinking them in both directions (using GParted), it took a while.

Deep breath and rebooted off the Clonezilla disc, this time with the "new" 160 gb drive in the external enclosure. Took about fifty minutes. I then swapped the old and new hard drives around, took a deep breath an booted it up. All three systems started up fine - not one boot repair required. I was amazed.

One problem is that Clonezilla rearranged all the Linux partitions. Mint / and Mint Home, for instance, now have a 30.5 GiB extended partition between them.The practical difficulty is that, short of resizing and shifting every single partition, I now won't be able to adjust the size of Mint's / partition - which has ended up 13.6 GiB in size. (A result of its being magnified four times - despite having shrunk it to about 5mb more than the used space on the original hard drive.) No matter - still a lot more space than I had before.

There's probably a way of resizing partitions more scientifically with Clonezilla - I've not found it. Anyway, both Mint and Ubuntu will probably be reinstalled in the next few months.

A couple of other little oddities cropped up(actually arose during the partition resizing before cloning), but not serious - might ask on this thread tomorrow if I don't figure out the solutions from Google etc.

An interesting exercise - Clonezilla seems pretty safe, and compared with my messing around cloning with GParted, it was nice to end up with instantly bootable systems.

For future reference, it would have been quicker and ultimately tidier to simply partition the more complex Linux drive and install from scratch, then transfer saved data to the new installations. Not nearly so much fun, though.

[ej-solutions]

Hurrah! A technical post on the technical/HTML board! 😄
Booting off a live CD is the easiest way to resize / partitions - what I usually do. 6 or 8Gb will be ample, if you have /tmp & /home as other partitions.

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[grumpy-cook]

I spotted this on DistroWatch the other day.

http://partedmagic.com/

It looks very good and I downloaded it. I've not burned it or used it yet but it looks a good one to have handy.

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[ej-solutions]

I tend to wait for updates to SystemRescueCD, with gparted etc. included in it. ;-)

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[otherego]

6 or 8Gb will be ample (ej #549)-8 gb was my original plan. Cloning from a 40gb to 160gb drive resulted in every partition ending up four times its original size. I tried to minimise the effect by shrinking the root partitions to 5mb more than the absolute minimum possible before cloning- my tendency to install all sorts of stuff that I never use meant that the Mint root partition couldn't be shrunk beyond about 3.4gb - which, of course, ballooned to 13.6.

Clonezilla "helpfully" parked it to the extreme left of the partition diagram. The 30.5gb extended partition containing Ubuntu is the next, immediately to Mint root's right. And of course, Mint Home - about 95-odd gb, I think it was - sits to the right of the extended partition.

So to regain any space from shrinking the 13.6 gb Mint / to 8gb would necessitate moving every other partition 5.6 gb to the left. I think GParted could do it - but it would need a day when I was very, very bored in order to try it - would take hours.

Still, all working nicely and I'm still better off, space-wise, than I was previously. And I think I've learned a bit, too, which is always vaguely gratifying.

Must try the CDs mentioned in #550 and 551. Amazing how useful various open-source live CDs can be. They also have the advantage of making one look terribly clever on occasion - eg when friends who can do all that clever HTML stuff and so on are suddenly stricken by an unbootable Windoze system and start wondering what it will cost them to retrieve their stuff. (Answer - a few pence for a CD.)

[grumpy-cook]

This looks an interesting virtualisation distro -

http://www.ulteo.com/

As well as a livecd/installable desktop release they have a version which runs on Windoze and basically gives you a Linux system in a window.

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[ej-solutions]

Like 'AndLinux' it does seem paradoxical to run Linux in Windows. ;-)

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[grumpy-cook]

It seems there are Linux militant groups out there -

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/27/daily_web_host_defacement/

Or maybe it was the Tux Liberation Front. ?:|

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[ej-solutions]

😄
Still people can't see past Windoze! ;-)

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[ej-solutions]

I tried an inline upgrade of Mint 7 to 8RC1. Kind of worked but quite a few 'niggles'. Have since reloaded 7 but I suspect it's 'things' within my Home partition that caused the upgrade quirks.

Have now installed the public release of Mint 8 on my spare partition. Now that went smooth. Less than 15 minutes from beginning to end (from a USB stick). Slick looking during installation and a real polished look. Startup time (including manually entering apassword to access Wi-Fi) a speedy 65 seconds. Shutdown in 5 seconds. Beats Windoze hands down.

A small gripe - it doesn't display 4 workspaces by default - soon sorted. 😉

[How the heck do people put up with all the adverts/rubbish on feeBay? Time to put 'the pack' on!]

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[otherego]

Looks as if this thread could use a bump.

I'm visiting family - very little internet access. The 17-year old nephew was gratifyingly interested in Linux live CDs. I now find that he has evil plans with respect to gaining access to his mates' computers. *Sigh*

I would never have thought of using Puppy to transfer embarrassing non-parent-friendly files to a friend's passworded computer for his parents to find. Youth of today.

(Grudgingly amused - at least I'm satisfied there's no harm intended... and had never thought of live CDs having potential in the execution of practical jokes...) I suppose it would be deeply unethical to try to find out whether he succeeds.

[ej-solutions]

:^O
Keep schtum. 😉

Latest version of SystemRescueCD is out - essential toolkit.
Mint 8-64bit RC1, for those with posh (underutilised) machines.

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