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

[ej-solutions]

A real stitch up, to get around inherent flaws in the OS. Maybe then, we'll see a plumetting MS share of the market. Wishful thinking.

[grumpy-cook]

The logical extension of this would mean that you pay a lot of money for a computer and it (i.e. the hardware) to all extents and purposes ain't really yours to do with as you want - at least not without having to hack it in some way.

Having to hack your own computer so you can use it! The mind boggles.

[ej-solutions]

Just like a Wii/Xbox then. 😉

[ej-solutions]

Just think, in a couple of years time with locked down BIOS, retro computing will be the defacto standard. Otherego shall be in his element. 🙂

[grumpy-cook]

:^O There's always a silver lining.

[otherego]

Moi?

Fashionable???

Nooooooooo>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[otherego]

The more I see of Xubuntu 10.04, the more I like it.

I installed it to a pair of CF cards (saga elsewhere) of 4GB (3,72Gib) each, and plugged into a dual-CF card adapter.

The laptop is the faithful old Thinkpad T23, with its mighty 1.13 GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM.

After completing all updates and adding OpenOffice and GParted, the whole installation took up 2.49GiB . Running apt-get clean reduced that to 2.24 on the card used as /. (The other is given over to /home - nothing used so far, other than ext4's journal - at least I assume that's what the "Lost and Found" directory is???)

With Firefox, Writer, GParted and System Monitor open - all just idling - RAM use is sitting at about 170MB (was even less a few minutes ago - Firefox?) The CPU's ambling along at about 35%. No swap, in deference to the "SSDs." (I know I'm using a journalling file system - from what I read, this shouldn't be too serious. And since Sandisk seems to decide what its users may and may not do with the cards they've spent so much money on, perhaps the wretched things deserve death. Just joking.)

Sure, it'll need more stuff adding - Flash, unfortunately, and probably VLC - Totem really ain't up to things when it comes to trying to play DVDs, and seems incapable of finding the necessary plug-ins. I've been through this on the Eee PC recently.

But really, a pretty capable distro, and generally a user-friendly one, for less powerful equipment. AntiX is even better, but significantly harder work - especially if it dislikes one's no-name brand PCMCIA wireless card, for instance.

I saw somewhere that Ubuntu is only going to offer Unity in future. Hope I misunderstood that. Most of my equipment doesn't get on with it (hopefully Mint will continue to pragmatically deal with Ubuntu's bothers).

Meantime - 'tho not a huge fan of Ubuntu, no matter how greatly I admire it - Xubuntu really impresses me.

Now to kill it trying to add noatime to fstab. Another night, perhaps.

[otherego]

Back to the UEFI/MS will block Linux story for a moment.

I see MS  "has hit back at concerns that secure boot technology in UEFI firmware could lock out Linux from Windows 8 PCs, saying that consumers will be free to run whatever they want on their PCs."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/23/ms_denies_uefi_lock_in/

"Secure boot doesn’t 'lock out' operating system loaders, but it is a policy that allows firmware to validate authenticity of components. OEMs have the ability to customize their firmware to meet the needs of their customers by customizing the level of certificate and policy management on their platform."

MS seems to be saying that it'll be up to the OEMs.

How many of those can be trusted a) not to do what they think will go down best with MS   and  b) not to  save a few pennies per unit to avoid the expense of respecting the wishes of the tiny percentage of we, the sheeple, who actually know or care what operating system we use?

To be honest, I'm a little more worried now.

[otherego]

Just for fun, I'm posting this from the old Thinkpad T23 - Xubuntu 10.04 installed to a pair of Sandisk Ultra 4GB Cf cards plugged into a suitable IDE adapter and used in place of the normal hard drive.

I'll try to attach a couple of screen shots - not something I'm too gifted at.

Bearing in mind that this old workhorse has a 1.13GHz CPU and has been upgraded (hold your breath) to 512MB of RAM, those are pretty respectable figures showing there.

In case my pictures are totally unreadable - with Firefox, Writer, Calc and the System Monitor all open and idle, CPU use fluctuated between about 38% and 99%. Even more impressive, RAM use remained below 180MiB - 'tho this does seem to creep up.

Even with high indicated CPU utilisation, the machine remains pretty responsive.

The GParted shot shows the / partition (which happens to take up the whole of the master drive.) That's 2.23 GiB used, after all updates and adding OpenOffice.org and GParted.

I really like the clean, simple background, with everything easy to find via the Applications and Places options along the top of the screen. Even on the 7" Eee PC, I personally find this much easier on the eye and less crowded feeling than the made-for-netbooks interfaces. Purely a matter of personal preference.

The mouse symbol during boot and lurking discreetly on the upper left might strike some as a little icky-cute, but mawkish murine murals aside, I find the whole thing very clean and friendly.

On start-up - from the disappearance of the IBM screen (POST phase, I assume) to the appearance of the log-in screen took 21 seconds. After entering the password and hitting Enter to all icons being visible and no other sign of frantic activity - 15 seconds. Clicking on the selected router to the wireless activity icon appearing (still haven't figured out why on one installation it fires up on start and two others needs clicking) - 5 seconds.  Clicking on shutdown to computer fully shut down - 6 seconds.

How much of this quite respectable performance is due to the CF cards and how much to Xubuntu, I know not. All pretty respectable for a straighforward distro which is pretty much as user-friendly as Ubuntu or Mint, though.

(Much as I like the long-term releases, I wonder why they're sticking with OpenOffice and Firefox 3.6? I'm not quite bothered enough to actually do anything about it - just curious.)

[oxieman]

I see MS  "has hit back at concerns that secure boot technology in UEFI firmware could lock out Linux from Windows 8 PCs, saying that consumers will be free to run whatever they want on their PCs."

MS seems to be saying that it'll be up to the OEMs.

To be honest, I'm a little more worried now.

See you have been, erm.... 'Busy' OE

Don't you mean M$ 😄

Oxie...

[grumpy-cook]

This is probably one for EJ if he's around, but any input gratefully received.

I have recently decided to get rid of my web server and moved everything to commercial hosting. However, I wanted a small server locally for development and testing running on my main (PCLinuxOS) box, so I settled on Xampp For Linux. No problems installing it, however when I came to start it, whilst MySQL & FTP started fine, Apache didn't, issuing the following message -

Another web server daemon is already running

Sure enough going to http://localhost gave the enigmatic message "The Server is alive and working." and issuing the following command -

netstat -tunap | grep LISTEN

showed that, indeed, httpd was listening on port 80.

I've never, ever, installed Apache on this box (as far as my creaky brain can recall). So where on earth did this come from? Any ideas of what package might have also put Apache on? I really haven't a clue where it came from.

[oxieman]

I've never, ever, installed Apache on this box (as far as my creaky brain can recall). So where on earth did this come from? Any ideas of what package might have also put Apache on? I really haven't a clue where it came from.

After a google for 'xampp for linux'

I Know nowt about this GC, but....

It might be installed automatically...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZhaXGTjp6o&feature=related

Second I one viewed - not sure if this will help at all GC

Oxie...

[grumpy-cook]

Thanks Oxie, but I know how to install it if I wanted to. I think that I may have puzzled out where it came from now.

A while back I did a lot of playing around with streaming video for my SwallowCam project. Although we had this successfully running, I was trying to find a better (linux) method to replace the clunky old Windows server technology we were using. I did most of this on a test box, but I did run some stuff on this box, including things like Motion, gstreamer, ffmpeg etc. I suspect that Apache got involved here somewhere.

I just need to workout how to get rid of it now. I can stop it and then Xampp starts and works fine, so I'll probably just find a way to stop it running on boot.

[ej-solutions]

In my playing around with local installs, I usually stick with LAMP, XAMP is afterall not how a server is typically used - there should be no sign of X-windows - it's generally considered to be a security risk.

In choosing XAMP, there may be a mini-httpd server (as a system webserver) that is installed by default. Try in a terminal session;

ps -eaf | grep http

or

ps -eaf | grep apache

to confirm the existence of the server.

If determined to stick with XAMP, you could configure Apache to use the common 8080 port but IMO, it's better to have a system webserver use this port, leaving port 80 for general webserver duties.

This is a good series of tutorials (albeit long-winded in many cases):

http://www.google.com/search?q=perfect+server

I wrote this for a particular task but is generic enough for other purposes and might give helpful guidelines:

http://wiki.oscdox.com/v2.5/lamp

[grumpy-cook]

Thanks EJ, I've quit for the day now but will look into all this tomorrow.

The only reason I chose Xampp was that I just wanted an easy mini server for testing on, not a full fledged one (I've installed several in the past - often with reference to HowToForge). Xampp is running fine by the way.

[otherego]

I see we now get a rather insolently peremptory "load something or other first!" if googleapis ain't temporarily allowed on sign-in. I wonder whether eBay realises just how irritating it can be?

After that slightly grouchy excursion - I finally had a go at remastersys on my Mint  9 desktop. Took a little googling to figure it out but, once installed, it had no difficulty producing a bootable live DVD with all my installed apps on it.

I went for the option to produce a distributable DVD, so can't vouch for its ability with a full back-up - but am most impressed.

The DVD ran fine as a live DVD, and installed to a virtual machine perfectly happily - again, with all my added apps on board. Even better, it was fully updated. Could be a relatively painless way of sharing an installation between computers, or passing it on to friends. No personal data - bookmarks, settings and so on - seem to have been incorporated, so no worries there if it's to be given to someone.

Must have a look at the PCLOS equivalent next time I'm using that distro. I seem to remember the updates last time I installed PCLOS came to about 800 MB or something equally alarming. Enough to put off acquaintances with even slower internet than mine, and it would be useful to be able to offer an up to date version. A project for another evening, methinks.

[grumpy-cook]

Remastersys sounds interesting OE, let us know how you get on with it and PCLOS.

Here's a little article you may find interesting -

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/opensource/best-linux-distributions-for-hardware-detection-and-older-hardware/3147

[otherego]

I've yet to try remastersys/pclos - hoped to give it a look last night, but I think the hard drive on the current PCLOS laptop might be on the way out. (Long and boring story.)

From the link you gave, I thought I'd give Lubuntu a whirl. As far as I can see, it's now an official part of the Ubuntu tribe.

The 10.04 version was eventually persuaded to boot on the trusty Toshiba 320 - the CD seems to be on the way out, but PLOP in the floppy drive and a Unetbootined flash drive in the USB port did the trick. Unbelievably slow (USB1.1 doesn't help, presumably), but at least it gets round the CMOV problem in relics. It would be interesting to try installing it and see whether it works, although the 320's 96MB of RAM is below the 128MB recommended minimum. One for another night.

Looks as if Mint is flirting with new desktops. As the owner of umpteen antique laptops, I'm a little concerned by comments like:

Gnome 3 requires video acceleration and that is something most systems have.

Yeah, right.

At least they are offering sort-of an alternative, and I suppose one can't stop progress. More here:

http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20111107#news

and of course, here:

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851

Interesting that Mint has overtaken Ubuntu in Distrowatch's statistics. More discussion in the above link, including a rebuff of suggestions of fraudulent activity. Looks as if Unity has yet to achieve universal admiration.

Meantime, I need to try to find at least one of my machines that will actually run Gnome 3...

[ej-solutions]

O_E, thanks for the poke in the right direction: I haven't been into Distrowatch Weekly for quite some time.

Good to see my fav. distro. reaching number one "in the charts" 🙂

It looks as though MATE will provide a suitable alternative to Gnome 3 and, as usual, Mint is listening to the end-user.

At the bottom of DW, I spotted this fella:

http://webpath.net/it/r4w/

Could be life left in those old Win98 boxes yet. 🙂

[ej-solutions]

Having read the above - forget it!

$60 licence, albeit a multiplatform one.

At least 256MB of Memory (RAM), 512 or more recommended for best performance.

A video card and Monitor capable of at least 1024x768 resolution

Hmm, non-starter, then.