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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[grumpy-cook]

You can certainly do harm with it if you are not careful, but I must say I find it a must. You can make sure the port is blocked to outsiders or even only use it on localhost to keep it secure.

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[*_munchkin_*]

I think some step-by-step guides to installing and configuration of an operating system such as Ubuntu would be a good idea, especially to the new user.

The Ubuntu forums don't always give clear instructions, and it can be quite daunting for the beginner.

I made some notes when I installed Ubuntu, for example, changing the sound settings from PulseAudio to Alsa, without doing this Flash applications using sound and Media player don't work correctly if running at the same time (Ubuntu 8.04LTS).

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[grumpy-cook]

I have always found How To Forge a very useful source - tutorials, walkthroughs etc. for most major distros. Some very knowledgable people contribute and the forums are good.

http://www.howtoforge.com/

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[ej-solutions]

There's a PDF available at the Linux Mint site that seems pretty good :-)

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[otherego]

I read this article

http://www.lowfidelity.co.uk/?tag=eeebuntu

and thought yes, that could be fun.

I was mistaken. If you don't want to read the article, suffice to say it described using UNetbootin to install Eeebuntu to a USB flash drive, then using that flash drive, plugged into an Eeepc, to make a persistent install to an SD card inserted in the EeePC's cardreader.

Several little difficulties ensued, but the last straw followed the partitioning. The partitioning itself uses the same nighmare tool as I encountered on another distro (may have been Mint) - I don't know why they don't stick to GParted, which is relatively easy for we beginners to understand.

Anyhow, I was reasonably sure that the card had been partitioned. After filling in passwords and things, a page invited the importing of files and things. This was not relevant. What was relevant was that the bottom of the page, which presumably bore the "forward" arrow, was out of sight - it disappeared off the bottom of the screen. The page could be move down. The sides could be pulled in. But NO WAY could I resize it in order to see the whole ****** thing.

And that was it. I'd managed to move on a couple of times earlier by hitting the "Enter" key and hoping for the best, but this page was having none of it - presumably there was a tick-box or something out of sight.

End of experiment. To add insult to injury, attempts to install to the card using the live CD on the desktop also flopped. No ways would the live Eeebuntu see the USB drive I wanted to install to.

If anyone wants to experiment with an EeePC, for goodness sake get one with the 8.9" screen. It's the only computer in the place designed with Linux in mind; it's the only one on which I've yet to achieve at least some success with my ventures into the various Linux distros. At least the screen resolution problem on the old T22 (didn't like Xubuntu) was resolved by using another distro. The faithful Eee, however,with its 7" screen, is made of sterner stuff and doesn't roll over and surrender just because you've now thrown four different distros at it, and various other things eg one's dummy, around the room.

Still - I suspect the more advanced members of this board might find it an interesting challenge. I f anyone succeeds in running any other distro than the installed one on an EeePC 701, please tell us how 'tis done!

Time to stomp off for a large nightcap and bed!

[ej-solutions]

Otherego: what a super 'Jackanory' 😄 Should've read before going to bed with a Horlicks 😛 Instead, only after my 1st coffee!
Excellent to see you taking this onboard with a vengeance 😄 Have you tried Gentoo with the netbook?
[Just wish I had a EeePC to 'play' with]

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[otherego]

ej, if you can find an Eee PC at a sensible price, you'll probably have a lot of fun with it. Glancing through the forums, half the people who buy them seem to do so with the sole intention of changing both software and hardware as much as humanly possible.

Although the little 701 retains the charm of "an original," it can also be the most infuriating little bundle of binary malevolence imagineable.

First things first - I've finally coaxed Pupeee onto an SD card (and thank you for the link to the forum.) Again, I had to resort to using the desktop and the live CD, rather than the Unetbootin flash drive and Eee PC internal card. I'm immensely grateful to the clever folk who write such useful code and give it away free, and I hope they'll forgive me all my cussing when I come to a grinding halt during an installation - 'cos I can't get to the bit of the page which holds the arrow which needs to be pressed in order to continue. Interestingly, this has only proved almost totally insurmountable (by me) with two OSs intended specifically for the Eee PC. They seemed to totally overlook its unusual screen resolution.

Perhaps they had the 900 and 901 onwards in mind.

I did EVENTUALLY get Eeebuntu from the flash drive (Unetbootin again - great fun, but needs to be installed to something else in order to create a persistent install - I think) onto an expensive 4gb Sandisk SD card. It took a mere seven and a half hours. At least it completed. My Transcend card gave up the ghost after an hour or so - haven't had the courage to try it out on something else to see whether or not it is toast.

(If I plug the card into a USB card reader, it's almost as quick as a standard USB drive. The object of the exercise, though, is to have a second operating system and a little more storage available without a vulnerable USB stick protruding from the computer.)

If anybody knows a simple and affordable solution to the Eee PC's very slow internal card reader (the problem is most accute writing TO the card), please post it here. I'm unashamedly looking for something really simple, please!

A program called Eeectl (I think) seems to do the trick for Eees running XP. It makes it possible to adjust such things as CPU performance without any actual expertise. As soon as I see words like "compile" and "kernel", I realise that I'm really right at the very start of the journey...

The problem may, of course, be a hardware one - seems to be a possible weakness of earlier 701s. Needless to say, the machine is out of warranty. It does seem that there is some hope if a certain amount of tweaking can be done to ensure steady voltage to the card-reader, or something like that. Eeectl (?) apparently allows one to achieve this without actually speeding up the CPU, unless one actually wants to.

The little 701 gets quite hot enough as it is. Apparently, this is mormal - the CPU is rated at 900mhz but underclocked, in standard form, to about 650.

Oh, and it took two hours of chopping and changing between UK and US English and keyboards (amazing variation on offer in Eeebuntu) before I was able to type "|" - necessitated by a command-line resolution copied from a forum to overcome a problem with Eeebuntu's updates. It turns out that to type "|" on a 701, you press AltGr (which I'd figured out) and then "¬."

Hope THAT might help somebody!

So - an educational weekend. And yes, I'm increasingly inclined to think that Linux can be used by we non-geeks, especially in view of the fact that most of the real problems I've had have occurred whilst "playing." With the aid of the internet and forums like this, even a beginner can experiment and mostly come out on top. Although I'm still very much in the early learning stages, I'm already more confident on computers, I think, than I was just a couple of weeks back - which must be a good thing for anyone, especially folk who enjoy online hobbies, and even earn their livelihoods, on sites like eBay.

So - any simple suggestions to enable me to get the Eee Pc's card reader working at a decent rate of speed and reliability would be very welcome!

PS GParted and Super Grub Disc are essential rescue tools for the enthusiastic Linux beginner who decides to use the desktop to tramsfer operating systems between two other media, which themselves need partitioning etc - a couple of little "surprises" when the desk-top suddenly finds itself without one of its two operating systems have been resolved the aid of these two - still not quite sure how - phew!

[*_munchkin_*]

Today I transferred an hard disk with 8.04 LTS installed on it, from a Dell GX270 to a Packard Bell PC with a Windoes installation problems. Both PCs have different hardware, the Dell a P4 and the PB an Athlon. It booted up fine and everything works as it should, no updates required or other obvious issues, I am well impressed.

Don't know what to do about the PB's Windows XP. It loads up really slow, can't go into safe mode mode, can't even use the recovery partition to fix it.

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[ej-solutions]

Munchkin: If a WinXP disc is available boot from it a try an install into a different windoze directory. It may be that the disc has 'dodgy' sectors that are getting WinXP 'in a tizzy'. Otherwise, use a UBCD4Win disc (that'll keep you busy for a while ;-)) to startup the PB. There's a suite load of utilities on it for disc checking, defragging, registry checking etc.

Otherego: I haven't looked into the hardware spec. of the EeePC but would be surprised if they have crippled the internal USB with only v1.1 speed. (Presumably, that's what drives the card reader). I suspect it's more to do with the module/driver that's being automatically used by the various Linux distributions. 7 hours install - yikes!

[Getting increasingly geeky:] commands such as 'lspci' and 'modprobe'/'lsmod' should interrogate the hardware enough to identify what is being used. Armed with this info., you might get a little bit further forward. You'd have to be hopeful that someone has written a hardware specific module for it, though. ;-)

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[otherego]

#28 Thanks for that, ej. I'm sure you're right and that the internal card-reader's not meant to run at USB1.1 speeds. I'm still inclined to think that there's a hardware problem BUT to be honest, find the Eee PC forums mostly way over my head. Those folk are geeks among geeks!

There might just be a glimmer of hope. A couple of people have had some success with Eeectl on XP equipped machines. It looks as though it's not speeding up the CPU that does the business, but increasing/steadying the voltage to the card reader. Does that make sense?

This MIGHT help:

http://greg.geekmind.org/eee-control/#download

If you could spare a moment,might you be so kind as to cast an eye over this and see whether it might be safe to try? And if so, would it be feasible just to download it to the SD card with Eeebuntu on it, so that using the computer with its built-in Xandros leaves it in its original state?

(And yes - I'd stick the card into a USB card-reader for the download to save time, then replace it in the built-in card-reader slot!)

Thanks for reading this - I'll look in from time to time>

[ej-solutions]

This simple statement is probably key to the issue(s):
"Under some circumstances, I2C/SMBus is not available because the BIOS "hides" the controller."

During boot up (if the splash screen is disabled) you should see a reference to this - it will also be in the message log. [I'm not in *nix at the minute - defragging under WinXP, otherwise I'd check the filename.]

This caveat is well worth sticking to:
"Note: eee-control is incompatible with most Eee PC ACPI scripts, fan-control scripts, et cetera. Please remove them prior to installing eee-control."
Might take you a wee while to figure this one out - look for a Startup Manager and disable the mentioned daemons (services).

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[ej-solutions]

BTW - Munchkin:
"I think some step-by-step guides to installing and configuration of an operating system such as Ubuntu would be a good idea, especially to the new user."

I did write one here, some time ago, geared to sharing Ubuntu with Windoze. The problem being, they are very much time dependent and the best source is often direct from the distributions website (with maybe a little guidance ;-)).

Some may recall my Heron sig., which was a veiled reference to the Ubuntu 'Hardy Heron' release. The guide was written around that time :-)

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[otherego]

Thanks, ej. Looks like a little too much potential for mischief in that lot for my present level of, um, "expertise"!

As it is, the Eee has fried my Transcend SD card so thoroughly that other computers don't even see it any more. Those Sandisks must be made of stern stuff indeed.

Would hate to toast something more serious, such as the computer's innards. I'll keep looking around, though.

[ej-solutions]

Following through on the link that you posted, there's a fair bit of discussion on Gentoo (with a dedicated EeePC forum). There is talk on a kernel rebuild to provide facilities for this netbook. Might be worth a trawl, if you have a few spare hours.

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[ej-solutions]

Also, do a search for a program called CardTricks (it's geared for Canon G7 use, amongst others). It's format utility might revive the SD card.
Generally, cards fail if there are too many re-writes to them. Lesser quality ones probably have fewer re-write cycles available to them. Having said that Transcend isn't exactly a 'no-namer' ;-)

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[otherego]

Thanks for all that effort! I'll look for Card Tricks.

Although the card's been sitting in a drawer for ages, this is the first ever attempt to use it (and most probably the last, as far as this particular card is concerned.)

Interestingly, both Puppy and Pupeee were quite content on a 2gb card (Panasonic Class 4). Having said that, I DID install them via the desktop, and it took Pupeee quite a time to write a 512mb storage file space to the card on the first shutdown.

I don't THINK it's an SDHC compatibility problem.

Pupeee solved the wireless problems I was having with Puppy, by the way. Just a shame it wouldn't let me use the Eee to install it - couldn't see the bottom of pages on the screen. (Should have tried with vesa rather than xorg, I suppose. Never tried it, but after an attempt at installing Xubuntu to a laptop flopped when I couldn't reset the "safe Graphics" screen resolution post-installation, I became a little wary of reduced graphics settings during installation.)

All most educational! Thanks again.

[otherego]

I'm now on my third attempt to install DreamLinux.

It all goes smoothly until I reboot and enter my user-name and password - which go unrecognised. Once, perhaps - but more than that?

One more try, and I'll probably be back for assistance!

[otherego]

Solved, but goodness knows how - it worked on the third install.

Not quite as nice as the live CD led me to expect, but it's early days.

Time to start compiling a list of favourite distros? There seems to be a fair number of us playing around with it now.

Probably just lead to arguments. Hopefully friendly ones!

[ej-solutions]

:^O

I presume that you've headed over to DistroWatch ?:|

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[grumpy-cook]

I took the plunge yesterday and set up a dual boot on my main PC with Ubuntu (8.10). Although I've run linux for quite a while on my server, first with Mandriva and now with CentOS Server and I had Linux Mint on an old laptop for a while, this is the first time I decided to give it a go for my day-to-day computing.

At first I was continually rebooting into Windows to do things, but now I'm staying with Ubuntu most of the time. I've got it set up how I like it and I'm gradually adding replacements for things I use a lot. I have Krita instead of PaintShop Pro, Kompozer instead of Trellian or Expression, Pidgin instead of Messenger, etc..

My biggest headache was with Thunderbird - I needed to think of some way to handle my emails, but not lose accessibility over both OSes (i.e. have some emails downloaded to one TB version and others on the other). Once I understood how TB's files worked though, it was quite easy to make them both share the same profile, made simple by Ubuntu's ability to see my Windows NTFS files.

So far it's looking good - literally actually, with Compiz and Emerald installed and tweaked, it's really quite beautiful. And it all runs soo fast.

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