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

[keiths-online-sales-uk]

Just announced, Google Chrome for Linux

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en-GB/w00t.html

[ej-solutions]

That's one I won't be rushing out to install.

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[grumpy-cook]

Mutter, mutter, xorg.conf, mutter, groan, dual monitors, groan, moan, XrandR, mutter, groan, moan.

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[ej-solutions]

PMSL - sounding like me there! XRandR; I can sympathise - never did get round to it (poor pun) working with the tablet. Speaking of which, must find time to look at it again.

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[ej-solutions]

Two new updates of interest on Distrowatch:
Clonezilla & Webconverger.

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[otherego]

This board's chief gadget addict and expert in tempting one to spend one's money has somehow managed to get me all enthusiastic about trying one of the old Toughbook CF-27s on offer on eBay.

Thus, the search for a lightweight but reasonably modern distro resumes. I suspect that whichever Toughbook I get won't have a touch-screen, since I tend to choose according to price.

Just trying out Vector Light 5.9 on VirtualBox. A surprisingly drawn-out installation, but it looks quite nice - and that's on 96mb RAM. For some reason, I've yet to get version 6 downloaded and succesfully burned.

It is starting to look as though more modern distros aim to take advantage of modern hardware - fair enough, but frustrating when one enjoys extending the useful life of old equipment. I'm determined not to end up using Puppy yet again - a brilliant little distro, from what I've seen. Though I'm still a little concerned about the fact that it always seems to run in root - perhaps I'm mistaken there?

Also - it's so nice to play with software that doesn't demand activation and doesn't constantly check up on its own licence validity. (I'm in the throes of a burst of enthusiasm experimenting with all my poor old computers.)Don't know why, but that aspect of the world's favourite OS is one of its biggest turn-offs for me.

An early night - and then see what produces the week's biggest challenges - finding highly ethical software that'll run on minimal hardware, or keeping on the right side of a software vendor which I personally feel has surrendered any ethical high ground it might ever have enjoyed! Ah, personal prejudice is wonderful.

[otherego]

Anyone else tried Antix? It's a lightweight version of MEPIS, itself a delightful distro if perhaps a touch pushy with respect to donations!

Using VBox, the Antix live CD ran reasonably with 128mb of RAM, and even Iceweasel was usable, with patience. Dillo was faster, of course - just wish I could figure out what it does with cookies. (A google project for another time.)

Reducing RAM to 96mb resulted in the live disc coming to a grinding grey halt trying to load the desktop. Adding 128mb of swap space to the VBox HD allowed the live disc to run again with 96mb of RAM. Very slow, but impressive that it did it at all.

Installing it with 96mb RAM seemed to take forever, but it got there in the end (along with a suggestion to "now pay for it"!) Increasing RAM to 128mb again resulted in a pretty acceptable performance. What really impressed me was the fact that the developer suggested 128mb RAM as an absolute minimum.

Apps include Iceweasel, Dillo, Links2 (which I've yet to figure out) Abiword and Gnumeric, which would pretty much take care of most folks' day to day computing needs on a modest machine. Admittedly it's enjoying the benefits of a 2.4ghz CPU at the moment, but I'm hopeful that it'll prove acceptable with an eighth of that.

It could also be a useful Linux-within-windows VBox exercise - allowing one to browse from the safety of Linux whilst stuck with everyday tasks in Windows, without the need for a mega-powerful computer. Time to boot into the neglected W2000 partition and see whether VBox is as nice in windows, I think.

I'll also try to download WattOS as recommended recently by ej - and see whether I can find a working mirror for Wolvix, which has been suggested in a couple of places as suitable for less powerful equipment. Its motto - "...for those with better things to do than wobble their windows" is a touch mrrowww-hssst - more Cattix than Wolvix, perhaps - but it looks like a distro with a sense of humour.

Any more suggestions for lightweight distros, especially ones that'll work with older CPUs? I'm hoping to get an old Toughbook in the next week, and anticipate a 300mhz Pentium II - but it's always interesting to try to make stuff work on a Toshiba Satellite 320CDT with a 233mhz Pentium (Pentium I, if there's such a thing?)

[ej-solutions]

Here's a list of what I have stored in my "Images" partition - you might spot something that you haven't tried.

absolute-13.0.3.iso
altlinux-4.0.2-lite-i586-live-cd.iso
antiX-M8.5-pt1-beta.iso
browserpuppy49.iso
CDlinux-0.9.3.iso
deli-0.8.0-full.iso
dsl-4.4.10.iso
feather-0.7.5.iso
geexbox-1.2.3-en.i386.glibc.iso
Gentoo-livecd-i686-installer-2008.0-r1.iso
goblinx.Mini-3.0.iso
icewmsid-snapshot-icewm-sid-i386-200812212207.iso
KNOPPIX_V6.0.1CD-2009-02-08-EN.iso
LinuxMint-6-Fluxbox.iso
LinuxMint-7-XFCE.iso
LinuxMint-8.iso
midiflux-i586-0_6_1b.iso
NimbleX-2008.iso
omniaxp1.1_en.iso
pclinuxos-phoenix-2009.4.iso
pclinuxos-xfce-2009-2.iso
pc-os2009v2a-opendesktop.iso
pup-431.iso
puppy-4.2.1retro-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso
pupremaster.sh.gz
PureOSlight_10b2_EN.iso
Safepup_LiveCD-March03_2008.iso
slax-6.1.1.iso
slitaz-cooking.iso
TEENpup2009Legacy.iso
tigerpup1_6.iso
tinyflux1.0-i586-k2.6.18.8-legacy.iso
TinyMe-2008.1-Droplet.i586.iso
TinyMe-2010-Acorn-Beta-1.i586.iso
ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso
ubuntulite_0.8_beta2.iso
Vixta.LiveCD.2009.06.i686.iso
VL6.0-Light-LIVE-Final.iso
wattOSb3.iso
webc-5.6-legacy.iso
webc-5.8.iso
xpud-0.9.iso
xpud-0.9-mod.tgz
xubuntu-9.04-alternate-i386.iso
Zenwalk-6.2.iso

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[grumpy-cook]

If you can't find something in EJ's list (should keep you busy) then have a look at Deli Linux - http://www.delilinux.de/

Minix3 may also be worth a look, it seems it will run on almost anything - http://www.minix3.org/

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[ej-solutions]

🙂
Deli - item #6. 😉
Minix3 - interesting...
[Minix was/is a filesystem in its own right. "MINIX, as originated by Andy Tanenbaum" - respect! :-)]

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[otherego]

Thanks for those suggestions. (Thinks: ej's 40gb distro partition must be getting a touch full.)

Tinyflux and Minix look like this afternoon's downloads. I need to sit down and spend some time with Deli - have yet to figure out how to get it working - but I'll definitely give it another go.

I see the World's Favourite Software is having a spot of bother:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8427474.stm

Whilst they'll probably easily cover the damages from the petty cash tin, it'll be interesting to see whether this has any real effect on M$ - I very much doubt it.

The relatively friendly and uncomplicated world of open-source is looking better all the time, isn't it?

[ej-solutions]

Yep, 'standard' Ubuntu got the heave-ho, to fit Minix in. No great loss. 😉

Patent 'skirmishes' are nothing new really and as you say, that amount of cash comes out of the tin in the desk drawer.

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[otherego]

Season's greetings to all!

Tis the season to be jolly, and to mess around with Linux - just like the rest of the year.

Clonezilla has provided a couple of interesting experiences recently.

The first involved transferring this desktop's Windows 2000 (on a 40gb drive) and Mint/Ubuntu (also on a 40gb drive, which they were finding a little cramped) to an 80 and 160gb drive respectively. I took advantage of Clonezilla's ability to proportionately resize partitions.

It worked fine and the systems work, if anything, better than previously. However, Clonezilla did a strange rearrangement of the partitions on the Linux drive, placing the Mint / partition at the beginning, then the extended partition bearing Ubuntu and swap, then Mint home, which was the largest partition.

Start-up now always involves much text ("verbose" start?) It's by no means a problem, and certainly not something I've felt the need to change, but a little googling suggested that partition UUIDs can be changed by Clonezilla's cloning process:

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=18591

I'm not going to worry about it, but I wonder if it would be better to clone partition-to-partition, one at a time?

The second Clonezilla job was transferring the systems on the old Ei laptop's 20gb drive to a (gasp!) 40gb drive. Windows XP had 15.6gb; Puppy had 1gb root/home plus 512mb swap. A 1.5 gb FAT32 partition for shared data lay between them.

Clonezilla transferred the NTFS partition (and resized it) without demur, but gave error messages concerning the others ("Failed to clone..." and "Warning: UUID and lable(sic) of ... are nothing."

Examining the partitions with Gparted showed one happy NTFS and three unidentified partitions.

Again, for future reference - it might be better to clone the partitions individually. I forget the details, but there is some reference to an NTFS-related preference early in the process, and it looks as if once Clonezilla's started with an NTFS partition, it runs into difficulties on encountering others.

Anyone figured out a way to avoid this annoyance?

FHIW, I decided that it would be easiest to remove the unidentified partitions from the cloned hard drive with GParted. Windoze was, of course, now unbootable. I installed Wolvix Cub to the now unallocated 6gb, and it sparked up fine - but with no reference to Windoze. Fortunately, its menu.lst file includes a number of commented-out examples of suitable variations, and I was able to get it to point to both Wolvix and XP - both of which now seem to boot up quite happily.

So - Clonezilla is jolly useful, but evidently has one or two pitfalls for the inexperienced (eg me.) It seems to be a touch unpredictable in the cloning of multiple partitions, tending to rearrange the partition scheme as it sees fit - at least when partitions are being resized during the cloning process. It also seems to have a problem dealing with the cloning of multiple partitions if one of them happens to be NTFS.

My googling's got me nowhere useful - if anyone finds anything useful on this topic, please post a link!

Time to see whether the supermarket's open. All this computer work has resulted in a beer shortage.

Might bore the board further with my Wolvix-on-old-machine edeavours etc later. Might give poor old Steve ideas for something more entertaining to play with(thinking old Toughbooks here) than a recalcitrant Windows laptop!

[ej-solutions]

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2896627&group_id=115473&atid=671650

Tried the latest (just released) version?

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[otherego]

Thanks - just downloading that now. I managed to complete the job, but it was a bit fiddly.

And there's bound to be a next time.

[ej-solutions]

For those older machines (and easy to 'share' with Win95/98).
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/

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[ej-solutions]

Managed to start this in 64Mb RAM @ 800x600, though VirtualBox didn't like the processor sharing too well and I would be tempted to replace Firefox with a lighter browser.
This looks as though it could be easy enough to remaster, so if the majority of it works on older hardware, it could be worth the effort. 35Mb for the ISO - not exactly bloatware 😉

slitaz-loram-cdrom-sqfs.iso
I had to go to one of the mirrors for it:
http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/slitaz/iso/cooking/flavors/slitaz-loram-cdrom-sqfs.iso

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[otherego]

Must give Slitaz another try. Previously, I found its RAM demands higher than I'd expected, and didn't have much luck getting connected to the internet - forget now whether the problem was wireless, ethernet or both.

Just having a bit of a play with the new Mandriva:

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

It doesn't look startlingly different from the 2009 version, but it's nice to see OpenOffice.org 3.1, and Firefox 3.5 included. I wonder why the older version doesn't include these in its software manager? Still version 3.0 of both OOo and F/F.

After much playing with really old equipment, this machine with its 2.4ghz Pentium IV and 768mb RAM is a real powerhouse - and is running the live Gnome version of Mandriva 2010 very nicely (only using 215MiB or RAM at the moment - interestingly, it wouldn't load on a 256 mb RAM machine, and the recommended minimum is 512).

Still - a bit too hefty for ancient Toshibas (and Toughbooks, I guess.)

A nice distro, Mandriva - can't help feeling that, along with Mepis, it is generally under-rated.

[ej-solutions]

I switched from using Mandrake (which was a favourite for a few years) not long after they changed business model and became Mandriva. 🙂
(I like Mepis - is there a remaster possibility?)

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[otherego]

Did Windows 98 come out with a health warning?