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

[*scyllabub*]

Re my XP MSI Wind (Advent 4211), the forum closed down but I've recently found its reincarnation:

http://insanelywind.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=40

Then there's a fella's admirable effort here:

http://www.pcurtis.com/wind.htm

It's all a lot to read 😞 but I wonder if an expert could glean the best way forward for me. I dread wifi probs.

[otherego]

That article suggests that Ubuntu 9.0.4 would work very nicely - wonder whether the bugs have been ironed out of the new one yet?

I know what you mean about potential wifi (and indeed any other) problems - off-putting.

But it needn't be. All the major distros have excellent assistance available on their forums, and your queries will often be responded to within hours.

Additionally, I find it's really unusual to encounter something that nobody has already successfully resolved, and that google/searching forums often provides the answers to any difficulties encountered.

As a result, problem-solving becomes more entertaining and intriguing than infuriating. Some distros are more demanding than others. Antix nearly drove me scatty, but its incredibly helpful forum got me up and running, and taught me a lot of really useful stuff.

It's definitely worth trying out live CDs to get an indication of how easily you'll get a specific distro to make friends with your hardware. Presumably the 4211 doesn't have a built in optical drive - I assume you would boot off a live CD in an external drive.

Another approach is to boot off USB flash drives - rather more compact than a USB optical drive. Have a look at "Unetbootin":

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

It's a very useful little program that allows one to install the live CD iso to a flash drive rather than a CD or DVD. (I'd imagine your netbook would boot happily from a flash drive.)

Simply keep a folder on your hard drive with all the isos of the distros you want to try out, and copy whichever one is required to your flash drive. Works a treat.

This gives one a chance to mess around with various distros before committing to an install. (See ej's comments at the very start of this thread for more.)

As far as the actual installation is concerned, modern Linux distros are very straightforward to install - simply follow the on-screen instructions, install it, update it and you're ready to go - in far less time than it takes to install a typical Windows OS, as far as I can see.

Ubuntu's great, especially once you add the "medibuntu" repository to deal with non-free drivers and the like (a problem in some countries, apparently.) You might like to consider Mint. Whilst it's essentially Ubuntu, it's slightly less fanatically conscientious about avoiding non-free drivers, and remains my personal favourite. Again, simply experiment with live CDs or USB drives.

I fully agree with doing a fair amount of reading around first, but I've found that the actual installation is invariably a lot simpler than implied in the various articles I've swotted up from first. My own preference now is to get an idea of any special considerations from what I can find on the internet, then to just get on and install the blessed thing. It's when things go wrong that links like yours in #640 suddenly make sense - "Oh, thats what he meant, and this is how he solved it."

It follows that things are much easier if you have a second computer at hand to seek assistance - although you should also be able to get on-line from your live CD.

While you wait for one of the experts to refer you to something a little more structured, might I offer a couple of preparatory suggestions?

Linux is useful and safe. It is also fun, and more than repays the effort involved in overcoming difficulties. Even though you may cuss and throw things from time to time.

It's worth trying a variety of distros (live CD/USB flash drive) to decide which one both you and your computer like best.

Dual booting is an excellent idea. Although surprisingly easy, it is not without its hazards, especially where partitioning is concerned. This makes it vital to back up all your data first, and to ensure that reinstallation media/product ID numbers etc for your OS and all your apps are to hand - just in case you manage to nuke your installation.

I've a horrible suspicion your 4211 relies on a recovery partition rather than recovery discs. It would do no harm to image the whole thing to another hard drive (see grumpy-cook's guide to Macrium on his "Me" page, for instance.)

Plan your partitioning in advance. I find the Ubuntu/Mint partitioning tool a little confusing - just the way my brain is wired, I suppose - worth googling a few tutorials first. My own preference, when dual booting, is to shrink the Windows partition (after a thorough defrag), check that XP or whatever is still happy, then to prepare my planned partitions on the remaining space, using GParted. I always have to think a bit then about how to tell the Mint installer just what to put where.

I've very little aptitude for computing matters (an aptitude test back in the eighties put me - just - in the top - erm - 95% of the population for potential programming skills. Nice to know there were 5% worse than me.) Yet I manage to get all sorts of distros working on all sorts of computers. It also puts a heck of a lot more fun into what is, after all, essentially just a useful appliance.

So I'm pretty much hooked.

[*scyllabub*]

Somehow I can tell you're "pretty much hooked", OE 😉

I tried several distros on the old Compaq, the ones I remember the names of are Mandriva (one or more variations), Mint... and was there one called Puppy? I remember liking Mint, which ran very well off CD on my desktop.

I have already partitioned this (4211) hard drive to separate OS/programs and data, and I used EASEUS and found it a complete doddle, so I hope it's OK to use it again - but of course it's easy enough to install another.

One possible snag that's just occurred to me: my router is a Thomson D8A13D and hardly anyone's heard of it. It was installed by TalkTalk/Tiscali when they replaced my PVR with exactly the same model but the new one wouldn't work with the existing router. I'll have to cross that bridge when I come to it 🙂

Another snag for the next few days is my obsession with new AV, rekindled by the 20% voucher which eBay sent me to try to make me buy on an unused ID. I ought not to afford it, but until the voucher expires on the 28th I'm a slave to researching it 😞 (Nowhere to put it, by the way, but I'm incorrigible.) I wish you lads were into AV.

I really appreciate your info and encouragement, OE :)

[ej-solutions]

Audio/Visual?:|

"..Plan your partitioning in advance. I find the Ubuntu/Mint partitioning tool a little confusing - just the way my brain is wired, I suppose - worth googling a few tutorials first. My own preference, when dual booting, is to shrink the Windows partition (after a thorough defrag), check that XP or whatever is still happy, then to prepare my planned partitions on the remaining space, using GParted. I always have to think a bit then about how to tell the Mint installer just what to put where."

Great advice! 🙂 Easus is a handy tool too.
Wireless is always the biggest pain. The 1st thing I do is replace the mini-PCI card with an Intel one on any 'new' laptop. Cheating, yup, but saves a lot of faffing about.

Oh how I loathe those days where I have to boot Windoze for particular tasks... even if it is mostly in a Virtual Machine. ;)

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[otherego]

Another suggestion, if Scylla can stand it.

It's worth doing a bit of googling about Linux file systems and boot loaders - I honestly barely understand either, but find it useful to have vague ideas of what's going on at the back of my mind.

It's also worth looking up primary, extended and logical partitions. Essentially, any one hard drive can only hold four primary partitions. Windows, bless it, doesn't understand logical partitions - Linux, on the other hand, is perfectly happy to install to either a primary or a logical partition.

Linux's typical minimum partition requirements would be a large partition for the operating system and data, and a swap partition (which serves much the same function as Windows's "page file" - a temporary home for stuff that apps need and that don't fit into RAM).

Linux partitions don't generally use the same file systems as Windoze. Although modern distros are quite capable of reading from and writing to both FAT and NTFS partitions, they actually need to be installed to one of the Linux-friendly file systems. Extended file system (or ext, for short) 3 is very common; ext 4 is now with us.

They are "journalling" file systems. As far as I can tell, this means that anything you write to disk is first written to the journal, then to the appropriate file. The advantage of this is that a crash or power interruption does not corrupt disk data, and there's no need to run a disk check afterwards. Very sturdy and user-friendly systems, and hugely forgiving.

Most distros will simply format their space with their default file system during installation. Mint 8 uses ext 4, and Mint 7 ext 3 for instance.

I've not tried Reiserfs (a file system developed by a chap called Reiser - logical enough, I guess) or any of the other varieties - but there are all sorts of possibilities to play with.

If you google further, you'll find all sorts of suggestions for the most effective partitioning schemes for Linux. Remember that you can create enough logical partitions within one primary partition to keep all the bits of your Linux OS happy. But for more detail, please ask ej - still a weak area of mine.

What is worth while is giving the Linux part of your hard drive at least a root partition (for the distro and its apps), and a home partition for data - plus, of course, a swap partition.

Unless you're really going to go mad with apps (and there are some worthwhile ones available), a root partition of about 8gb should more than suffice. How large you make the swap partition depends upon what you read! I go for twice the installed RAM - but this old desktop, with 1gb of Ram, never seems to notice the lack of swap. And the lack of swap is due to me c****ng up a cloning operation, which seems to result in my having to start up swap manually - which I never remember to do.

I suspect Easeus might not be able to create ext file systems. This is not a problem. Once your computer's all backed up/restore disks dug out just in case, you could use Easeus to shrink your Windows partitions (making sure there are no more than three, if they're primary) - then use GParted to create an extended partition on the remaining space. This extended partition (nothing to do with the "extended" in the file systems!) can then be further divided into logical partitions as you desire - typically five to eight gigs root ("/"), one or two gigs swap and the rest home ("/home").

Even a major distro like Ubuntu or Mint will live quite happily on a fifteen or twenty gig drive. Linux doesn't have the Windoze need for 12 or 15% of the drive space for system restore (admittedly a useful feature, but hugely more likely to be needed in Windows than Linux anyway), nor the 15% free for defragmenting.

However - it is difficult to resize a partition "on the right side of the disk" (see the Easeus and GParted graphic representations of disk space - a real pain to move data from right to left) once everything's installed - so worth doing a little thinking about how much space you're likely to need for each system before installing...

Sorry about the essay - really just a few things to think about and google further. As I said before - in the final analysis, it's worth doing your homework until you can't bear it any longer, then going for it and seeking help as and when required.

And it really is great fun.

[ej-solutions]

I think you've probably scared off 95% of potential users by now, OE! 😛

What your saying is fine but probably too granular for most. 😉

Suffice to say, defrag your Windoze drive, at least twice, after running a clean up. Let the Mint/Ubuntu installer guide you through the rest - bearing in mind that 'Home' SHOULD be separate, then pray that your wireless connection is supported.
All going well you'll have a safer, more robust, less licence restrictive, Operating System, with more free programs available to you than you could dream of. (Whether more than 10% are any use to you is another matter ;-))

Me, I ain't looking back. As another once regular will attest to (Munckin), once you have seen the light, just look for solutions/workarounds. Grey matter and a lot of search engine usage is all that is required. The information is there, you've just got to know where to look.

[Note: Even though I earn less than being on 'the dole', I'm now making it policy to denote a small amount to all the Open Source software that I use. I choose a different bit of software each month. A fiver here and there, is all I can afford but if everyone done the same....]

Vive Open Source!
:-)

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[*scyllabub*]

EJ, your opening words are such a comfort, I will never think of you the same (ie, with fear and awe 😉 ) again. I know exactly what's happened - OE thinks I'm Knawes :^O Massive thanks to OE for all that advice! I'm going to read Easeus's info pages, there's some quite basic explanations there and I think I'll have a mental "glossary" afterwards. (Page file, swap file, logical drive? All my drives are alphabetical 😉 ) However:

It's the 28th today, voucher cut-off day 😞 And it's my birthday on Wednesday. How is a girl to resist?

[grumpy-cook]

I think you've probably scared off 95% of potential users by now, OE! :^O

And it's really not scary any more. My main PC is a dual boot - Mandriva and XP. I can't remember the last time I booted into XP. When I did it over a year ago, I thought I would just dabble in Linux, but I was soon using it all day, every day. It took some messing around to get it running as I wanted it (I have an ATi graphics card for instance and it took some sorting to get it running 3D and able to run Compiz and Awn) but EJ is quite right - you get Googling and the answers are there to be found) If I need XP to try something out, then I have one running under Linux in VirtualBox (using the same license key as my main installation by the way).

Best of all it's actually fun and there's no interference. The other night I was using my (Windoze) laptop when it suddenly told me it needed to restart because of the updates it had just installed - what updates? I didn't ask it to install any, it didn't even tell me what they were for goodness sakes. Bugger that for a game of soldiers - the laptop is going Linux as soon as I get round to it.

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[otherego]

ej's right again, of course. (*Sigh*)

Cross all those bridges when you come to them - stacks of help available in the open source community - and as they say - just do it!

It's lots of fun. And as g-c points out - Windoze soon starts to look like a bossy, petulant, whining and distinctly fragile pain in the arris.

Have fun!

[ej-solutions]

:-D

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[ej-solutions]

You know you want to. "Go on, go on, go on...."
;-)

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[*scyllabub*]

Off topic - EJ, I had the thrill of seeing/HEARING Vulcan at the Farnborough Air Show ?1959? But it was white ?:| I'm sure it was a V-bomber. Maybe there were more than one. What a wonderful day!

[repairexpert]

I had the thrill of seeing/HEARING Vulcan at the Farnborough Air Show ?

What brand of hearing aid do you use? :^O

[ej-solutions]

White was the nuclear attack colour, later changed to camouflage when its' role changed, AFAIK. 🙂
Quiet things.. just like me. 😐
That photo doesn't do justice to how close it went past - I have shots that fill the full-frame. :-D

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[otherego]

Aluminium overcast or not, it has to be one of the most graceful aircraft ever built. And engines from that era don't make noise. They make music.

Interesting Wikipedia article on the Vulcan. They did things differently in the fifties:

Testing the vehicle was crude in those days. For example, recording the instrument readings involved filming the control panel and manually transcribing the results onto graph paper. As well, testing the brakes of the Vulcan included strapping the company photographer Paul Culerne to the front landing gear with the aircraft moving at full landing speed and photographing the brakes in operation :

And it all worked.

[grumpy-cook]

I'm sure all was well once Mr Culerne had changed his underwear.

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[lancashire-lad]

Well, its a loooooong time since I visited this forum, nice to see its alive and well.

Now, from a lifelong Windows users ( but has 3 webservers running Linux of course) I decided to have a go at Linux on a spare PC.

Mint 8 is now installed and running, got a small issue with the wireless card, but will work it out, next problem will be in remembering passwords for mail accounts, then pop in KVM switch then I can use the spare at the same desk I am sat at now.

So far it looks good, not that I am surprised at that, but trying to ween me of a Windows PC is going to be along task ;-)

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[grumpy-cook]

I was the same Eddie. I've run a Linux server for quite a while, but it wasn't until about 18 months ago that I started using it seriously when I set up a dual boot on my main PC. Now, it's exceedingly rare that I ever boot into Windows.

Stick at it, you'll learn to love it.

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[lancashire-lad]

In reality, web browsing (using Chrome or Firefox) is no different, quicker maybe and I guess more stable ?

The other stuff I do, well I run Open Office on one PC here, so thats no big change for me, email is the one I think, I am so used to Outlook 2007, and because of what I do I get a LOT of emails, and run quite a few macro's on incoming, so that could be the sticking point for a complete change for me.

Also I use Quicken for printing cheques, doesn't look like there is a Linux alternative for that ?

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[grumpy-cook]

I would be surprised if Thunderbird wasn't able to replicate what you do on Outlook, either through addons or macros. The Quicken problem may be more difficult to solve, but GNUCash may be worth a look, it probably has cheque printing.

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