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

[otherego]

WEP (I know, I know - I'll get round to WPA.)

The wireless card - an Edimax USB dongle, actually - works fine with the windows partition on this very machine - and until today, worked fine with Mint, too.

That's what makes it so darned confusing. To make it worse, it appears to connect wirelessly to the router, showing 100% signal strength - just seems unable to find any servers.

And although I know next to nothing about networking, all the settings I can find are identical to those on another Mint computer which is connecting quite happily.

Makes me wonder whether whatever has gone wrong might be buried deep in some configuration file - guess I'll need to do some more in-depth googling and experimentation.

[grumpy-cook]

Well, that's blown one idea out of the water then (some older cards will not work with WPA).

Have you tried looking at the firewall?

[otherego]

I've tried disabling the firewall (as far as possible using the simple firewall interface), and I've checked that no strange "rules" have crept in.

The odd thing is that it was working very happily yesterday, and I'm darned if I can find anything that's changed.

Unlikely to be a driver problem, I think - that would have shown up ages ago.

I tend to just OK any updates offered - just wondering whether one might have done something - trouble is, I can't remember whether I installed any updates between the last time it worked and this nonsense starting.

Still hoping it'll turn out to be one of those, "Oh so that's what I've done - what an idiot" type things - but I really can't think of anything I've changed.

Still - hardly life-threatening - I'll continue to mess about with it. Thanks for the suggestions - and I'd certainly appreciate any more ideas that might occur.

Apologies in advance if I run out of posts. My feedback-building has not proved a success. What is it with eBay sellers and postal orders - not to mention 0 feedback buyers? (Rhetorical.)

[otherego]

I tried another dongle, and that seems to have solved the problem mentioned my last post - for now. Just hope it's not some sort of a hardware problem.

A couple of comments about PCLinuxOS and VirtualBox.

Post 925, I think - I bragged about cleverly adding the current VBox repository in order to install VBox 3.2.

Don't. It's horrible. It has some strange bug which leads to difficulties with any iso stored on an ext4 host. That would be most of them now... Apparently there is also something arcane involving the use of asynchronous I/O "to achieve high performance while maintaining data integrity."

Yeah, right. Slower than a slow thing in treacle. Browsing various forums came up with various work-arounds (including changing one setting - forget which - which is no longer available anywhere I could find it in the VBox UI) - none seemed to help.

Your mileage may vary, of course - but my impression is that VBox 3.2 has a way to go. Let's just hope this isn't indicative of the way things are going to go under Oracles's stewardship.

Happily back on VBox 3.1, I've been trying to get PCLinuxOS working - the plan is to replace Mint 7 on a laptop which has major graphics driver problems with Linux.

Little joy so far, which is strange. The Gnome version seemed quicker than the KDE, which I don't pretend to understand - but neither ran particularly smoothly, despite including Guest Additions from the word go.

One problem I eventually solved by having a peek at the partitions involved  a) the default paritioning scheme  b) my use of the default 8 GiB VDI. Turns out it allocates separate / and /home partitions if you allow the default partitioner to run. It allows about 4 GiB for / - which fills up if OpenOffice is installed and updates are attempted.

I'll have another bash later - using a slightly larger VDI, and partitioning manually. It does seem a little more "bloated" than Mint, which is currently using 3.0GiB of this machine's / partition - despite my habit of installing absolutely everything I can get my hands on.

But PCLinuxOS gets such good reviews, I really do want to give it a try - and the live CD suggests that it copes better with the dreaded SiS chipset on the old Fujitsu V5535 than Mint.

A complete aside - has anyone been following The Register's PARIS project? Splendidly barmy, and seems to have been a good excuse for a trip abroad and a great deal of wine. More here in case anyone's missed it:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/science/paris/

If I were a real cynic, I'd suggest that the paper aircraft is nowhere to be seen in the launch photos ... But there, everybody know that even the moon landings only took place in a film studio ...

[otherego]

Blast.

Thought I'd checked that.

Mint is using 3.9GiB of / - not 3.0 (I wish!)

And there goes another post. Wish they'd give us an "edit" function.

[otherego]

Good grief, this board is suffering horribly - just can't believe some of the stuff being posted here. Listing problems, who's in the wrong in disputes, contacting eBay ... Unbelievable.

I'm still grateful the board is still here (just), but really think it needs to sit on its own, as it did before - it is not a ****** selling tool. And the indignant posters who believe that problems with eBay's software should be magically dealt with here - really quite unbelievable.

The bad mood leading to this rant is due to PCLinuxOS KDE.

I'm fated not to be able to use it. Quite honestly, right at the moment I think it the most buggy, erratic, unpredictable non user-friendly piece of binary rubbish to blight my life.

Yet the rest of the world loves it. So what am I doing wrong?

After several attempts (and literally hours of update downloads), I managed to get it installed on VBox - goodness knows why I had problems, but it was unworkably slow on one box and took two attempts before it worked on another. Checked the md5sum and ran the media check - no ideas.

The latest problem. I installed it, apparently successfully, to an old T 23 Thinkpad (1.13GHZ PIII; 512MB RAM). It seemed to install fine.

The updates were pretty horrific, both in terms of quantity and the quality of the download/install process - but I think it was all updated. I added OpenOffice. I added a couple of Gnome apps - GParted and the Gnome System Monitor. All seemed fine, and I thought I'd broken the jinx that has seen PCLOS drive me to Rude Words.

Got in this evening and fired it up. All I get, after much verbosity/scrolling text is a page offering:

Welcome to localhost.localdomain

Login:

with a log-in window. Using either Root or my user name, I log in and the next stage is a black screen with one small box on it telling me that I am "attempting to run drak3d which requires admin privileges..." blah blah blah.

Humour it and sign in (tried both as root and as user - same result with every combination I've tried.)

A box appears allowing me to configure 3D desktop effects. WTF? Never mind, I play along. Click No 3D desktop effects > OK.

I find myself back at that infuriating little white oblong welcoming me to localhost.localdomain.

I try ctrl-alt-backspace. I end up back at that infuriating little white oblong welcoming me to localhost.localdomain.

So far, googling has not helped. I suppose I should try the PCLinuxOS forums, but feel so hissed off at the moment that I might upset somebody.

I really was starting to think that I might be able to make friends with this *&@*@!!!! distro, until this happened - most disappointing.

A couple of thoughts. The old processor probably doesn't help - but that doesn't explain why it ran beautifully for a while, then started this.

The Windows 2000 partition boots fine, so at least that bit of GRUB seems fine. Interestingly, the Edimax utility (wireless) needed fiddling with - had reset itself to the Windows XP utility (very useful that, on W2K), but it was easy to sort it out. I vaguely suspect the Outpost firewall, which has so far necessitated one complete Windoze reinstall. (If it seems to be taking its time installing, don't get impatient and turn it off...) (And generally annoying - the most intrusive ads I've seen on free security software, and I use Avira - another story ...)

So - any ideas would be gratefully accepted and considered. Apologies if I fade this evening, as beer and a novel seem a good antidote right now - but it would be nice to get it working.

If worst comes to worst, then I'll simply bung in Mint 9 instead - the old laptop ran beautifully on Mint 8 - or even try PCLOS Gnome. Just can't beleive that I can't get such a well-respected distro working, or find a solution to this latest snag. Whatever the heck localhost.localdomain might be anyway.

[grumpy-cook]

Oh dear OE, what a fine mess. As you may remember I've been running PCLOS KDE for some time now. But I can't really offer much help because I didn't really have any problems. However, I run it on a 3.2 P4 with 2Gb of ram and a good Nvidia card. I have a feeling that your Thinkpad may not be quite enough for it.

[otherego]

I have a feeling that your Thinkpad may not be quite enough for it.

I fear you might have a point, g-c - although I would have expected trouble before this point was reached. Strange - it was running nicely, and I was starting to see what people liked about it.

Trouble is that the installation is such a long drawn-out process that I'm reluctant to wipe it and try again - although that might be a good idea.

I'm also indiscriminate about what updates I allow, and can't help wondering whether something was borked during the last update - but didn't show until the machine was restarted.

Think I'll sleep on it - it's a bit of an obscure one - might have one more shot at reinstalling it, which sometimes mysteriously solves problems - or give the Gnome version a try.

Certainly not the sort of hardware the compilers likely had in mind, but it was running so nicely and with such low resource use (according to the gnome monitor) that I suspect the problem is more complicated.

Never mind - all part of the fun.

[otherego]

I fear the Penguin Fates just don't want me and KDE ever to get on.

Despite much googling, I just couldn't get PCLOS KDE working again. I'm still not convinced that it's a hardware problem, as it initially worked very nicely, with CPU useage generally unalarming.

I'm writing this from the same Thinkpad, now running PCLOS 2010 Gnome. It installed without a hitch, updated with no hassles and so far is working very nicely indeed.

Perhaps Gnome really is a little lighter on resources than KDE, although the system monitor doesn't seem to be showing anything substantially different from the CPU and RAM useage I glanced at before the KDE version snuffed it.

It also seems to include a couple of odds and ends in the initial installation that I didn't see in KDE - Abiword and Gnumeric, for instance.

OpenOffice was the same massive download ( and I think it said that it would use something like 435MB of hard drive space - might be mistaken - pretty massive. But it does seem to include all of OpenOffice.

I like the default desktop background - very smart and shiny, especially if one overlooks the fact that the central icon is a foot. The rest of the desktop - menus and so on - seems pretty stock Ubuntu, if I'm not mistaken. So far, I'm finding navigation a little simpler than I did with the KDE version - but would put this down to the relative familiarity of Gnome.

And the KDE version really was pretty, until it popped its clogs.

Both are/were surprisingly speedy on this old workhorse. FWIW, the system monitor shows that I'm using about 228MiB RAM, with CPU utilisation fluctuating between 25% and 65% - that is with only Firefox (and the system monitor) running, but really not too bad at all.

4.0GiB of the / partition has been used so far - that includes all updates, and OpenOffice. Better than KDE, but I still think that was a dodgy installation - perhaps it wasn't clearing cached files after updates.

Trouble is, the KDE version seems to be the "real" PCLOS. I'll get it working on something if it kills me... Just wish I could afford to use this as an excuse to look for something a little more powerful on my favourite auction - site.

Still - if anyone really wants to try PCLinuxOS and keeps running into trouble with the KDE version, consider giving the GNOME edition a shot. So far, so good.

Now watch it croak.

[grumpy-cook]

I'm glad you got the Gnome version working OE. It may be a little lighter than the KDE version, but I doubt there is a great deal in it. I wonder if it was a graphics issue? That's the only thing I had a little bit of trouble with.

[otherego]

Interesting start-up problem with Mint9 this morning.

After an enormous delay, the blank green screen that starts the process gave way to the sign-in page. I signed in, and the usual desktop appeared, with a message saying that, "A program is still running ..." etc. This usually appears, if at all, during shut-down, surely?

The offending program was Power Manager.

I waited until the warning disappeared, and found that I had no wireless connection - it showed as disconnected.

Very odd. I disabled Power Manager in the Start Up manager, and restarted. Still no joy with wireless, although plugging in an ethernet cable got me onto the internet with no difficulty.

Very unscientifically, I unplugged the wireless dongle and reconnected it. The system found it and connected to my wirelss network with no further ado.

I re-enabled Power Manager in the start-up list, and tried restarting the computer. Everything seems back to normal.

If anyone has any idea what happened and whether I need to do anything about it, I'd be much obliged. Hopefully just one of those computer things.

As ever, apologies if I don't respond to posts - must be rapidly approaching my daily ten.

[*scyllabub*]

In order to post without restriction, I used my posting ID to buy some cheapo charity items and a few other things I would normally fritter on, then made ID private.  I don't like you being restricted, OE 😛 :-x

This is the link to performance comparisons on netbooks - Windows 7/XP/Linux, which I started a thread for cos I couldn't find this thread 😐

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2010/11/17/the-best-netbook-os-xp-windows-7-or-ubuntu/?DCMP=NLC-Newsletters

[otherego]

Hi, Scylla - an interesting article - I responded on your other thread, too.

As I said there, it looks as if Windows users have benefited from the netbook craze due to the need for MS to extend XP's life (to compete with the early Linux netbooks with their slow processors and tiny solid state drives), and the need to keep W7 light on resources.

I still think Linux offers enough to keep me using it, but it's useful to see some objective data. I still think Windows 2000 would be a great netbook OS if a) it had the drivers  b) one could secure it now that MS has abandoned support.

Linux still has an edge for those stuck with tiny hard drives, although even here, a 4GB drive really ain't enough any more. It also has the security edge at the moment, most versions are available for free which makes it fun to experiment with distors, and to discard them and try others.

For those blessed with the right skills, one can legally play with the distros and modify them. Really wish I could do that.

And lf course, if ethical considerations are important to one, it could be argued that open source has an edge in certain respects.

But choice is good!

Meantime, my let's buy-things-on-this-account ain't getting very far. I'd rather use postal orders on this one (don't ask) - amazing how few sellers take them...

[otherego]

Good grief, but this thread has slipped a long way down. Wish they'd disassociate this board from selling matters - 'tho I still accept that this is better than nothing.

Extraordinary the stuff that appears here - and has anyone else noticed an increase in the use of capital letters and exclamation marks?  The neighbourhood really is declining.

The technical matter is this.

Once in a blue moon, I find it useful to save a clip from YouTube. The only way I've managed this so far is to let the clip run its course, then to copy its file from the /tmp folder before it evaporates - a little tedious. (Mint 9/Firefox 3.6.13.)

I tried the Firefox add-on, DownloadHelper - no joy. The files it "saved" were empty.

After some fruitless googling and appropriate comments, I installed Real Player via Synaptic. Notwithstanding everything I read about it, it hasn't done the trick. Its plug-in seems present in Firefox, but the download button simply ain't there. Trying to paste a video URL into Real Player results in a message that it is unable to download that type of file.

There seems no option during set-up, or using Tools, to apply any of the settings I've seen recommended (eg to set the "Download" button.)

Groovy.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be obliged - useful links to simple tutorials would be great, too.

I'm wondering whether part of the problem is the fact that I block flash cookies/local shared objects. Perhaps DownloadHelper and Real Player rely on these when they save videos.

Not earth-shatteringly urgent, and I'll have another google in due course - but as I say, any suggestions would be most welcome.

[grumpy-cook]

I would suggest looking further into why DownloadHelper isn't working for you. I use it on here without problems (PCLOS/FF3.6.12).

If you can't get anywhere then have a search on Synaptic for "youtube". There are various Youtube downloaders for Linux - youtube-dl, ytd, fatrat, CaC to name a few.

[otherego]

Thanks for that, g-c.

If you have a moment - confirm that you also block flash cookies?

Just curious. I'm wondering whether some downloaders call on a Local Shared Object to retrieve buffered data or something ('tho presumably this shouldn't be possible - thought the beastly things were only accessible/comprehensible to the sites which set them.)

But I'll certainly give DownloadHelper another try. A spot of research this evening, methinks.

[grumpy-cook]

OE, no I don't block Flash cookies, although I keep an eye on what is there. I wouldn't have thought DH uses LSOs, but I suppose you never know.

Have you tried one of the other FF addons, there are several.

e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10137/?src=api

[otherego]

I'll try a couple of those, too - trying to keep the number of add-ons within reasonable limits, of course.

I'd not thought of the others you mentioned. Stuff that comes via Synaptic sometimes takes a bit more figuring out, but is usually pretty safe and stable.

I'll certainly have a play this evening - much appreciated.

[otherego]

Not much joy with any of that. I'll have another go in the new year, so everyone can dread look forward to more error messages and requests for suggestions.

Or I'll just give up, since I want to download video about twice a year ... but that would be very defeatist.

My good resolution to update the Windows computers by the end of the year ain't likely to happen. Contrary to g-c's belief, I don't have 820 computers purchased on eBay for sums of up to sixty quid - but the reality is bad enough. Consider - three desktops each with Linux (used lots) and Windows XP or Vista (hardly touched, and it gets worse as the thought of accumulated updates looms and I just can't bear to boot into those partitions. Or, irrationally, to ditch them. Trouble is they're paid for.)

And several laptops with a similar setup. At least the Windows 2000 and 98 ones don't get updates any more .

I sparked up the old Fujitsu V5535 yesterday. (I bought this one. Most people got them free with their mobile telephones.) It's not been used in four months.

Mint 7 updated in about five minutes - no problems, no restarts, nothing.

Vista took over an hour. Then I had to update Flash. And Java. And Avast. And Threatfire. And the new version of Comodo.

The saddest part is that I'm going to remove Mint 7. It was an interesting exercise getting it working on that computer - never buy anything with an SIS 672 graphics chip if you want to try different types of Linux - and, despite being restricted to 2-D graphics, is quicker and more responsive than Vista. Mint 7 is past its sell-by date, though, and I can't face all that mucking about with drivers again - Mint 9 still only manages an 800 x 600 resolution.

With a gig and three quarter of RAM and a 1.86GHz CPU, though, I might finally get somewhere with PCLinuxOS KDE - 'tho the Gnome version continues to thrive on the 1.13GHz Thinkpad with its half a gig of RAM.

And mucking about with PCLinuxOS might just cause fewer Rude Words than trying to get the remaining Windows partitions and their associated software up to date.

[grumpy-cook]

I'm fuming here. I'd wound down my workload for the holiday and was free today and tomorrow to shop and organise the cooking prep. The was faced with a crestfallen neighbour and her teenage-son-infected laptop. (I would have said no, but she's very pretty)

So I kick off with a SAS Portable scan and after half an hour it's found several trojans and the usual My.Web, FunWeb, Hotbar stuff. I go inside to ream out the capon or something and when I come back the laptop is sitting there inviting me to login. When I do it informs me that Microfshaft has done some updates and a restart was required (and done). Thanks a million MS.

That's sweet, it really is. MS can arbitrarily decide that it is going to update MY computer and then restart MY computer without so much as a by your leave or thank you. Thank the lord I use Linux for most of my computing where this sort of (censored) stupidity would never be contemplated.