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Re: Re: installing Debian
by Robert Grant (DEV) 12 Nov '05

12 Nov '05

Here are some experiences/thoughts from an ordinary 'user' who just wants a laptop on which to use office and other applications rather than any kind of developer work 1. I'd like to support the positive things said about the Sarge installer. My first Linux try was with Woody and it took me months to get X working at all. Although I'd read up in advance and knew all my hardware specs I somehow chose a 2.2 idepci kernel which I think dogged subsequent efforts including my later effort at an online upgrade to Sarge. When I tried a fresh install with a Sarge CD all went far more smoothly and I had a nice looking desktop (KDE) with very little real effort. Certainly more quickly than when I put XP on the same laptop. 2. Aptitude is wonderful. dselect under Woody was really hard to get into. With aptitude installing and managing packages is extremely easy. This gave me the confidence to bypass Tasksel at install time and build up from a fairly bare-bones text only system. 3. As Brett said in this thread already "99% of the battle is knowing where to look" and I agree. Debian is not 'hard' in itself but the documentation available online seems particularly challenging for the non-initiated. The more I learn the more I like the intuitive and accessible way the Debian system itself is laid out: but the more puzzled I get that nobody seems to have produced an entry level guide which would make working it out less of a groping in the dark experience. 4. The rise of Ubuntu has me unsure of which way to leap. On the one hand I am tempted by the idea of more up to date software than I have in Sarge. On the other I want to keep building on what I have learned about Debian. Once my confidence improves my plan was to try the approach of selectively pulling in packages from the testing/unstable repositaries. In particular I'd like the more recent versions of OO.org and Okle. Maybe someone with my low level of technical knowledge and 'user' orientation would be safer going for Ubuntu though? 5. Thanks to all contributors to this thread which is a timely one for me as I've got a new, unformatted 60G HD in my thinkpad now after the last one died. I am on the waiting list for a UEA copy of XP, which I think I need to install first, so have a few days to choose between Sarge and (K)Ubuntu. BTW, just to make the purists cringe, my plan is to put on XP then shrink the NTFS partition down and add ext3 ones for / and /home plus swap using Partition Magic. Rob Rob Grant Tutor in Economics School of Development Studies University of East Anglia NR4 7TJ +44(0)1603592324 r.grant(a)uea.ac.uk

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Hard Drives
by Bob Dove 10 Nov '05

10 Nov '05

Hi Folks, Installation CDs and pre-installed O/S plus recovery disks. I have always installed from a full O/S disk. My daughter and several of the outlaws have bought systems with pre-installed O/S and recovery disks (Tiny and Acer). Initially, these boxes had Win95. Recovery on these machines was in fact a reformat and copying of a 'mirror' image and not a full version. I upgraded my sys to Win 98 and eventually 98SE (do you think I'd admit to upgrading the outlaws?) Currently, because Photoshop CS demanded it W2K (which is absolutely with no exceptions they flakiest O/S I've used - and I started with CP/M! Fond memory says W3.11 was the best. I now have two towers and two USB externals. The 'twin towers' each have two HDD. The reason for this is that initially a refusal to boot up and even acknowledge the presence of emergency repair disk in floppy drive or the installation CD in CD drive caused my local guru to pronounce the HDD dead. I bought and fitted new drive, reinstalled every thing and fitted (after setting jumpers) 'dead' drive as slave in the hopes of being able to recover data including a large number of scanned images. Lo and behold, the 'dead' drive was seen and all the data was there and could be accessed. So verily the dead drive was resurrected! The next time the 'C:' drive 'died' on me, it was another trip to PC World for another HDD and again installing and loading O/S. This time 'dead' drive went into one of those new fangled (at the time) external USB drive boxes where it remains. As I said - two boxes and now six HDDs later have lead me to believe that it is software (namely windoze) that is at fault, not the hardware! Possibly a viral infection could have caused it but who knows? Next failure will see a smaller drive installed as 'C:' as it will in fact only contain O/S and those programs that won't install anywhere else but C: Why smaller? It takes an age to scan for Virii or defrag big drives! Incidentally, the latest reformatting because windoze wouldn't boot resurrected a dormant Linux partition which the system labelled C: and windoze took itself off into a second partition it named F: I wonder how long before I have to repeat the exercise? Now come the question; with multiple hard drives installed, can Linux install and boot from a second hard drive D:? Having windoze and Linux in separate partitions on the same hard drive made me give up on Linux. Reading these mails - your comments re operating/installing Linux is absolutely frightening. A 'simple' installation CD that injects Linux onto a hard drive and which comes up with a desktop 'just like windoze' (or Mac O/S) is all 99% of PC owners want. We don't want to know about command lines - just icons on the desktop just like the original Digital Research GUI that all other O/S desktops have copied! Cheers, BD.

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Re: Hard Drives
by Robert Grant (DEV) 10 Nov '05

10 Nov '05

Just a thought provoked by Ten's question/aside >There really is nothing inherently bad or unusable about consoles. > >As an aside, there's *got* to be some way to remove the fear of the console >for the average user. Whether it's consoles in funky anti-aliased truetype >fonts with images/music/css theming/whatever in a gnome/kde app, or even >turing-type rubber-fork "find me the mp3s I saved in july last year" type >stuff, if we could just crack this heinous culture that's built up against >using fast, expressive, intuitive typed commands, then people would REALLY be >moving to linux. I use two stats programs, SPSS and STATA, which have GUI interfaces that have grown over the years and versions on top of command line origins. Both preserve full access to command line flexibility and to different extents encourage users to use that interface as they gain experience. The key enabling factor is that in both systems it is very easy to access the commands generated by using menus and dialogues. STATA is particularly good at this, reporting the the plain-text command equivalent with every set of results, whether generated via console or point-and-squirt. There is also an on-screen history of commands in a separate window along with another showing available variables. Items can be grabbed from either source to construct new console entries. This works the other way too, with a CLI command that shows you the GUI way of issuing. When I introduce a class to the package I can just give them the true-and-pure commands and they have the security of knowing how to get back to a GUI method too. Come to think of it there must be many other models of GUI/CLI integration like this in various applications. I'm sure others on this list will know dozens. But has it been done in an OS yet, or could a desktop environment just superimpose this behaviour? Could something provide the user with a console window that is, for example, filled in with the appropriate mnt/ls and so on commands when they stick a disk in? Rob Rob Grant Tutor in Economics School of Development Studies University of East Anglia NR4 7TJ +44(0)1603592324 r.grant(a)uea.ac.uk

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GDM not shutting down
by Peter 10 Nov '05

10 Nov '05

Sorry, in this question I got the details all wrong. What is not shutting down is dm, not gdm. It is however true that this shuts down fine with either xdm or kdm. And the other thing that is failing is nfs locking, not ntfs... Which is puzzling me a bit, not being terribly well informed, as I don't recall ever installing nfs. Or maybe Mandriva just does it? Sorry about that Peter

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Good Evening Everyone! New member here!
by rob page 10 Nov '05

10 Nov '05

Well, I moved down to Norwich about 2 months ago from York, where I'd been doing a Computer Science degree, and I've started using Linux about 6 years ago, about 3 years ago started using it as my main OS. Hmmm, now for why i'm interested in Linux. Well, because its better.... :-), and the politics... and I can actually do decent programming on it, and when something goes wrong with it, the answer is just a google away, because it supports my USB OHCI PCI card, and my tulip network card (which win 2k doesn't), because it has xfce4 and many other reasons.... As for me, the main programming languages I use are C++ and java, I currently maintain a latex editor called AmyEdit [1] , written using gtkmm in C++, (end shameless plug). I'm also the current KBounce International Champion! [2] That's me, Hello! [1] http://amyedit.sf.net [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBounce#International_champion

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GDM not shutting down
by Peter 09 Nov '05

09 Nov '05

Hi, Can anyone suggest why GDM should not be able to be shut down when I logout and turn the machine off? XDM and KDM both do, just fine, but I prefer GDM but am a bit troubled by the failure. This is on Mandriva 2006, and its the logs that scroll by after you have closed down. The other thing that fails is something to do with NTFS locking, don't know if this is relevant. But it fails when using XDM and KDM also. Peter.

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Anyone got some old 500MB-2GB hard drives they no longer require?
by Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. 08 Nov '05

08 Nov '05

I'm in the process of building a small Debian GNU/Linux based cluster using old machines. It's something I always been interested in doing. I've already got the boxes, some motherboard/cpus with Pentium chips on them, and the NICs. The only thing missing are the hard disks. Has anyone got one or more they no longer need? I've managed to build the cluster for free so far, and hope to finish it in the same manner. I'd prefer sizes between 500MB and 2GB. So, if you can help, please email me. Perhaps you could bring something along to the kit meeting at UEA on Sunday? -- Ashley T. Howes, Ph.D. http://www.ashleyhowes.com "All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day." - The Joker in Alan Moore's The Killing Joke

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Re: Re: installing Debian
by Robert Grant (DEV) 07 Nov '05

07 Nov '05

Thanks Ted, Adam, Wayne and Tony for useful thoughts Ted, my blood ran cold when I read your warning about BIOS settings on the hd. Fortunately I remember going into BIOS since installing the new unformatted drive to make sure the CD was set as boot device- then running Partition Magic just to check the drive was functional as I want to leave feedback on ebay for the thing. I also booted Knoppix which is about all I can use with no hard drive at all, so thankfully the BIOS seems intact. Knoppix froze on me after about five minutes though, so maybe even this needs an hd to be present. I do seem to recall the XP installer mentioning a small area of disk as something like 'unused' or 'unformatted', only about 2-300 meg I think, when I installed it over the factory W98. Maybe this was where 98 had 'squirted' its recovery/hibernation info. I quite agree that this kind of behaviour, plus the absurdity of making recovery data available only on a device which will be dead if it is needed, is a pretty poor show. With a totally new hd any hidden diagnostic or system specific tools are lost now. I do plan one day to have a go with the "ThinkPad Configuration Tools for Linux" tpctl package that can give you such things as on-screen volume display, power management, trackpoint configuration etc. Details at http://tpctl.sourceforge.net/ if anyone is interested. Tony, though the windows labels for all your bits C:, F: etc. are not much use in linux for the reasons given, you should still be able to mount these as you please using device paths like /dev/hda1 etc. Apologies if this is blindingly obvious but I was pleased when I realised it! I had a FAT32 partition automounting rw as /exchange and an NTFS one as /xp where 'My Documents' was. The fact that NTFS write support in linux seems to be less than fully reliable is one reason why I didn't want to set up my XP partition with the Sarge d-i by the way, even if that option were offered. In fact I am thinking of putting 'My Documents' entirely on FAT32 when I reinstall so that everything is easily accessible from both OSs, unless there are compelling performance or reliability reasons not so to do. For example it would be nice to be able to access my mp3 library from both linux and XP. I reckon something like this will do hda1 8G NTFS XP C: or /bloat hda2 8G ext3 Sarge or Ubuntu / hda3 23G FAT32 'My Documents'E: or /xp hda4 20G ext3 /home hda5 1G swap (machine has 256M RAM) Best wishes, Rob Rob Grant Tutor in Economics School of Development Studies University of East Anglia NR4 7TJ +44(0)1603592324 r.grant(a)uea.ac.uk

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Re: installing Debian
by Peter 07 Nov '05

07 Nov '05

> installing Debian is like being greased, and wrestling with an eel. This is completely mad. I have installed Debian and derivatives of Debian many times (on a little Dell that I bought for £50, specifically for the purpose of playing with distributions, and on a couple of other boxes, one a 200mhz MMX, one a home assembled Shuttle). Debian Pure (now another name) installed over the net or from a Debian DVD with no problems. Debian Sarge, from a magazine cover DVD booted and installed with no problems. Mepis installed with no problems. Ubuntu installed with no problems (though using it, the old version I tried a year ago, was a different matter). Knoppix has an install option - it just went in and worked. I have had some problems installing things. I couldn't get Dragonfly to work at all. I had problems with one of the BSDs, or at least, problems figuring out how to get to a proper desktop. I've had temporary difficulties with Slackware, largely owing to the lack of a 'go back' option at various critical points. I had trouble with Mandrake 10.x on some machines. The first issue of elive wouldn't work properly. I never could get Woody to work. So, its not that I can do everything perfectly and easily, and I'm not at all expert in this stuff, but recent Debians are SIMPLY NOT A PROBLEM. Peter

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2nd Thursday Norwich Meet : Reindeer, Dereham Road
by Jonathan McDowell 07 Nov '05

07 Nov '05

The monthly "Second Thursday" ALUG Norwich Pub Meet is this Thursday, 10th November. It's at the Reindeer pub on the Dereham Road, just opposite the City Gate. We'll be there from 8pm-ish, though there may be a few people there earlier. Topics for discussion will no doubt be as varied as ever. The Reindeer has a reasonable selection of beer as well as decent coffee (with biscuits, if you're lucky). Directions to the Reindeer can be found at: http://www.alug.org.uk/venues/reindeer.html Pictures of some of the regulars, and irregulars, and, well, just some pictures of people that might or might not turn up are available from: http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2004-08-ALUG/ http://www.earth.li/~noodles/Photos/2005-01-ALUG-Xmas/ http://the.earth.li/~noodles/stilvoid-alug/mp20050811/ Which should hopefully aid those of you wondering who to look out for. We're /normally/ just to the left of the main entrance, though last time we ended up at the far end of the pub beside the pool table. J. -- 101 things you can't have too much of : 41 - Tea.

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