Ed's Adventures in Linux

You can get them for about 40 on ebay.

Wil

lesson 1 learnt, damn small linux is not a good idea, even though it runs of hd it still loads a big chunk of itself into a RAM disk, and the memory overflows and processes drop off, like ssh or the xserver. So attempt number two, with debian.

Gentoo is definitely good for installing on a minimal machine - it's very easy to just install the stuff you want and nothing else.

My current project (and this is a fun one) is getting the retarded Yahama OPL3-SA3 sound chipset thing to work with Linux

I've got one; it works fine with ALSA on a 2.4 kernel. Not tried 2.6, but I'd imagine it will be fine with that too.

There. I said it. I feel better.

Generally, I like Gentoo because you can really get your hands dirty. But, the support forums and emerge in general don't let you get too bogged down IMHO.

http://www.macosrumors.com/

(scroll down a half page to see the Linux item)

Also I am being tried by trying to set the time using date, it doesn't want to play ball as detailed in it's man page. Is there a little dohicky to sync the clock with a network time server?

Even now Mac OS X is the best *nix distro around. I just can't afford another mac box to be the server, afford at the moment is anything more than free.

rdate ntp2b.mcc.ac.uk

(yes haha very funny)

However, I have been won over by gentoo, time to install again, minimum system to start with, as long as I can get ssh and screen running I can do the rest remotely.

Aaah, you ask that Mark, you ask.

date MMDDhhmm
hwclock --systohc --utc

Ed: I use Gentoo on a P266. Installing the base system took about 3 days.

Unfortunately, I think you only get that with the installation kernel. To get it to work on a normal kernel requires quite a bit of hacking - at least, it did the last time I thought about setting that up.

It's not too difficult, just add some kernel compilation flags for framebuffer, pass some arguments in grub, emerge bootsplash and a couple of other tweaks that are mentioned in a Gentoo framebuffer tutorial that I'm forgetting. I've got it going on mine with a custom background.

More to the point, configuring your system can be a serious pain. Anyone can upgrade a driver in Windows, but I'm not sure how many average people want to learn VI or Emacs or whatever and then change runtime mode so they can set up their graphics card for X.
And I don't blame them.
I've just moved to Linux myself, after being a Windows user since '94 or so (whenever Windows 95 came through)
I'm quite enjoying it for the most part, mostly thanks to the shell-scripting and the overall smoother running. But goddamn can it be a pain sometimes.

Installing Flash in Mozilla Firebird took like two days before it finally worked. Grr!
But, of course, if someone sets up the system and you never want to do anything more than use the programs that come with it to browse the net, send emails and write some documents, it'd do. I just think Linux in general demands more of its users than Windows does... Not that this necessarily is such a bad thing, but it's a definite showstopper as far as starting this "*nix desktop revolution" that slashdotters are so convinced is at hand.

XPOst:
It's not too difficult, just add some kernel compilation flags for framebuffer, pass some arguments in grub, emerge bootsplash and a couple of other tweaks
I seriously thought you wrote that as a joke at first :)

homophobe 8) i've been using it since 7.0 and never had any trouble with it. apart from supermount.

> I got to spend this weekend in package dependency hell, rpming endless shared libraries

urpmi is your friend. it's mandrake's rpm tool that works like apt, does all the dependancies for you. apt for rpms is also available from various places.

and i'd recommend fluxbox as a lightweight window system. kde is very nice to look at etc but i find it sluggish on my 1GHz p3 so...

setting the date? 'alevt-date -set' sets it to teletext time 8)

andy

This is why Gentoo is a good thing. Just type emerge program and it works out all the dependancies for you. RPMs are a nightmare when it comes to that.

*cries and cries*

Linux is in no WAY ready for the bloody desktop!!!

Anyway.

Dude!

I can't remember how to edit the sources list either actually (read: where on earth is the bugger).

This is why Gentoo is a good thing. Just type emerge program and it works out all the dependancies for you.

And wait 4 hours.....

And hope the compile doesn't break.

Basically, back end and query ability is what I want. I'm not paricularly bothered with the pretty front end, I just need to be able to sort and filter and query and all that stuff.

Gentoo's USE flags allow you to do this. It will build dependencies however you want. For example, you might want xmms to use OSS instead of ALSA or emacs without xemacs and you can define it in the USE variables.

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/use-howto.xml

You could try out one of the microkernel BSDs if you're feeling adventurous.

Oh I dunno Ed :)

also does nobody in this bitch just use frikin redhat!!

building php with cURL drove me nuts till i figured out that it needed (and didn't say in the config) zlib.h

Are Redhat still doing boneheaded stuff like shipping versions of RPM itself with infuriating bugs (like the one that came with RH8), and then refusing to fix them in case it causes "compatibility problems"?

(I do not understand all that Gentoo hate)

Ed: is it compiling gcc for the first time or the second time? It gets done twice during Stage 1 - the second is slower, because it does all the extra stuf like f77 and gcj.

Anyway name an OS for second machine which I think will be a desktop machine rather than a server.

They even have competitions where they celebrate this lack of understanding.

Use Python instead.

as for 'find / -name', don't bother. fix your locate and keep it up to date by running 'updatedb' as root every once in a while. (updatedb does the aforementioned find but remembers the result. locate looks up these results rather than thrashing disks and ruining directory caches and all that jazz. it will also find partial names for you)

ed, wait until you need to compile kde-base. and then go away for the weekend and it might be done by the time you get back. maybe. 8)

my tip for learning a language that's easy without being too mickey mouse is php. edit, save, hit refresh. easy. (ok, i skipped the bit about installing apache...)

andy

um... i'll try again.

andy

two:adean> perl mark.pl
Just another Perl / Unix hacker

the string gets printed very slowly, one character at a time but you can't see that above. the delay between characters is probably due to it deleting important files...

andy

(I guessed that was what it would print, because a) that text is also in the code, albeit backwards b) that's what obfuscated perl competition entries often do. I have no clue how it works, though)

That's one thing I like about Python, it's almost impossible to make really obtuse code.

Uhm.
Nevermind.
Google gave me THIS: Obfuscated Python
Good grief. Oh well, at least I haven't seen that sort of code in a real-life project, unlike in Perl, heh.
Then again, the first example on that page didn't work in the latest version of Poothan. '

Hrmm, I wonder if there are any pages for obfuscated Standard ML code.. I borked around with that language recently, and it's lots of fun. But I can't help but imagine that there's been made some real doozies in it.

List of errors:
1. Beast booting into old kernel (I know BUGGER ALL about this)
2. Getting the Beast to talk to the super fast wireless network of my friends (this took abt an hour in which I completed Parappa the Rapper 2 and ate pizza)
2b: Something geeky
3. Something about typing ./ before the rom name...

And then I got to play PANG! hurrah!! good old linux. Andy, your roms cd worked perfectly, I even remembered how to mount things without checking the Big Yellow Book. HooRAH.

I could never have done it without help of friend who is linux sysadmin (and has been for years) and his super broadband connection though :)

Sorry for shouting.

apart from Qix which i later found out was borked. (you just need to unzip it, change the filenames to lowercase and zip it back up again). there's something you can do to save yourself having to bother typing the rom path setting every time, it's in the help files somewhere.

btw, it's computer night on bbc4 tonight - history of tetris, history of the pc and steven poole(?)'s trigger happy thing about video games.

(and as i type this the random mp3 player on the pc picks ed rush and optical's PacMan. spooky)

andy

i give up on upgrading anything from 7.3 to 9 piecemeal (but this means i can't use the cool mozilla project Thunderbird mail client).

at least i was on the clock.

OpenBSD is a branch off of NetBSD. Multi-platform support is still a big deal to the OpenBSD developers. If you're looking into NetBSD because of cross-platform concerns, you could be served just as well with OpenBSD.

That's the most pornographic thing I've ever read.

There should also be a sample config that's fairly basic that you could try incrementally tweaking if you're feeling adventurous.

If it's a modern monitor, X *should* scan for the modes it supports and automatically choose the highest-resolution one. Checking the X server's logfile (I think it'll be called something like X.log.0) will have the results of the monitor probe, and list all its valid modeline settings (amongst lots of other Useful Information)

X font rendering can be a bastard to set up properly - lots of programs/libraries tend to do things slightly differently to each other. Mozilla's font rendering depends on how it was compiled, and what fonts you have installed, and so on.

Just waiting for my sun box (possibly more than one) to arrive for me to play with. The mail server box is still compiling postfix and cyrus, maybe overkill for a home mail server but I want to learn how to set those kinds of things up.

program1.o
+
program2.o
+
program3.o
=
Program.Exe

or

header.h
+
program.c
+
program1.o
+
program2.o
+
program3.o
=
Program.Exe

ANAL!

(this is also why I have never successfully rolled my own distro. I'm all thumbs with gcc.)

It needs a name though, hernia is a candidate because that's what bringing it up the stairs nearly gave me but suggestions are welcome.

Also trying to persuade it to boot from cd is giving me grief. tomorrow I shall try and craft a net boot image for it although I'm am rather slowed by the fact that I am foxed by the SunOS version of ifconfig or rather by how sun names it's ethernet interfaces, or infact by how sunOS does anything at all.

One otion with the cdrom on this aging device is that it cannot read cd-rws (i never had a use for them before multi OS nonsense).

Any ideas?

Maybe when Alluvium is released we should revisit this subject. I'd be happy to chip in a bit for the World's Greatest Jukebox.

I could have Googled this, but I'm more interested in the ILE take on it... if somebody could sum up what I've missed in the last year of Linux distributions that would be great. There seems to be lots of love on this thread for Debian, but last year I was massively into well-tuned Slackware installations w/ Dropline Gnome and a few bits and bobs (like ALSA, which wasn't in Slack at the time) running on older Compaq hardware. I found Slackware to be a joy to use (except, of course, when printing via USB).

Red Hat is the WinXP of Linuxes so I won't repeat myself there, despite the fact that it was the only distro that allowed me to print via USB without ANY configuration at all.

The only trend I have noticed as a new Linux user is the movement towards looking at a replacement for XFree86 both inside and beyond the X11 framework, see http://www.freedesktop.org, http://www.y-windows.org/, http://www.gnustep.org/ providing different alternatives. Since OS X came about some BSD people have been pushing BSD as a good desktop platform.

im going down the linux route soon, finally. july is going to be linux month for me

I use Red Hat, but that was foisted on me by work. In any event, make sure that you install firefox after you get Linux running, because all other *nix web browsers that I 've tried are really dire. Make sure you stay far away from konqueror, which is pure evil and about the worst web browser I've ever had the misfortune to try.

I think the next time I decide to give it a go I'll probably shell out on VMWare. That said, it only supports (at least, in terms of guaranteeing that they'll work) Red Hat (I expect Fedora too through this), SUSE, maybe a couple of others.

If I have time I may try and set up Xen so that I can run virtualised instances of other distros (Fedora/SUSE etc..). Then again, maybe I'll just persuade work to pay for VMWare.

There are some very good Linux tutorials here:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/views/linux/library.jsp
(just enter a mailinator.com email address at the registration screen, or use BugMeNot)

And The Linux Documentation Project is also worth a look:
www.tldp.org

yes, livecd such as knoppix is probably a good way to test these things out without going through the hassle of installation but i don't personally like the way knoppix does things - it's too flashy for me (don't like kde). it's also very choppy on a machine without much ram / fast optical drive and might give a bad impression.

if work's imposing linux on you then see if they have preferences. you might have to use redhat as that's the only thing managers seem to have heard of. (in which case try fedora at home - it's near enough and free. FC4 out soon...)

today in fact...

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/release-notes/fc4/

If you don't like the KDE desktop, there's always Gnoppix - the Gnome equivalent of Knoppix.

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php?pick=Linux_PPC&showonly=All&sort=&sm=1

ed hasn't talked about his adventures in linux for a while. maybe he let it slide as well

Fiddly bollocks.

?

Fuck one Linux, basically.

fuck the lot of them, tbh.

bah

czn are you having issues with it or is this more of a general thing?

i used to run SuSE but i got fed up with things not working, eg having the window manager fail because it didn't like my ATi card then being dumped to a command prompt with no idea what to do next :(

I never really appreciated the phrase 'it just works' until the last week. Now I am thanking God for all manner of small mercies on a daily basis.

Forgive me for saying it: I would take Windows XP right now would it mean I needn't spend another second using Linux.

huh. sorry for your troubles, dudes.

it's not your fault big hoos!

Yeah, apols, Hoos. I'm just frustrated and venting.

Linux is horrible

jon is a windows man, obv.

i mean i did seriously like the idea of linux but it was all the hassle :( i guess i am not l33t enough

I'm still not exactly Captain Command Line, but I really love my linux box, and learning to use it has been v. useful in teaching me what is going on under the hood of any computer, especially my Mac. You could not pay me to go back to windows.

haha all the old slashdotter massive on the prettyboy bsd realizing it's okay that quicktime is a gigantic resource-chewing behemoth because at least it hardly ever breaks in a thoroughly graceless fashion

computers are all bollocks regardless

The trick to linux, I guess, is to have a few sleepless nights and get a little obsessive and overcaffeinate and just figure the shit out. It's more than most people want to do with their OS, I understand. Again, it probably works best if tinkering with your computer is something you count as an enjoyable pastime.

Also, rtfm.

One of the things giving me the fear about my new job is that one of the products I will have to support runs 'an embedded version of linux one of the developers cooked up'.

i feel so much better about being steve jobs' bitch

the other thing giving me conniptions is supporting a mixed domain of Win2000, XP and Vista. I long for the day that I am steve jobs' bitch.

lube up for teh vista

The only time I wish I was on Linux is when Leopard starts doing mysterious shit, and you realise there's no way in hell of you doing anything about it until Apple deigns to release a version that "improves compatibility and increases reliability" and hope a fix is in there.

Last time I had to use Vista, so much went wrong that I came very very close to throwing the thing out the fucking window.

czn, which Linux and what went wrong? Driver support will be flaky for as long as manufacturers don't provide Linux drivers (or even the source), but 99% of all issues are easily surmountable these days.

Xandros.

I want it to recognise an SD card and an external USB 2.0 HD. But, no. That would be too easy.

Linux lost its lustre for me around 2002, when I couldn't get good 3d performance on QUAKE2 no matter what I did.

It took you until 2002 to figure out that it's shit for games?

Can I ask why you're using Xandros? Ubuntu and Fedora have wider support and a greater quantity of available information, and they're free.

I'm fannying about on an EEE PC I bought for someone.

I initially thought installing XP would be a breeze but turns out you need to be a super l33t haXor to achieve that as well. Meanwhile, all the wikis and tutorials are all 'yeah, installing Windows XP is a breeze.'

Ohhhhhhhhhhh. Right. So you've got no choice. Fair enough then.

Apparently you can get Xubuntu on there but it takes aaaaaages to boot and shutdown.

Correction: It doesn't take ages to boot OR shutdown.

I've been playing with eeeXubuntu 7.10r3 for a few days now, and it's 100 times better than the standard Xandros. Even booting off an SD card (which is slow by its very nature) only takes about a minute and a half. Apparently if you boot off the internal SSD it's around 50 seconds, which is just fine.

It's awesome to have everything you normally use without having to hax0r special repositories and recompile code every time. Everything that works in Ubuntu will work on this.

INCLUDING COMPIZ.

I am not kidding. I've got wobbly windows and desktop cube all over this biatch, and there's no performance lag at all.

When Ubuntu 8.04 is out and the eeeXubuntu distrib is updated, I think I'll scrap Xandros entirely. It's just too good to have all the hyperniche apps I'm used to on this thing. And if everything dies I can just restore Xandros off the CD that came in the box.

(this probably makes me the only person in the entire world to use Inform 7 on an Eee PC)

Ubuntu 8.04 beta distro ate my graphics driver, my sound card driver, and my balls. For some reason, “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg” doesn't work on 8.04, and they have yet to replace it with anything. So if you're having trouble configuring X (and let's be honest, why wouldn't you?), it's just tough titties.

Other recent adventures: Ubuntu Studio, fresh install. Here's the deal with this: it's big-upped as a package for editing music, graphics, and video. In reality, it's just for editing music. The RT kernel is the only one that installs with it, and it does a bang-up job with audio software, and seems really stable (considering). Freebirth, Audacity, all the Ableton-like stuff, it all runs great. However, it's hilariously slow at doing anything else, even just opening a damn folder. The sound takes priority over everything, which of course it's designed to. But Gimp and Inkscape are both nearly unusable, especially if you have a music player running at the same time. It's a little mysterious to me why they would put together such a giant package of all kinds of cool software, and then provide only a single kernel that is miles away from optimal for half of it.

Ok, so, install the generic kernel as well, right? Easier said. It installs, and it runs, and now I'm in some kind of crazy-ass mire of conflicting sound card drivers, because whatever the RT kernel uses is given no love by the generic kernel, and all the usual ways to fix it don't work. The sound card is recognized, seems like it should work just dandy, but... no sound. Sad face. If I never see that awful, confusing, borderline non-functional ALSA website again, I will be a happier person.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/

i have a mac, too, smart guy.

actually, my poor little iMac isn't up to the task of running all this stuff, not at once. It's been getting crashy lately from the enormous strain of running a local server AND illustrator at the same time. (Imagine!) My beautiful dream is the able to move the server to a Linux box and leave it running all the time, use Ubuntu for all my music and iPod and space-intensive needs, and use the mac for what it's best at, like, email and calendars and photoshop and such.

Which reminds me, I'm going to try to turn an old box into a server -- any suggestions or warnings?

It's awesome to have everything you normally use without having to hax0r special repositories and recompile code every time. Everything that works in Ubuntu will work on this.

INCLUDING COMPIZ.

!!!

Which reminds me, I'm going to try to turn an old box into a server -- any suggestions or warnings?

What are you going to be serving? SMB? HTTP? DB? Or is this just a box going in your cupboard for you to SSH into when you're not at home?

loonix sux lol use netbsd

I think he means LAMPish

just install debian then.

HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS

UBUNTU!!!1

Only good part of LAMP is A.

I don't get the appeal of Ubuntu outside the desktop.

LAMP is fine where P stands for Python and M stands for "not installing fucking MySQL".

what L do people prefer?

I think ubuntu is fine (for the desktop yes!) but have pretty much ended up using centos

"CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible."

which one?

L = Debian, as far as I'm concerned. I don't see the point of running a Debian-derived OS on a server. I don't run it on the desktop though.

centos = red hat, apparently </tuomas>

RPM was a nightmare when I last used an RPM system (Red Hat 5.2 in 1999), which is how I've ended up using solely Debian.

HE DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS

I think i've heard of debian. You know, maybe somewhere.

What are you going to be serving? SMB? HTTP? DB?

Yes. Lamp-ish otm (lampp, even), but not a goofy package like xampp. I had a setup mostly working on the box that I just gave up on after the 8.04 "incident," installed the old-fashioned way, but I lost a lot of sleep and hair trying to get cpan to let me install DBD::mysql. It said, "Ha." Never did get that to work. Meanwhile, I already have everything running on Leopard, including with a working installation of movable type, but it's kind of a monster and probably explains a lot of my performance issues lately. I'd rather have it on my pc that has a lot more space and processor power, or, like I said, on a dedicated server box.

Redhat is shit because RPM has entrenched bad habits in the RH community.

Kind of like my feelings about using php and javascript examples you dig up online

Yea Centos is basically Red Hat. From work perspective its all Red Hat so it makes sense for me

Opinion on SUSE? apparently the main one in Germany?

which linux do you think is best Catsupppppppppppppp dude 茄蕃?

Debian is truly the best GNU/Linux

I've heard bad things about SuSe's commercial support. Yea, Debian or commercial variants are the ones I like

INCLUDING COMPIZ.

I am not kidding. I've got wobbly windows and desktop cube all over this biatch, and there's no performance lag at all.

Yeesh. Compix 90% annoys me. What does a free OS need with all this floor demo bullshit? Check out this guy: a reflective, 3d dock. Oh, joy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvnQE1EAEZY&feature=related

My god, turn all that shit off! If I want things to spin and wobble, there's booze.

I've never used Debian before at all, what specific things you like about it?

I just noticed there's a debian-3.1-r2.iso on the server here, might burn that off and have a look tomorrow (is that pretty old or newish?)

Debian's packaging system is so overwhelmingly superior to any other Linux that I am genuinely staggered when people volunteer to work on a distribution which doesn't use it.

Can I just bitch about one thing with Ubuntu? I mean, it's great and all, and I might still be trying to get Vista to run if it weren't for it, but the name... oof.

"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are".

Give. Me. A. Break.

Debra + Ian = true GNU/Linux branding A+++ would install again.

Ubuntu others as they boob unto you.

Can I just bitch about one thing with Ubuntu? I mean, it's great and all, and I might still be trying to get Vista to run if it weren't for it, but the name... oof.

"Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are".

Maybe there weren't enough breeds of penguin left?

Of course you can turn it off (or have fun changing it to James Brown like I did), but the African drums that are the default startup sound, again combined with this whole "We are all one, sigh, coo" vibe just makes me want to rant about lolDiversity like I was Sean Hannity or something. :(

Here is a guy who loves the word "ubuntu":

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/29/Dashiki_1.jpg/300px-Dashiki_1.jpg

Compiz adds to useability. The desktop cube is a tool I simply could not do without. That and it's fun.

compiz does have very nice, usable, and working virtual desktops, unlike a certain revered OS whose latest "feature" to that effect is so awful and annoying even for a casual user that I can't believe they can get by with releasing things like that as "features" and still sleep at night. Maybe they don't sleep at night. I hope not.

But on the new Ubuntu, or even an update of 7.10, "Wobbly Windows" is a STANDARD OPTION. This blows my damn mind. Who, ever, ever in the history of graphical user interfaces, ever EVER, has walked away from their graphical user interface experience all red-faced and angry because goddamnit, I WANT MY WORKSPACES TO BE ALL JIGGLY! I want things to stick to the sides of the screen in unintuitive ways, I want things to stretch and jerk around and shit! GOD FUCKING DAMNIT I DEMAND THE DISORIENTATION OF A CARNIVAL FUNHOUSE ON MY COMPUTER WORKSPACE!

No. No user ever wished for this. This is what happens when "designers" are let loose in a space where they don't have anyone reminding them of any bottom line. And it's ridiculous.

I should draft this as a memo and send it to apple, as well.

This is what happens when "designers" are let loose in a space where they don't have anyone reminding them of any bottom line. And it's ridiculous.

I have waited so long for this to be a criticism leveled at something Linux-related. And yet ...

kenan, Compiz is the sort of novelty that could bring in new users. I've impressed several Windows users completely by accident, simply because they happened to be around when I was working.

In that sense, it's not just excited devs packing in fun shit for the sake of it.

no, that's the same sense. sorry to get all angry-like, i should sleep. But that's what I mean by "floor demo bullshit."

yeah well it's a desktop platform so as long as it works and looks brilliant it shouldn't matter. When RHEL makes a cute BLINGNGNGNG noise every time you roll over a host icon, THEN I'll panic.

LINUX HATER

(j/k)

I understand that ubuntu in particular is packaged for maximum first-time-user impressiveness, but the preponderance of graphical garbage is a little worrisome, especially because it's getting worse with every release. The graphical garbage is the main reason that I can't and won't use Vista -- it's too fat, really processor-intensive, requires too much of the really recent hardware, and I at least like to entertain the illusion that I have better things to do with my processor and hardware. And a lot os the newer garbage that comes with ubuntu won't run on old or cheap hardware, which seems kinda wrong -- isn't the archetypal new-user linux install one that happens on a computer that can't hack it in the real world anymore -- or so you thought, but linux revived it! What are they aiming at with all this? Market share?

Xubuntu is for the low end.

Compiz barely uses any processing power. It's much leaner than it used to be, and the basic effects don't put a dent in any box with standalone graphics. I mean fuck, my Eee PC runs it with no performance hit.

btw Ubuntu bug #1 is to get market share.

I can neither confirm nor deny that, but I'm still kinda bitter about finding that the new distro doesn't give you the option to dpkg-reconfigure X11, which would usually be the first thing you do when X11 is all broken. And it's all broken a lot. There's other ways, obv, but this is supposed to be beginner-friendly, right? The explanation I get from the forums/developers is that "the new version does that automatically," which sounds awfully obnoxious when you just told them that this is not at all what has occurred during the course of your installation. So I guess I... drop back and punt?

I can't find the quote, but I think someone once said, "Automatic just means you can't fix it yourself."

xpost

Yeah, that's pretty harsh.

I agree that all the Compiz dev time could have been spent making X11 work properly, but they're separate organisations, aren't they? You can't just pluck four Compiz people and sit 'em in X11 desks. (I realise I'm preaching to the choir here.)

I've heard so many bad things about the Hardy beta that I'm considering just waiting six months. Edgy and Feisty Just Worked when I installed them.

Yeah, oh man, hardy broke my machine, like, broke. Would have been extra bad times if I didn't have excellent backups.

Still, my third clean install on this drive has honorarily been named RedQueen.

> Which reminds me, I'm going to try to turn an old box into a server -- any suggestions or warnings?

ubuntu server?

(i think ubuntu's popularity and value is largely due to the package management and googleability of errors. it's certainly not the brown, gnome desktop 8)

and yes to everybody complaining about compiz. i can see the cubic thing being an easier way to switch virtual desktops (mousewheel up and down in fluxbox does me, but the jumpcut can be a bit disconcerting) but the wobbling and the flames, who needs it?

Yeah, oh man, hardy broke my machine, like, broke.

Huh?! In what way?

and yes to everybody complaining about compiz. i can see the cubic thing being an easier way to switch virtual desktops (mousewheel up and down in fluxbox does me, but the jumpcut can be a bit disconcerting) but the wobbling and the flames, who needs it?

need vs want

Compiz is a wonderful tool for freshening up your experience with a GUI. I happen to love it, and I know loads of people who swear by it. If you don't want it, turn it off. Compare this to Vista which is so shit that there's nothing you can turn off to make it useable.

btw the only reason you'd use Ubuntu Server is to take advantage of the repositories. If you're just running a simple server, go with straight Debian, same pkg mgmt system (this is to the person who asked the question natch)

Huh?! In what way?

heh... first question i get from everybody. It may not do it to you, don't worry, but it wipes all the old video and audio drivers and reinstalls new vones without asking first and with no way to go back. So for someone with old hardware like me (formerly, really, I have enough machine now) that big hardware upgrade you've been wishing for starts to look irritatingly essential.

Like a certain other maligned OS.

Ugh that's shit. It needs an option to leave certain drivers alone.

Sakes alive I got uppity last night! In the cold light of day I had a thought: "Maybe it's me." So I ducked into Barnes & Noble and bought this giant tome called "Linux Bible," which I'm sure is pretty lol if you know what you're doing -- it's not any kind of comprehensive reference book, it's 900 pages and four pounds of beginners' manual. I will make a lot of use of it.

Haha, I've got something called that that's about 10 years old. Invaluable then, but with the internet what it is it's probably less so now.

Giving Hardy a miss until Firefox comes out of beta and all the plugins work. Fuck it. Also eeeXu Gutsy works and i cbf waiting for the new release.

Invaluable then, but with the internet what it is it's probably less so now.

I find that the internet is really good at telling me what keys to press (^C and ^V, more often than not), but it's not so good at giving any context for what I'm doing or why, which is exactly the kind of "little knowledge" that, as the saying goes, is a dangerous thing. I know exactly enough about my machine to break it. I'm getting really good at that much.

(Kinda like what Jon said somewhere about his moral issue with yanking php and javascript off the internet and slapping it on a website, which I have also been very guilty of -- it's more than tacky, it propagates a dumber and more broken internet.)

I'm running Gutsy on my Macbook Pro (My mac os dvd broke and wouldn't let me reinstall it, so instead of getting another one I installed ubuntu 100%) and I am the most happy I've been with a linux install ever. I had some problems with the control of the fan speeds but I've sorted it out myself.

Re: people bitching about compiz - you can just turn it off for christs sake! I have the compiz-icon package installed so I can switch easily between Metacity and Compiz. I generally have it off unless I want to show it off to a windows vista user. "My free OS can do everything Vista can do but better etc" But daaam you should see compiz running on my new 24" widescreen monitor (£200 from dabs TIP!)

I actually just bought a PC from these EfficientPC guys who ship with Ubuntu installed, for a good price too. It's a one-man show I think so we'll see if it actually turns up.

kenan, that's a bloody good point.

Ok, it is done -- I have upgraded to Hardy. And I have seen the light. I understand now that most if not all of my issues were about the graphics driver. You see, I'm one of the lucky ones that has an ATI graphics card, and as some of you may have had experience with, ATI will not release any of its drivers, so any one you use is just basically a hack. To boot, apparently Gutsy 7.10 had issues with that particular driver that neither the previous version nor the next version have. My graphics driver up and quit the other day after I popped some new RAM into my machine. I guess the already lean-to driver structure just COULD NOT HANDLE the extreme stress of getting more RAM. Pissy little bitch.

Anyway. Hardy runs great. I did a clean install, wiped the drive. It's... very pretty. :)

(Still though, fuck a wobbly window right in the ear.)

I've heard several reports of Vista sp1 actually breaking drivers that previously worked perfectly, so it sounds like Ubuntu has the upper hand there too.

feature I am loving: hot corners. Being so used to this Mac feature (Exposé, named in true silly-ass haute-computerese style), I am always jamming my mouse pointer into a corner and expecting it to do that magical thing where it shows me the desktop or all my open windows, and have a half second of confusion when nothing happens. No more!

i like hardy... still have a lot to get nailed down and moved in. for me it's a double bonus because the new box is much beefier, so i get speed boosts and a clean, new OS that feels better than xp.

Is it Hardy specifically that feels better than XP, or just Ubuntu in general?

oh I have a quick and ready answer to that, just guess what it is.

oh wait, strike that, I did not read carefully.

Vista is gorgeous but functionally it's an abortion.

Microsoft did its usual trick of hiding anything omgdangerous from simple users, and as a result you can't find anything.

ok but anyone new to linux is going to argue that Ubuntu does this 10x worse than microsoft, even though they prolly just don't know better, and any microsoft developer or even devoted low-level IT dude who's used to MS will have a ready (and surprisingly long!) list of reasons why microsoft is awesome and you are LIVING IN THE PAST, despite the fact that you are both nearly 100% verifiably living in the present moment. Microsoft devotees baffle me more every day.

And I agree -- Vista gets just about EVERYTHING wrong, except for that nice glassy look. It's the first attractive MS OS. But guess what?... heh

Agreed. Have you tried changing the window theme in Vista? You open Control Panel and it's buried somewhere completely illogical.

Change is good if it's for the better or even makes sense. Gnome, kde, xfce all have everything exactly where it would make sense to put it, even if it takes 2-3 goes to find it the first time. MS has gone so overboard with its oversimplifying everything for dumb people and making changes just to obsolete the previous version that it's disappeared well and truly up its own arsehole.35

This post is four years old, but change a few words and we're right there again:

I don't think installing Linux is the problem with putting it on the average desktop.
It's using the god damned thing. Someone wants to install a program in Windows: they download an exefile, run it.
They want to download something in Linux.... Ooops dependancies, oops learning RPM (though rpmdrake etc helps a lot when the files are available through it)
More to the point, configuring your system can be a serious pain. Anyone can upgrade a driver in Windows, but I'm not sure how many average people want to learn VI or Emacs or whatever and then change runtime mode so they can set up their graphics card for X.
And I don't blame them.
I've just moved to Linux myself, after being a Windows user since '94 or so (whenever Windows 95 came through)
I'm quite enjoying it for the most part, mostly thanks to the shell-scripting and the overall smoother running. But goddamn can it be a pain sometimes.

Installing Flash in Mozilla Firebird took like two days before it finally worked. Grr!
But, of course, if someone sets up the system and you never want to do anything more than use the programs that come with it to browse the net, send emails and write some documents, it'd do. I just think Linux in general demands more of its users than Windows does... Not that this necessarily is such a bad thing, but it's a definite showstopper as far as starting this "*nix desktop revolution" that slashdotters are so convinced is at hand.

So yeah, for the first time in history it's 100 percent accurate to say that Linux works better than Windows.

xp The line is blurred now that you have to edit .ini files in Vista just to get some hardware working. And don't start me on vulnerability to exploits.

I've loads more to say about this. I'll do it when I get home and have a proper keyboard.

Okay.

The pundits forget this: Most people use Windows that's already installed on something. This is why they don't have trouble with it. If they bought something with Ubuntu (say) pre-installed, including browser config and Flash plugins and all that nonsense, they wouldn't have trouble with it either.

The better modern-day Linux distributions are rock-solid. I'm going to wipe Gutsy (née Feisty) off this and install Hardy from scratch, but only because I choked it with unstable packages (1-2 small things are a bit wonky). Yer average granny won't do anything with her Hardy installation that would necessitate a rebuild, any more than she would with Vista or XP.

Now.

I think one of the blocks to Linux getting market share on the desktop is that it's free. People are sceptical of free things. They think free means not very good. Windows costs $nnn, therefore it must be better.

I don't know how you rectify this, apart from putting Linux on slightly cheaper PCs before they ship or charging an arbitrary amount like some distros do. But I've had people give me funny looks when I explain that it's free. They expect it to be all in Chinglish or blow up or something.

I believe the addage goes, "Free software is only valuable if your time isn't worth anything."

Hah. That was true 10 years ago when you had to fuck around with X11 for 49856345 years in order to get a desktop.

well two things there: 1) however many years ago it was that it was *more* valid, it's still at least a nice sound-bite-type argument, and that's all it takes usually. And even if it didn't sound so catchy, there's still the issue of 2) X11 is still a bit of a mess, and honestly has nothing like the stability of the Win or Mac desktop environments. Just kind of a fact, I think.

Absolutely. But X works 99% of the time now, whereas 10 years ago you had to configure the bastard manually and it still didn't work.

Anyone had any joy setting up their wireless card (Belkin) in AP mode on Ubuntu? This is pretty painless on XP but I can't find any instructions that make sense to a linux newbie.

If I could do that (and my other pcs and Wii etc could connect to the internet through it) I'd probably make the leap over to Ubuntu for most apps.

By wireless card do you mean wireless router? I think you need a wireless router if you want your Wii &c. to have a wireless connection.

Either way, this is a good starting point: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/?action=fullsearch&context=180&value=wireless&titlesearch=Titles

Oh, I've just discovered what AP mode is. Sorry.

Yeah. Basically I don't want to have to buy a standalone router when my desktop PC happily fulfils that role when using XP

like this:-

phoneline---adsl modem---Desktop PC with wireless card ~~~~ wii, laptop, upstairs PC.

I've searched on the Ubuntu forums before, but can't find anything that gives a recognisable answer. I'd have thought that what I'm trying to do isn't that uncommon?

Yeah, weird. I can't help you I'm afraid; I didn't even know this was possible until tonight.

no probs, thanks for looking :-)

Hah, the Ubuntu sites are down. Them people are crazy.

it's goofy, i see on digg this morning ... HERON IS OUT!

but it's been out for days.

so anyway... yeah, the ubuntu sites are being slogged by digg users no doubt.
m.

Googling this now.. but if anyone knows answer

"session_child_run : could not exec /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession default"

which is preventing me going into runlevel 5 if selinux is enforcing (but not if it is permissive). can go into runlevel 3 and run startx no problem with it still enforcing

(i dont have a ~/.xsession-errors file)

permissions on /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession seem ok

ls -l /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession

Never trust anyone who says that something "seems ok" in the world of computers and like stuffs.

unless they're just being honest about the state of computing/networking in general, e.g. "everything SEEMS ok but just you wait"

good point, 'seems ok' is never a good thing to say!

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3411 Apr 24 09:32 /etc/X11/xinit/Xsession

To be fair, that does seem OK.

I suspect the problem is: the user trying to execute it. If you go into runlevel 3 and run startx manually, you're doing it as an ordinary user. If you try to go in runlevel 5, it's being run by init, as root, and not from startx. I'm not a SELinux expert, but I suspect that's what it's objecting to.

the new Ubuntu tag line... "You'll never go back." Feeling saucy now, are we?

Saucy Snake: The next Ubuntu release probably.

You can indeed build X11 so that it's root-executable or not, yes.

Oh, and there's a subhead that says, "Ubuntu 'just works'"

hrm.

sorry my permissions should have been with a -Z i think

ls -Z

-rwxr-xr-x root root system_u:object_r:bin_t Xsession

Ok I think i fixed it. I noticed that the selinux permissions for /sbin/init were

root:object_r:sbin_t

so i ran "/sbin/restorecon -v /sbin/init" and it changed to

system_u:object_r:init_exec_t

it now boots up into runlevel5 no problem

I think Forest Pines, this is what you were saying, so it was the selinux permissions on /sbin/init?

Oh, and there's a subhead that says, "Ubuntu 'just works'"

hrm.

-- kenan, Friday, 25 April 2008 05:08 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

Without having used Hardy, I maintain that installing Vista would probably be more painful.

Oh and I waited until now to d/l Hardy because I didn't want a release candidate CD floating around the flat for six months. lol 5832 seeds 3909 peers lol

Couple of small problems on my Dell Inspiron 6400, but excellent otherwise. Really nice desktop integration.

^ (hardy)

I think Forest Pines, this is what you were saying, so it was the selinux permissions on /sbin/init?

Yep.

Hardy's network http lookups are SO SLOW. Five second delay every single time. I cannot work out what the fuck is going on.

Fixed with a dns cache.

Torrent downloads are slow. I cannot work out why. I tried setting up the whole port forwarding thing and it didn't work, but I almost bricked my wireless router FUCKING HOORAY. Networks can die.

Maybe yr ISP is traffic shaping? Torrents became ridiculously slow for me, even with a stack of seeders.

Nah, it's fine on the old Gutsy installation.