Geek White North

I spent the weekend updating and installing Linux on my workshop computer, amongst other things. I then turned to my EEEPC.

For a while I knew that somewhere along the way that my EEEBuntu installation was screwed up. I think that some upstream updates had come through that were not compatible with the EEE701. EEEBuntu seems to be moving away from ‘EEE’ and ‘Buntu’ and has changed its name to Aurora. Seems more ‘cloud-y’ to me and maybe not really what I want  (I will wait to see what people say).

I read some reviews, and Slitaz and Ubuntu Netbook Remix caught my attention, so I got my pendrive and loaded them up.

Slitaz was quite good but I am lazy and would need some time to get the wifi working. The thing is, whilst you can connect to the internet with ethernet you do need wifi with a netbook some of the time.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix to be honest seems like a vertical version of the ‘baby’ Xandros that came with the EEEPC701, except it also had some of the classic desktop available if you need it. The next step was to write to the internal memory card. That seemed to be easier this time around.

The one thing I find that is odd is that every time it starts up, it states that my battery is no good. I started looking for replacement batteries, since it is several years old now and it does seem plausible. However I had not seen the message prior to the install and the EEEPC and Slitaz did not mention anything about the battery. So I thought maybe I should test the battery life. I uplugged it and left it running. 2+ hours later I concluded that the battery life was reasonable for a computer that is this old.

Everything else  seems that it is working for me right now, so I will leave it for a while.

So six months had rolled around since my last install, it was a long weekend and the need to install a new variant of Linux came over me.

I felt it was time to update my workshop computer. It is an old Pentium 3 Dell Optiplex Gx something with 512Mb Ram but has a 250Gb drive that I added about a year or so ago (I bought the drive for my wife’s computer without checking the type first and then discovered I had bought IDE).

Of course that means about 232MB that are actually usable but it seems a shame to waste so much space on one distro again so I started by looking at live cd’s of what I thought were lightweight distros. The Dell has some sort of weird Intel video chipset that seems to screw up a lot of distributions.

I started by looking through my recent Linux format magazine disks and saw Mepis and Mint 9 Isadora. I downloaded PCLinuxOS2010  and, for a change, I thought I would check out BSD (or at least PCBSD). I had been reading a review and it peaked some interest.

PCLinuxOS had some video issues and I could not fix it while using the live disk so I rejected it. Mepis worked except for the same video issue but was fixable. Mint found the correct resolution straight away.

Mepis is predominantly KDE based and, to be honest, it was the nicest looking implementation (if that is the right way to describe it) of KDE 4 that I have seen. BSD took several goes to actually boot. The first failure was because the disk was corrupt. Then I had to play around a bit in the menus and ultimately install it to get it to work.

I decided I wanted to try to triple boot Mepis, Mint and BSD. I first installed Mepis and Mint and left a space for BSD, (about 70, 70 and 90GB split). BSD took just over an hour to install whilst Mint took just over 20 minutes. Mepis was about 5 minutes slower than Mint to install.

Mint and Mepis worked fine together and then at some point I clicked so BSD would overwrite grub. When I rebooted I had the menu for BSD, Mint and Mepis. The downside here is that the first time it did actually work, but when I rebooted the menu did not actually accept input. No matter what I pressed it just added a # character. BSD would take over another hour to install, just too much time to mess around if it then did not work, and so BSD was voted off the island.

I reinstalled Mepis and Mint together, 116GB each. This is where I got a chance to really look at Mepis. When it was on the live CD it seemed faster than once it was actually installed. It seemed pointless to keep Mepis when I could just put Mint (Gnome) on the disk and then install KDE as an option at boot up, so that is what I did I also installed (Mint XFCE) Well I have plenty of space.

It took several hours to download the 4.2GB file, check the file and burn it to a DVD.
Installation was very similar to before except the screens looked older, and not quite as flashy.

The other difference I noticed is that I was given a choice to install Gnome, KDE or other. I chose to install Gnome.

The video card setup was quick.
First I was going to customize the desktop – I tried to enable Compiz fusion.
It popped up a message that moaned that my hardware configuration was not capable of running Compiz.
I ignored it and surfed the web for a while I noticed that the screen fonts were corrupted and looked odd like empty lines running through my text.

After some thought I went to the openSuSe website and with some digging I found an article that said for the HD3450 card it was recommended that I install the ATI drivers. I then found the one click install. Yes one click and it was installed.
This is where I held my breath because five months ago I did this with Linux Mint and it would not enable multi-display.
But OpenSUSE just worked. I identified the screens and found my screens were switched around so I moved the configuration around but after doing that and rebooting several times, a quick trip under the desk and switching the cables solved this.

Compiz now was now smiling and I could now zoom my window and flap my pages.

I installed the codecs and this time sound was working fine.

Next on the list was gPodder, a great podcatcher, and a newer version came with openSUSE. I really like the new features in gPodder

I was able to install Giver, a simple file sharing program that I use to pass files around over the internal network with other computers.

Finally my configuration was finished once I updated my user profile for Firefox and Thunderbird.

I’ve jumped in with both feet. I have my core utilities installed; now to explore YAST and the other features.

Around every 6 months I back up everything and look at updating my distro. My last update was in the summer when I tried updating Mint and ended up with Ubuntu.

Well, I heard on the Linux Outlaws Podcasts that some listeners said great things about openSUSE and how it just worked.
I got my Linux Format magazine and the cover disk had Mandriva 2010, Ubuntu 9.10 and openSUSE.

I had every intention of actually installing Ubuntu, but when I put the disk in the drive and ran the live version of Ubuntu I noticed that I had similar video issues to 6 months ago. I thought I’d have to go through that configuration again.
It did recognize the 2 Acer monitors attached but it did not indicate that it knew the videocard. I tried to use the configure display settings utility but with no luck.

I then thought to myself why not give the live version of openSUSE a try. The live version was KDE4.3.
Now it identified my video card as the ATI HD3450 without any help from me. It did not recognize the 2 Acer monitors. I was amazed that when I tried to use configure display settings. It worked!

So I tried installing from the live version. The installation is very similar to installing Mint or Ubuntu approx 20 minutes, but then it reboots and goes through an extra configuration stage.
An added plus was that it identified that I have 2 hard drives and that one is a Windows drive.
Mint and Ubuntu in the past have always needed some intervention to make sure it is going to the whole drive.

The negative was that the first time I installed it stopped half way through. I believe it may have been me knocking one of the buttons on my mouse and activating the highlighted button, which was abort.

After installation my first impression of KDE4.3 was that it was much nicer that the previous KDE4.x implementation that I had seen 6 months ago.

Then it happened – crash…Reinstall…crash… Reinstall. OK when you have just installed it is easier to reinstall because it is 20 minutes, whilst troubleshooting could be an hour. I did some reading and the live distros are only 686 versions and I only have 2GB Ram on this computer.
I like to watch podcasts so I need the codecs to play them. I downloaded the media packs. I now see the podcasts but with no sound. Bah!

Crash! I thought that perhaps the low memory and the 686 version combination may be making things unstable. I had come this far, I have everything backed up, OK so time to download the 586 version distro, give that a try.

Continuing my search for a suitable Linux for a Dell 3800 Laptop…

So my first step was to add Internet to the computer. I found a Linksys laptop wi-fi card that I had bought from the local Factory Direct (a computer outlet store) a while ago and that was still floating around.

I have a lot of distros that I got from magazines and the first one I tried was a Google Geos distro. I think it’s based on Ubuntu. I put it in the drive and started it up. It started chugging and puffing, and after 20 minutes a background that reminded me of a snooker table (bright green) popped up, with a big flower in a pot. Then I started getting errors and everything slowed down to the point where it was quite painful to proceed.

Google has already announced that it was going to create it’s own operating system from the ground up, not surprising really.

Next

I thought I would go with an old favorite PCLOS. The latest had just been released and I thought I would give that a go. It was much more perky than the Google operating system. Everything seemed good. OK, so now to install the driver for the wi-fi and get online. Well, it knew which card I had but the problem was it wanted me to download it from within the setup (problem was, I still wasn’t on the internet yet).

Next

Puppy Linux …everyone loves Puppy. I loaded Puppy and it was quite playful but the drivers for the wi-fi card need to be downloaded (er, still not on the internet) and added using ndis wrapper.

Next

The next few distros I tried all seemed to have the similar issues, either they were slow, needed an Internet connection to download the drivers or used ndis wrapper.

And the winner is…

Vector Linux

Laziness crept in here as I stopped as soon as I found a distro that was able to set itself up. Vector Linux was able to configure the wifi card and load the driver with a minimal interaction from me. Winner, Winner.

Vector Linux is the first Slackware Linux I’ve tried and it is using XFCE. Now I just have to find a cool use for it.

About a month ago we decided to upgrade to the latest Linux Mint on some of our computers here.
The installation on my wife’s system went really fast and really well. In fact, I have to say the end-to-end installation for Linux Mint was very quick. It was the quickest of the distros that I tried to install. Approx 20 minutes to install and maybe 10-15 minutes reconfiguring and upgrading packages.

My setup has two Acer LCD monitors 1680×1024 (ATI HD3450) that gives me a desktop that is 3360×1024, and for that the installation was not so smooth. Technically it took me about the same time to install but only one monitor stayed on after booting. Then it noticed I had an ATI card. I remembered the ease of installing the previous version ATI drivers so I clicked ‘yes, go ahead’ and that was when the fun began. After installing the driver it then recognized the second monitor, but only as a mirror of the first.
After many hours of modifying my xorg, crashing and then reinstalling, the best I managed was to get one monitor mirrored or two separate desktops that I could move documents between, or a big screen that was one and a half monitors in size.

I then tried Mint and KDE 4.xx. Also didn’t work, but it didn’t matter as it would not allow me to play sound. Several times I went back to Linux Mint Felicia, which worked EVERY TIME, no issues. I then came across an article that suggested that the issue lies with Xorg 7.3 and up and the kernel. As I had no issues jumping distros I thought this was my chance to see some other variations in action.

The latest PCLOS had just come out (PCLOS2009). This was funny because it gave me a 1024×800 desktop. After reconfiguring I could get 1280 something but I was having sound card issues. I felt I should try something else. I had been listing to Distro Watch recently and heard the man talking about how stable Debian was.

After installing Debian Lenny which really is a nice distro, (a little retro, but I could have seen myself keeping it) I had two monitors working in mirror each time I logged in. Basically I had similar issues as I did with Mint, except I did not get the black space invaders screen of death as often. I was usually able to recover. Bottom line-I could not compile the Debian version ATI driver because of error messages.

Then I went over to the dark side-Ubuntu 9.04. Don’t get me wrong, without Ubuntu there would he no Mint, I just like being different.
Here is where the video setup woes ended. I came across this message on the forums:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1203437

I followed the installation, step by step, and wow! I now have my monitors working in big screen mode I have Compiz working and the video is no longer flickering like crazy (I always had to turn off compiz when watching pod-casts). Yes, the dark side of the force is strong with this one.

My wife got given an old laptop from her work. It was going to be thrown out but they gave it her on the condition that we made sure there was no confidential company information left on the hard disk and, if there was, made sure it was erased.

The computer, a Dell 3800 Inspiron laptop 256 MB Ram 14GB hard drive Pentium III Celeron-was not in the best of shape.
The first hurdle was it was password protected but no one could remember the password.
Second hurdle was the touch pad and ‘stick-mouse’ did not work
No built in Ethernet.
CD ROM drive
Internal modem is a win-modem.
The battery could not hold a charge.

My first thing to do was comply with the terms of the agreement and to check to see what was on the disk. I started up an old live version of Puppy Linux on a CD and was able to read the Windows “My Documents” directories for several people and it appeared that the directories were all blank. First step done.

The next thing was to see if I could get the mouse etc to work so I undid the screws for the keyboard. I noticed that the plug that goes to the mouse pad was disconnected, I thought, “Could that be it as simple as that?”
No, I was not that lucky. I tried various combinations of plugging and wiggling of the connector and the surrounding area and eventually I felt that this was a long time to waste on something that was not really needed. I found an old Logitech tracker ball mouse and plugged it into the mouse port on the back of the computer.

At about the same time they were cleaning up the office and found a spare battery, I placed it on charge and found that this second battery pack was actually keeping a charge, so I now have a basic computer that ‘works’.

Next to do some distro checking…

.

So there are a number of posts about guys testing their partners to do typical functions in Linux that they would normally do in Windows.
A couple of days ago my wife announced that she wanted to have a particular fancy font for one of her craft projects.
When she used to boot to Windows, her computer would have a lot of fonts that she would download and install.
So I perched over her shoulder and kept an eye on what she was doing she went out there and found several instructions for a Redhat distro I explained that she needed instructions for Debian distro. Well, unperturbed, she typed something else into Google and found better instructions. I told her what a sudo is and how it works and she followed the instructions.
She manually copied the fonts to the location she wanted them to be.
Then at the command line she typed in the commands fc-cache -f -v etc.

She successfully installed the fonts with a little mumbling that it was easier to do in Windows.
This was all done with minimal prompting from me.

Today she installed a program from package manager and mentioned there is no way she is going to boot back into Windows anymore.

Installing a new release of Linux about every 6 months gives me a good excuse to back everything up, which is not a bad thing.
However I hate all the tweaking that is then needed to get everything back to **just right**.

So it was a pleasant surprise when I installed Mint 6 Felicia this past weekend. I was expecting my dual monitor setup to be a big pain in the you know what. But I have to say I was amazed at how easy it was. It detected my video card and I told it make a large desktop and voila!

I thought to my self ‘Hmm.. that was easy …almost too easy’.

My first impression was ‘Cool, this has improved a lot since Mint 4,’ which
had me going around in circles for several hours trying to get dual monitor support.

I then went to open Firefox. Nothing. Tried again. Nothing.

When I looked at the hidden .mozilla directory it had a lock and an X emblem on it and when queried it said root only. I found I could run it as a sudo user in terminal.

It took me a while. My solution was to add my user account by using the chown command sudo chown : .mozilla (and then all its subdirectories and file).
I also had the same issue with .adobe and .macromedia directories that prevented flash working.

I am now in the process of adding all those other tweaks, but in the back of my mind I am wondering how can some files become root? Why does this happen and would this happen again?
Should I reinstall over again while I have not got too much time invested in getting it **just right**?