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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • First Post! (by tomd123 on 2009-03-16 08:15:22 GMT from United States)
great quality! keep up the awesome work. I especially liked the in depth coverage of setting up the lvm on multiple distros. Thanks again DW.
2 • Moon OS (by vaithy on 2009-03-16 08:35:47 GMT from India)
Well, I am now a days learning the Linux in easiest way'simply printing Distrowatch' Tutorials..No geekish book for me.. after meddling with Arch then shortcircuted to Chakra 'alpha-2, I set my eyes on 'Moon' then suddenly fell on the earth. OWw..I my daughter has approached me just behind me, 'Hey what are U doing...didn't I told U not to mess with my Vista wall papers again...Oh.. U changed the theme again..get lost ".. when I retreat my closet she is still struggling to find out the IE thing is.. Sorry dear I unintentionally format that crap.(that was the Compaq Presario V3424 with lot of HP's own malware crippling along with 'vista)
3 • Slackware team member Eric Hameleers - opinion of KDE 4.2 (by Mark on 2009-03-16 08:44:02 GMT from Australia)
http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/massive-updates-in-slackware-current/
Eric Hameleers:
"I have been working with KDE4 releases for nearly a year now, running it as my default desktop, and 4.2.1 is stable, fast and beautiful. People who heard or read that the new KDE is bloated and slow, should try it out and decide for themselves; I think it performs better than KDE3."
I thought I'd let Eric have a bit of a voice here on Distrowatch, because what Erice has to say there would not find its way on to Distrowatch otherwise.
As for Distributions being impressed with KDE 4.2, Linux Mint is also apparently prepared to give it a fair go.
http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=655
Clem of Linux Mint:
"I think I can speak for the team when I say we’re all really excited about this release. It’s new, it looks fantastic and it’s our first ever KDE4 release. I would like to congratulate Boo for the excellent work he’s done on this edition, and I’m proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 6 KDE RC1."
4 • Linux in Schools (by Tom at 2009-03-16 09:05:36 GMT from United Kingdom)
Doing a quick SWOT analysis of the problems of putting Linux into an existing school network with a Windows Server. Well i'm not sure how to differentiate between "Strengths" and "Opportunities". Use the strengths you have rather than fight against that strength.
It seems likely that a large number of students probably need to find projects worth working at. A lot of the work that needs doing can be broken down into a large number of tiny projects or a few large projects. Keeping track of it might be a project. Giving local journalists the chance to report on aspects of it sounds like a project for people studying business and marketing. Perhaps it's possible to get funding such as ESF funding. Most funders want a log showing a lot of people putting in a lot of hours, this log used to be called "a match for matched funding" (and the funders convert this into cash for your school) or something like that. Another project for students studying business & commerce?
Err, perhaps i should have broken the technical aspects down into possible projects? Sorry, i'm not geeky enough to be able to do that.
I know that many schools in Australia have mixed Linx, Mac, Windows servers on desktops and Servers (well, i'm not siure about Mac Servers lol). There was a big furore in online forums about a school teacher 'punishing' a student and local linux distributor for 'creating a false impression that software could be free'. The end results were that the teacher now uses linux a lot and the school has some linux machines :)
Good luck and regards to all from
Tom :)
5 • RE: 3 Slackware team member Eric Hameleers - opinion of KDE 4.2 (by ladislav on 2009-03-16 09:12:34 GMT from Taiwan)
I thought I'd let Eric have a bit of a voice here on Distrowatch, because what Erice has to say there would not find its way on to Distrowatch otherwise.
Please stop these silly accusations. If you'd like to have your superlative article about KDE 4 published on DistroWatch, please write one and send it to me. In all likelihood I'll publish it in one of the upcoming DWWs.
6 • LVM and stuff (by slim on 2009-03-16 09:16:19 GMT from United Kingdom)
Your excellent discourse on LVM is appreciated, Chris. However, sometimes the trees disguise the wood! Taker a look at your reams of explanations. Surely this clearly demonstrates that the concept is overly complex, well beyond the capabilities of even average Linux users, but, more important, utterly unnecessary for most of them? I am not given to pouring praise on Mr G., but his (over)simplification led to incorporation of swap space within a file, usually on C:. Most commercial machines come with a single (visible!, cf Compaq, for example, and their notorious hidden partition) partition. However dumb is such a strategy, it kinda suits most bog standard users of Winduznt. Normally, a primary + 2 - 4 logicals is overkill for his appalling monstrosity, but confers some merit for determined masochists. With Linux, apart from GRUB in the (entirely adequate MBR), a root partition + home, (maybe with one further to collect eg downloads, O&S, family picture album?, w.h.y.) suffices. Whether these are primary or extended is academic. Furthermore, with the advent of superb liveCD compact distros, the issue of multipartitioning shouldn't arise (yes, I hear the advocates of multibooting, but that is equally dumb when they can be installed to one USB stick each, left as one CD each or, anarchistically, one old 500Mb hard drive, frugal or fully installed according to whim).
So, if my F10 defaults to an LVM installation, who is the average punter to know or care? If you get a root partition with the luxury of an home one, too, Joe Public might in equal numbers consider this a luxury or a nuisance, especially as alternative (or no) backup strategies are common.
Back to the basic engineering principle that overrides all others - K.I.S.S. Einstein, Schrodinger, Pauli, Heisenberg and the rest of the crew managed to reduce their monumental works to half-a-dozen symbols on a single line....
7 • Great article (by bugz on 2009-03-16 09:17:25 GMT from United States)
Another great article/tutorial/weekly news. Distrowatch really change a lot after adding some tutorials on a "Distrowatch Weekly", more excitement, more educational and more resourceful. More power Distrowatch... can't wait to see more.
8 • New Distrowatch Logo (by Vladimir on 2009-03-16 10:40:57 GMT from Serbia and Montenegro)
Can we please get the old logo back, that one was better than this new one.
9 • Re: Linux in Schools (by greenpossum on 2009-03-16 10:46:30 GMT from Australia)
I think that school teacher was in the US and the activist in question was Helios. In case your phrasing gave the impression that we had such a teacher in Australia. I'm sure we have one or two, but nothing newsworthy yet.
10 • @8 by Vladimir (by Frisco on 2009-03-16 11:03:44 GMT from United States)
Voicing agreement here. The new one looks very nice, clean and artsy, etc.
But it ain't "distrowatchy," like the old one, if you know what I mean. :o)
11 • KDE 4 (by Duhnonymous on 2009-03-16 11:12:08 GMT from United States)
The real problem with KDE 4 is how slowly the major apps are being ported. K3b, KOffice, KDevelop and Krusader seem to be stuck in beta, and even KTorrent has just recently been released.
It would be great if everybody in the KDE community was on board with KDE 4. It would be less hassle for the user, and more uniformity across different distributions as well as applications.
12 • openSUSE mirror structure (by Simon Jessop on 2009-03-16 11:59:04 GMT from United Kingdom)
Issues with download.opensuse.org were one of the reasons for me switching away a couple of years ago - when download.o.o was broken (and it happened a fair bit back then) you couldn't get anything and Yast didn't handle that at all well back then. I understand that download.o.o is useful for load balancing and such but I prefer the approach in (for example) Fedora where yum keeps a list of mirrors and if one is down then it just tries the next, the mirror list is held locally (but is presumably kept updated at intervals) so there is no single point of failure dependent on a remote server.
Kudos to the opensuse peeps for getting a backup sorted relatively quickly and promising to make things better in future, but the approach does seem fundamentally flawed.
13 • Scary! (by Greg Debniak on 2009-03-16 12:34:25 GMT from United States)
Oh great, talk about scary! I can just see some Windows or Mac user seeing the whole partitioning tutorial and fleeing. This is not the way to win converts from the Mac and Windows world. The whole partitioning thing should be automated, transparent, invisible... a non-issue.
It is technicalities like this that give Linux users the reputation for being hi-tech geeks and it inhibits the adoption of Linux by the mainstream. Your average Windows and Mac user doesn't even know what a partition is and this tutorial will only frighten them off. The fewer the confusing decisions that have to be made during installation, the better.
Keep it simple, keep it easy and we can get more people on board. After all, widespread acceptance will not come from the technically oriented... it will spread via your kids, wife and grandmother and others without technical expertise.
14 • LVM (by h2s on 2009-03-16 12:37:59 GMT from China)
nice tutorial,looking forward to implementing it out when Ubuntu 9.04 is released
15 • LVM and ext4 (by IMQ on 2009-03-16 12:58:28 GMT from United States)
So LVM is kinda like extended partition except it can span multiple drives instead of just limited to 1. Am I right?
When do one use LVM?
I can't imagine a typical home user would need something like this unless one needs to stores lots and lots and lots of big files like video files or distro ISO images.
What are the advantages of ext4 over the ext3?
As usual, DWW on Monday is a pleasant reading!
16 • Thanks for the tutorial (by HH on 2009-03-16 13:13:42 GMT from Canada)
Unlike the criticism offered by #6, I would like to commend DW for this week's tutorial. It may be old hat to some of us, or meaningless complexity to #6, but last time I tried to explain LVM to my Mom (who asked) it wasn't even a minute before her eyes glossed over and it was all techno-babble to her. But here we have a couple good articles in the last two weeks which keep the concepts clear and show various distros in action. This is to the benefit of the free software community as a whole, please keep up the good work!
17 • schools, ooops (by Tom on 2009-03-16 13:23:25 GMT from United Kingdom)
@9 GreenPossum
Ooops, i think you are right but it was a month or so since i last looked at it. I think the speed of your correction is a good example of why OpenSource ideals are better. I still can't find the link to the main forums about this but it was quite high profile and should be fairly easy for anyone to research.
I think if i was giving a networking project to a small bunch of kids (rather than older teenagers) then i would probably get 3 'dead' or ancient machines out of a cupboard so they could document setting up a gateway server and 2 dual-boot machines. Dual-boots are great for keeping existing systems available while exploring new set-ups. Many tiny OS's can revive old machines into being ultra-sophisticated resources quite easily in a plug-and-play way but still provide an interesting challenge. Upscaling a successful project would then be much easier.
18 • re #13 and #15 (by Gigi on 2009-03-16 13:26:00 GMT from India)
Let's take a simple example. Alex for example decides to partition his 80GB hard disk in the following partition layout.
/ 5GB
/home 20GB
/movies 20GB
/music 20GB
unallocated 15GB
Now if for some reason, the /movies becomes full, he can add the a 5GB from the unallocated pool to /movies. He later deletes some stuff from /movies and frees up some 10GB. But for some reason he later finds out that he needs atleast 15GB more on /home. So how can he move free space in /movies to /home? With normal partitioning, it would be a nightmare to move the free space over. With LVM, it would be a simple matter of reducing one LV and extending the other.
Let's now say he buys another hard disk of 160GB. So with normal partitioning, for example he cannot add 40GB from the new hard disk to the existing /movies. Either he has to recreate /movies on the new disk and copy stuff over or create something like /movies2. With LVM, it would be a simple three steps: vgextend, lvextend and resize2fs.
Hope that answers #13 and #14. There are a lot more advantages to LVM but they would be beyond typical home users.
19 • No.16 (by slim on 2009-03-16 13:30:03 GMT from United Kingdom)
HH seems to have trouble with his reading and/or comprehension. Not only did I NOT criticise Chris' discussion of LVM - I actually congratulated him. Furthermore, nowhere did I say that LVM was a meaningless complexity to me; I find it all very straightforward. No.15, IMQ, had no difficulty understanding the issue. Contributors on this feedback would do well to heed the advice of Mark Twain, so helpfully provided by Ladislav.
20 • No subject (by forest on 2009-03-16 13:41:43 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ref #13
Greg, an excellent comment, very well put, and spot on in your observations.
It must be admitted that if "you" want converts it must be through the simplest way possible, hence my quick plug for Ubuntu! I have just managed to persuade my old boss (68) to get into U8.1 and he is happy as larry.
If folk want to get more into Linux then this forum is a very good introduction, we have excellent tutorials for those that like that sort of thing (and can understand them, LOL).
And then we have the more general approach of showcasing a distro(s), which is more my interest.
So, f this forum maintains its "layered" approach to Linux, with something for everyone, then you can't really go too far wrong by nudging them over here.
21 • LVM (by Landor on 2009-03-16 13:45:19 GMT from Canada)
I like seeing this kind of thing happening here and that being said, I have the same sentiments as John Frey did here last week. When you start adding more drives etc, you're creating a very real possibility for said drives to break down twice as fast and the chances of losing your data has increased considerably. In my opinion nothing beats cleaning up a drive by either removing or archiving data on the drive, depending on if you actually want to keep it of course.
Hell, if you're even as anal as I am about order, you can buy a couple binders (if by chance you're not geeky enough to have them already by being prepared) and some pages of sleeves and put all your cd's/dvd's that you "actually" want to keep in alphabetical order! :)
I've also found some of those old drives that you don't know what you're going to do with anymore because your system has run out of space for them are a great way to store things if you put them away in a safe manner that ensures they'll be ready to operate when you need them. It even saves money on cd's/dvd's since you already own the HDD and it's not being used anyway.
Just my opinion though. I do see a need for LVM, but to be honest, not for an everyday enduser system.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
22 • No subject (by forest on 2009-03-16 13:49:15 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re the education topic (o continue on from a query last week from NZ) perhaps you could direct your search here and follow up any leads that look promising...
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=linux+in+UK+schools&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
23 • RE: LVM and stuff (by Andre on 2009-03-16 13:52:29 GMT from Norway)
@#6: As an editorial in DW should be considered preaching to the choir, I don't see the harm in explaining LVM and outlining some of the possibilites. I'd may even appreciate diving into related stuff like software RAID, although most Windows users would fall off long before that.
As for KISS, I think this is exactly what Fedora (and Red Hat, CentOS et al) gets right in this matter: One single volume on one single LVM, spanning all available disks. It doesn't get simpler than that. It's certainly simpler to the end user than C:, D: E:, F: etc, especially to users who tend to store everything on their user desktop or "My Documents".
24 • Tiny Core Linux (by Robert Shingledecker on 2009-03-16 14:05:33 GMT from United States)
Thank You for hosting my new project. But, shame on you for linking in Mr. Andrews besmirchment post. Was THAT really necessary? You did not even use the word "apparent": but instead stated it as fact. You did not even bother to contact me to get my side of why I left the Damnsmall Linux project. There are numerous reasons why I left. I would have been happy to answer any and all questions. You have falsely stated the reason I started the Tiny Core Project. You have continued and participated in this besmirchment. That is not fair journalism. Not fair to me personally nor to your readership.
25 • A little off topic (by IMQ on 2009-03-16 14:09:58 GMT from United States)
What are the best software for scanning and converting scan images/files to searchable pdf format? Running under Linux, of course.
If I understand correctly, no software can scan to pdf format but some sort of image file, then using a different software to convert the file to pdf format. More difficult if the file is searchable.
I just start thinking about scanning some of the calculator manuals I have to searchable pdf-format files. These manuals are quite old so I want to *save* them before they disintegrated. ;-)
Anyway, I am completely newbie to this. Anyone has tips on where to begin?
I am aware of couple apps for Linux like Kooka or Xsane. Does anyone has experience with these? How good are they?
Thanks!
26 • @13 and @24 (by Anonymous on 2009-03-16 14:14:16 GMT from United States)
@13 - Why do we need to attract converts? Windows partitioning is no different and actually more of a pain - at least with winxp and doesn't allow resizing or anything. Linux is light years ahead of windows in terms of partitioning and install.
@24 - in full agreement - not fair to only show one side of the story but even that whole issue has nothing to do with your new venture anyway so why bother bringing it up.
@Distrowatch - why would you add Tiny Core Linux only to try to discredit the project and developer - pretty shoddy IMHO.
27 • RE: 24, 26 Tiny Core (by ladislav on 2009-03-16 14:29:57 GMT from Taiwan)
Apologies if we offended anybody. The main reason I wanted to link to that forum post was that it gave a hint about the future direction of Damn Small Linux. Many people were surprised to see Robert Shingledecker behind Tiny Core and wondered what would happen to DSL now that he had started a new distro. I didn't even read the post, except the part dealing with the future of DSL. Now that you brought it to my attention, I have to agree - the link shouldn't have been in the story (it was actually me who added the link, not Chris).
28 • @25 (by Alexandru on 2009-03-16 14:32:18 GMT from Germany)
Your problem can be solved in just 2 steps:
1. Scan your manual. You get a set of images.
2. Convert images into PDF document.
At the first step you can use any SANE software available.
At the second one you can use OpenOffice.org, create an Impress presentation (or writer document), put one image per page and then export result to PDF.
29 • RE: 28 (by IMQ on 2009-03-16 14:40:57 GMT from United States)
But does the pdf text searchable since the openoffice.org file will have basically images only?
Without the searchable feature, navigating the large manual would be a PITA.
By the way, what format (jpg, png, tiff, etc.) would be best to save the images in?
30 • LVM drawbacks? (by nightflier at 2009-03-16 14:54:41 GMT from United States)
I can see the advantages of LVM, but like others am worried about data recovery.
- if one drive fails, will it be like a drive failure on a raid-0 (very bad)?
- if you move a drive to another computer, can you read the files there?
31 • RE # 8 - New Distrowatch Logo (by Roachboy on 2009-03-16 14:54:53 GMT from Kenya)
Naah! I like the new logo!
32 • Is SWAP necessary? (by gk on 2009-03-16 14:55:03 GMT from India)
I have 2 gb RAM and didnt have partition for swap, so i still installed linux(ubuntu) and it's working good. No problems in last one year atleast.
What do you suggest.
Logo is fresh and crispy by the way.
33 • K-eep I-t S-imple S-tupid (by Anonymous on 2009-03-16 14:55:19 GMT from United States)
"...Windows partitioning is no different and actually more of a pain - at least with winxp and doesn't allow resizing or anything.."
Wrong! Have you heard of Acronic Disk Director. Easy to resize any Windows partition. It will no longer work with Linux newer schemes. LVM is just nonsense. Why lock out the full hard drive for furture use that you may not need.
There's more programs like Disk Director that does the same thing. Linux partitioning has always been overly complexed.
When I install a distro I use Windows method. One partition to "rule them all". I don't mess with /homy, /hood, /this, /that, or /theother. I just use "/" and a swap partition. Oh, I know...what if? Always give a "what if" response. The "what if" scenario has NEVER happened for me. Have you ever heard of Parted Magic to backup your disto?!
REF#6 has it totally right with his statement:
"- K.I.S.S. Einstein, Schrodinger, Pauli, Heisenberg and the rest of the crew managed to reduce their monumental works to half-a-dozen symbols on a single line...."
34 • RE:#29 (by PITA on 2009-03-16 14:57:43 GMT from United States)
Does it really matters? How about pdf? ;)
35 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2009-03-16 15:00:52 GMT from Canada)
can you please change the logo back - i am afraid of change
36 • #35 (by Anonymous on 2009-03-16 15:03:22 GMT from India)
:-)
37 • Re:#30 LVM Drawbacks (by kilgoretrout on 2009-03-16 15:23:53 GMT from United States)
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head re lvm drawbacks. If you have an lvm volume spanning multiple hard drives, if one drive goes, the entire lvm volume is trashed and your chances of getting any useful data off the remaining drive is pretty much nil. Similarly, with lvm volumes spanning multiple hard drives, you can't pull one of the drives out and read anything off it on another box. LVM has a lot of uses but in enterprise settings, you would use lvm only with redundant raid to protect against data loss.
38 • HD, Laptops and all that (by Steve on 2009-03-16 15:24:22 GMT from United Kingdom)
1st a quick comment on LVM. Looks good for servers and other such kit!
Interesting article, yet agree with comments about HD propensity to die on you / throw errors.
...and that's what this comment is about.
My 4 yo laptop has been through one HD - and has started throw the occasional "can't boot, won't boot" fit with the 1 yo replacement. Found a BIOS upgrade which "seems" to have fixed it, yet I just don't trust it... and I've got a final year project during 2010.
Now HD tech is pretty sad stuff; I'd like to ditch 'em and go solid state / flash drives, rather like this....
Use 2 x 8gig USB sticks A) and B). A is the main bootable and B is for project work. The laptop would have both plugged in at boot-time and would boot from A.
A) 4 partitions:
1. boot (100M ext2)
2. .iso "live DVD" OS image (4.7 gig ext2)
3. /home (1gig JAFF2)
4. long-term archive / reference files (remainder about 2+ gig, ext2)
B) 4 partitions:
1. boot (100M ext2)
2. .iso "live CD" OS image (720M ext2)
3. /home (1gig JAFF2)
4. project files (remainder about 6gig, JAFF2)
A) is the full-blown OS and B) can do an emergency boot if A dies (In practice, B would also have a twin for backups).
Note that there is no swap - I'm hoping that with ram of 1gig I just won't need it; I'm writing and doing presentations etc not editing movies.
I'd like to go for a fairly current KDE environment available in live CD / DVD forms - but the OS would need to be happy running with no swap and must support JAFF2 fs.
Anyone done something like this? Your comments appreciated - especially recommendations for suitable distros!
39 • @33 (by Anonymous on 2009-03-16 15:27:23 GMT from United States)
None of your lovely suggestions comes with the windows install cd so lets compare apples to apples please.
I use remastersys to backup my debian lenny install. Don't need a separate distro or livecd to do the job.
40 • RE:25 You can scan to pdf format. (by Eddie Wilson on 2009-03-16 15:53:56 GMT from United States)
On my HP printer and running Ubuntu whenever I scan something using the HP front end for Xsane it scans the document and saves it in pdf format. It works very well for me and I've never had any problems. All it takes is one process. So you see, you can scan to pdf format in linux with very good results.
@11: I agree with your observation about some KDE apps being the problem with KDE 4.2 being excepted. You are also correct when you say everybody needs to get on the same page with KDE. Distributions that still use KDE 3.x are hurting the KDE project. Saying the KDE 4.2 is not stable is just a load of crap now and that is not an excuse anymore. When a distro comes out with KDE 3.5 or whatever it is already behind other distros and living in the past. Or maybe some people are just too lazy to learn something new? There is no good reason now not to use KDE 4.x in a distribution.
41 • RE: 40 The question remain (by IMQ on 2009-03-16 16:08:51 GMT from United States)
Can you search for text in pdf file created by the scan program?
Imagine searching for a specific keywords in the pdf-format manual like 'complex number', 'matrix', etc. A normal true pdf file would allows the users to search for any keyword quickly but the scanned pdf file does not. It's basically an image file converted to pdf image.
Anyway, I think I play around a little bit see what these apps can do.
Thanks.
42 • this week (by dave on 2009-03-16 16:13:10 GMT from United States)
thank you for yet another great read on a monday morning.i dont know where my monday morning would be without dw weekly.I truly enjoy your article every week,and the lively comments that follow.Lvm is quite interesting and yeah to me its complicated but i love too learn about linux and its capabilities.linux is for those who "like" computers and its all about options.thank god im not limited to windows and what microsoft has to offer.linux can be as easy or as complicated as i wish.distrohopping is a fun thing to do and i love to see what all the different flavors have to offer.I took moon Os out for a drive yesterday and it truly is a gorgeous design.everything worked beautifully on my dimension 4400.It seems to me that with a desktop like that everyone would like to give it a try.enlightenment really has developed an excellant alternative to kde or gnome.I realize its not looks that make a great distro ,functionality plays the major role.there are just so many options!keep up the good work chris and ladislav and you know where ill be next monday morning.
43 • EXT4 is stable (by dooooo at 2009-03-16 16:14:20 GMT from Jordan)
I just wanted to report that I had zero issues with EXT4 .
I've been running my root EXT4 partition with Arch Linux since the 2.6.28 kernel release . I think other users from the Arch Linux community share the same experience .
Apparently the KDE configuration files are the only popular files affected by delayed allocation (In case of a power failure or a crash) . So If you don't use KDE , you should be fine .
If some users run Alpha software and consider multiple system crashes something normal they should just recover from , I think that's a problem they should deal with quietly without shouting all over the place .
44 • @ a few things (by Nobody Important on 2009-03-16 16:17:10 GMT from United States)
@13: So Linux websites aren't allowed to host tutorials to show how to do more advanced topics? Please. With your logic, we should have any tutorials on the internet detailing how to play with Windows XP's registry, because it would "scare the newbies."
@24: I'm readership, and I saw nothing printed that I haven't already read elsewhere. I can't blame DWW for picking up the sentiments I've seen most websites have had. No offence, of course, but I'm just relaying my sentiments - there's been a nice lack of information from one side of the argument, and you can't blame DWW for that one.
45 • RE: 27/40 (by Landor on 2009-03-16 16:17:34 GMT from Canada)
#27
Although I do understand why it would be considered negative to have posted the link, I personally didn't view it as such after fully reading what was involved. I am also thankful for it being posted in all truth. I haven't been a huge fan of Puppy since some of the Mark South stuff happened and I really didn't like how JM handles himself and many of you are well aware on my feelings regarding community and decent behaviour within it. Anyay, the link further fortified some of my reasoning for my dislike of how JM does things and how since The Puppy Forums are ran by the man I wouldn't truly give it anything but a cursory glance.
#70
You're not very accurate in your personal beliefs regarding distros holding back the KDE project. It's quite a blanket statement. First off regardless of any project's progress in whatever area, more importantly newer versions, the code is available and distros are free to use it. This reminds me of the MS blunder in a sense with their fonts. It's out there and free, it can and will be used if someone feels the need. But also, there still are people who just don't want KDE 4XX, I happen to be one of them. Let's look at distros though. Should Red Hat really just drop the stability they' have in the KDE 3.5XX series in their Enterprise Product for the sake of the KDE project? That would be totally unrealistic no?
So you see, it's not laziness, nor is there "no good reason" to not switch to KDE 4 and personally, I'm thankful a number of distros haven't, especially ones that will carry it long term.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
46 • Logo (by DistroMaan on 2009-03-16 17:15:36 GMT from United States)
"can you please change the logo back - i am afraid of change"
Hey it's 2009!!!!. I think it was time for change, the old logo was looking a rather bit old.
I like the new logo its looks very COOL!!!!!!
47 • This one just keep arising over... (by raymundo dionicio on 2009-03-16 17:31:53 GMT from Mexico)
"...But both XFS and ext4 do delayed allocation, which means that data blocks don't get allocated right away, and they don't get written right away. Btrfs will be doing delayed allocation as well; all modern file systems will do this, because it's how you get better performance."
This is a problem long ago solved on DB field. Backup, rollover and restore functions. Programmers do not need to add complexity to their puppets. Just use an embedded DB to keep changing data out of corrupting. SQlite, maybe?
48 • New levels of connections: Distrowatch Grows Up (by Bill Savoie at 2009-03-16 17:56:05 GMT from United States)
I love to watch this site grow. It is an organic process, growth is, and it has interesting and challenging difficulties. Most of us have tried Damn Small Linux, and we might know of the good work that Robert Shingledecker has done with and for John Andrews. These are brilliant people, who both love to code, and both care about efficiency and purity of purpose. We also notice that the one man show of Ladislav Bodnar is open to another fine talent Chris Smart. Now here is the amazing part, these are all, for the most part volunteers. They all work mostly for free. Yes, they may get something, but after so many years of ‘free’ that small money can hardly be their focus.
So, here we have all this volunteer brilliancy and we connect that with the blog and the internet’s unforgiving nature. Everything that anyone says about anything is up so every temporary emotion now becomes ‘fact’. Wow, that can cause some heat to build. There are three solutions and but nothing known works well.
1) send out e-mail to clear and preview statements before being published. (People just can’t be reached.)
2) Release the Distrowatch in layers, alpha, beta, just like a linux distribution. (The data is two or three weeks old.)
3) Do peer review and suppress or tone down what gets out. (more work for the volunteers)
Fortunately everyone involved in this process is brilliant, so the natural process will arrive at a solution. As it is said in one of Jackson’s Brown Song, “The Hammer Shapes the Hand”, so we can all watch this unfold together.
49 • LVM and such (by davemc on 2009-03-16 18:24:29 GMT from United States)
Hey Chris. Good read. Its good to see you taking on LVM as it is not for the feint of heart, but it is a very good way to do things if you want a very flexible system, and it really is only useful if you have special needs like that. For most folks, the standard partitioning methods work just fine and most people rarely put more thought into it after the install. I dont think LVM will become really mainstream until a commonplace tool like GParted fully supports it, as those bash commands are fairly cryptic and I really don't know of a sysadmin brave enough to trust their critical resize operation to something as chancy as that, but they typically will trust GParted.
50 • RE: 24,26,27 Tiny Core (by Robert Shingledecker on 2009-03-16 18:33:04 GMT from United States)
I see you have since removed the link but did nothing to correct your false assertion. The fact is, I alone, started tiny core four months before the Murga incident. The fact that I left DSL has very little to do with Murga and everything to do with the abandoment of DSL by its founder.
51 • Emotional Energy and seeing how everything works (by Bill Savoie on 2009-03-16 18:49:59 GMT from United States)
Part of the problem of dealing with brilliant people, is that they are very complicated. Yet they code and we all need that. We especially like the fact that they give it all away. One approach is to take the good and ignore everything else. That works, but there is more that we can learn. Learning is fun. I suggest learning personality types of the Enneagram. These are nine modes that people operate out of habit. Kind of like a math co-processor, or a subsystem of consciousness that operates unconsciously. I am writing a book called "The Bridge To One" on how we are all reflections of each other. It is currently at 203 pages, but it is a few months from being done. Until it comes out, just google enneagrams and read. It is fun stuff. Most of us are on automatic!
52 • distrowatch censorship (by lalala on 2009-03-16 18:52:13 GMT from United States)
Big surprise, I say something negative, yet true, about ubuntu, and now it's nowhere to be found. Is this site run by ubuntu fanboys that can't stand anything negative said about that distro?
53 • Nice Issue (by PastorEd on 2009-03-16 19:23:04 GMT from United States)
Wow. That's one of the more informative issues of DW I've read in a long time. Thank you for the extended look at LVM. I'm not using it right now, but if I ever decide to, I'll know where to come back for information about it!
DW weekly... one of the first things I do on a Monday!
(Oh, and I didn't even notice the "new" logo until I read the comments. Brown isn't my favorite color, but meh... it's a logo.)
Finally, congratulations to PCLinuxOS for their "final" release. Looks nice, and I'm planning on installing it on my Dad's computer this week. It seems as it shouldn't give him any difficulties.
Take care, everyone. I hope you all have a good week!
GBYLBT, PastorEd
54 • ext4 bug (by nix on 2009-03-16 19:52:02 GMT from United States)
Tso states that this is an application problem. In my not so humble opinion; this is a bug with ext4. With delayed allocation and a power failure; you should loose just the data that has yet to be written to disk. The bug in question wipes out the contents of the original data. At a minimum this is a file system problem at a maximum this is both a file system and application problem.
Just my .02 cents worth.
55 • No subject (by forest on 2009-03-16 20:02:56 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re #38.
Can only agree with the KISS principle, and I am a bit reticent to embrace this LVM or indeed RAID. It does seem fraught with dangers and rather a lot of "programming" (I speak from my perspective of course.) and, just because it is "do-able" is it justifiable? Ditto RAID. I usually employ the CIBA test (can-I be-arsed?)
(The notion of striping the RAID set up, or any RAID option is, I consider, a case of technology looking for a home, similarly LVM. Unless a case could be made that such arrangements were absolutely vital I would steer clear of this practice...again that's from my perspective...)
I found, for me, that the DOAS (distro-on-a-stick) notion was worth a punt so experimented with installing what would install and using the usb boot option in BIOS rather more than usual. Currently I am using Puppy Interlace, Knoppix and the "original" Puppy.
This way you don't really have to back up your hard drive for the distro...any probs...just bung in another stick. Yes it could be a pain if you lost your "favourites" but just run your sticks and save said favs to each stick first.
I found it fine to use a 4GB stick(s) to mount the distro itself, then save whatever files I wanted onto the stick, then unrar, say, (if nec) to the stick, then transfer said unrar'd file to an external hard drive.
Similarly any WP I needed to do could sit on the stick then onto the ext h/d...or rather ext h/dS. Email sits in cyberspace so that issue is neither here nor there for me.
(I had an disaster years back, which resulted in losing everything...apart from a few files I had stuck onto CDrom. Believe me, you do not want to do this twice, LOL! (In those days HP saw fit NOT to supply a set of recovery discs with the PC and wanted £35 for the set of 5CDroms to bring everything back as original...then SP1, followed by SP2...don't get me started on SP3...probably the reason I looked rather harder at Linux.)
Following the save to h/ds I do a final save onto CD or DVD rom. Granted I can only save (on my system, ie, no Blu Ray) a max of 4.7GB odd but If a DVD rom fails it's only a "few" GB and not a whole h/d's worth.
Really precious stuff, family fotos of the dearly departed I stash onto gmail accounts...cos it's free, so why not?! And are "redeemable" from anywhere on the planet.
The notion of saving all your stuff onto a single 500GB or 1TB h/d is simply asking for trouble. My ext h/ds max out at 250GB and even that's too big a chunk to lose if the drive fails. I have to say I wish they still made smaller drives but that's not going to happen...in fact I gather there are 1.5TB sata drives around...that is one enormous amount of work to lose if it goes bad...and they do...
I much prefer having a whole stack of DVD roms (which I on occasion reburn...just in case) and a few 160GB ext h/ds, carrying the same files on each.
To my mind the added effort of saving to stick, thence to ext h/d(s) and finally to DVDrom is a lot less effort that having to try all sorts of recovery apps to do the Lazarus thing on a h/d with its toes curled up...when you know the chances of success are on a par with Bill Gates doing a 180 and admitting MS is probably not that good anyway...
One advantage with a stick is that I found was that it was easier to install to said stick than tiddle about trying to either install to a hard drive or run a live CD or DVD rom.
Whether this is the "future" remains to be seen, but having a supply of usb sticks and a couple of PCs capable of booting off usb does make it easier to "compute".
I don't trouble with recovery routines if another stick is to hand, what went wrong is in the past and, again from my POV, that's where it stays.
There's always another distro around the bend...now if all devs could be persuaded to load up a usb installer...
56 • re#51 (by hab on 2009-03-16 20:07:26 GMT from Canada)
I presume that you are referring to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality, rather than this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram?
cheers
57 • Great issue, LVM, #13-WIndows/Mac converts, #52-censorship? I don't think so (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-03-16 20:18:43 GMT from United States)
First, I think the lead article was an excellent LVM tutorial by Chris Smart. It's well written, covers tlhe most popular distros, and makes it reasonably easy for someone with a modicum of Linux knowledge to install LVM. Well done!
LVM, generally in combination with RAID5, is widely used in the enterprise. The average Joe or Jane Six-Pack home user probably will never need or use it. The average Joe or Jane Six-Pack home user also wouldn't likely ever read or be interested in DistroWatch. The readership here, OTOH, clearly includes people who are interested in somewhat more advanced subjects that go beyond a basic installation. I strongly disagree with #13 simply because Windows/Mac users aren't the target audience or readership of this website IMHO. To me the sniping and personal attacks that often end up gracing the comments are more certain to drive people away than an LVM article.
#52-I've read more anti-Ubuntu um.... stuff... (kinder than the word I wanted to use) on DistroWatch than any other Linux forum I care to think of. DistroWatch is pro-Ubuntu? It censors anti-Ubuntu posts? I don't think so.
58 • Weekend Fun (by Anonymous on 2009-03-16 20:43:08 GMT from United States)
Great second installment on VLM. I just wish you could have more than 3 on a drive.
Is the read/write access any faster?
I just spent 12 hours each day installing a new distro on fairly average boxes. Both with 256mb memory from a 24x laptop style cd drive. One was a PIII 650mhz and the other a Celeron 700.
I chose XFCE distros on each Mint and Dream both took about 12 hours. The moon installer didn't work either. I chosed ReiserFS, should I have done ext4 or VLM?
59 • MoonOs more than welcome (by Gus on 2009-03-16 20:49:36 GMT from Spain)
Tried MoonOS and was very positively surprised. It somehow seems like a Linux Mint Enlightenment E17 / LXDE edition. Great addition
60 • TinyCore surpased my expectations (by rarsa on 2009-03-16 21:30:39 GMT from Canada)
I am a puppy user. I really appreciate the "small" size and "speed". With that in mind I can say that TinyCore blew me away.
- Downloaded in seconds,
- Booted to a VM in no time.
- Applications are a click away
- Applications don't run, fly! even though they are running under a VM.
I'll keep playing with it.
61 • #52 (by Anonymous on 2009-03-16 21:50:48 GMT from Lithuania)
Wow ! Ubuntu bashers are truly a bunch of crybabies as it was evidenced in that post.Once again I might add...
62 • Irony && real-word LVM use for the home (by gord-s on 2009-03-16 22:42:36 GMT from United Kingdom)
The real reason we need LVM installs is that with all the bitching, abusing and personal backstabbing that goes on here, even a robust browser rapidly fills the RAM, spews gigabytes of crud out to swap, then the OS oops! sorry Filesystem oops! sorry Badly Written Applications writes GB-on-GB of rubbish into the root FS until it gets full.
Luckily in these days of hotswap and LVM we can add extra platters into the array to keep the bitching and moaning going; just certain other OS users who seem to suffer ALL of the above, but have to use some strange proprietary NTFS mechanism to acheive an identical result.
A realworld practical home use for LVM is a home storage server for video files, like a PVR/Myth sort-of-thing. You just keep adding Terrabytes until the system case fills up, then use ATAoE and fill an adjacent case. My best yet is 21 TB for an ad-hoc dumping server, rising slowly. Not a single bit wrong so far, MD5s every week or 2 during the night. (my serious servers are much more organised ATAoE affairs though)
When it gets as big as this the sustained speeds seem to even out nice an high too, a nice side effect; I think it's due to the JBOD-style that such a huge array turns into, spreading so much across so many spindles and busses.
The downside? Size your UPS carefully, very, very carefully :) BEEEEEP-BEEP!
63 • Nice (by Paul Juarez on 2009-03-16 22:51:43 GMT from United States)
Hi Chris,
I must admit I have always looked forward to Monday and the distrowatch news letter. However, Since you have taken the helm this weekly has been ground breaking. Thanks for the good work you are putting into this weekly news letter! keep up the good work!
Paul ;-)
64 • pc linux os 2009.1 (by dave on 2009-03-17 00:13:45 GMT from United States)
Well I installed pclinux os 2009.1 yoday onto my machine dual booting with xp.After the initial install upon reboot it just hung up.Darn! i thought.It seems that this new release isnt cooperating quite as well as 2007 did.The live cd ran flawlessly.A quick trip over to the forums fixed my problem.It seems I had too add the cheat code "no scsi" under boot options at the start.After entering said cheat code wich i found directly under texstars release announcement entered as 2009.1 eratta,by texstar himself,all was well and she started no problem.I also was quite delighted that i only needed to enter this code once as all bootups afterwards went off without a hitch.It seems as though texstar knew this would be a problem and immediately posted the solution.thank you texstar for yet another wonderful release,even if its not quite as problem free as 2007 release.It has been my experience that with slightly older machines pc linux runs in live mode where ubuntu will not.and also runs a higher resolution!
65 • @62 and others re LVM (by john frey on 2009-03-17 00:47:11 GMT from Canada)
Exactly the same reason I'm using LVM. A year or 2 ago I had many video files scattered across many hard drives. I wanted to access the files alphabetically. I could have created a list or an HTML page and linked each entry to the correct location. I could have moved the files around so they were all in alphabetical order. The problem with both those solutions was that I was planning to add to the files on an ongoing basis. That would mean constantly updating the list and links or continually moving files so they would be in order.
When I heard about LVM it seemed like a good solution to an increasing volume of files without requiring any constant updating or sorting. It was far more interesting to learn to set up an LVM. The other options seemed like drudgework to me.
I tell people I am training that there are always at least 3 ways to do anything on a computer. Often there are more but that seems to be a minimum. I choose to do things based on my likes and dislikes which will be different than someone else. LVM has it's uses for sure. No it's not a K-tel food processor slicing and dicing and working miracles undreamt. It's a really useful tool for certain jobs.
I don't know if Chris plans a further tutorial on LVM with raid1. For anyone who wants to increase the reliability of their LVM setup that is the way to go. Personally I go to howtoforge to find instructions like that. For anyone who doesn't know about it, Howtoforge is a really great source of howto's from the basic how to install an OS to very advanced. No, I'm not associated with them I just like the site a lot.
66 • No subject (by Still_Learning on 2009-03-17 01:42:11 GMT
)
Re 21 - Most home users backup to optical media (CD/DVD) or an extra hard drive. Tape is still out there, but mostly only in enterprise environments. Anyone in medical, legal, financial, and multimedia business has to be concerned with long-term archiving (5 to 10 years, depending on market, and what laws govern your field). I think it was on Steve Gibson's site I saw mention that data retention on hard drives could be suspect after only a few years. That leaves (at least for now) DVD as the affordable option. If handled with clean cotton gloves by the edges only, stored in the dark, at 25 degrees C, and low humidity, such media SHOULD last at least 10 years. Finding proper studies with correlating data to back up their findings is another matter. Some aspects of the industry seem shrouded in secrecy. The claims and advertising only making it harder to discern product reliability, or lack thereof. Sort of reminds me of all the claims the pharmaceutical industry makes (although DVDs don't come with a host of side effects!). Personally, anything important gets backed up to multiple media from several manufacturers, as they all have the odd bad batch.
Large data pools can be tarred across multiple media. Once done, in addition to verifying the media (eg. K3b does a CRC check), you can use CDCK to actually plot a chart of the access times for various parts of the media. With a bit of use, you will soon recognize what is normal for your DVD writer and media. Then you will start to see patterns and differences from manufacturer to manufacturer and even from batch to batch. The important thing is, the timings are consistant and repeatable, so a bad batch or spindle sticks out. This of course leads to questions about quality control in the industry; again with no clear answers. I am still awaiting the arrival of holographic media. Just like a holgram, if one area is damaged, the entire rest of the media provides redundancy. These are the size of present media, but sort of a radioactive-Hulk-slime-green colour.
re 25 - scanners: Does anyone know where you can presently walk into a store and buy a flatbed scanner "off the shelf" that is fully supported in Linux under sane. None of the current stock at any of the local "big box" stores is listed in the Sane Back ends supported list. I have a Canon 4200F. Works fine in the viral OS; zip under Linux. I'll never buy another Canon product. But even with Epson and HP, why can't I find an affordable supported scanner. There are some all-in-one-solutions, but for reliability, the idea is to keep your scanning and printing solutions separate.
re 33 - That should be Acronis ending in an "S" for anyone doing a search. They do make fine proprietary products for anyone so inclined....
67 • Re: ext4 (54) (by Duhnonymous on 2009-03-17 01:43:11 GMT from United States)
If you look at the bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781
You will see that it *is* considered a bug in Linux (aka the kernel).
Nevertheless, everyone who is concerned should read these as well:
http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2009/03/16/ext4-vs-fsync-my-take/
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/comments/45
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=310436
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/15/dont-fear-the-fsync/
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/11/2031231
And if you are worried about data loss, it really doesn't matter whether you're using ext2/3/4 or even NTFS or FAT32. You need a UPS. :)
68 • Enneagram of Personaility types RE #56 (by Bill Savoie on 2009-03-17 01:48:49 GMT from United States)
Yes, you understand. What struck me, is around the enneagram type one, the habitual need to perfect, and be perfect and how this drives people.
Especially this line from that website "They often demonstrate integrity (consistent adherence to a set of values) and a desire to improve things for the good of all. Challenges for Ones include dealing with their own anger, managing their perfectionism, and being overly critical of self and others."
People also need to know that an enneagram type is a habit that we fall into, it is not the real way that we are, it is our defense or mask. A perspective that we can, with mindfulness, drop.
My ennergram type is a seven. I am a bit like 'Peter Pan' and I get stressed out by the perfectionism of the enneagram type one, who naturally nit-picks at my facade cover. I also turn into a one, if I get stressed out.
If you think computers are complicated, think again. Humans are much more complicated, and therefore interesting.
69 • re#67 Enneagram of Personaility (by hab on 2009-03-17 02:44:57 GMT from Canada)
Interesting read. I have bookmarked the page for further reading. I have long wondered just how much we project our own needs, wants, and desires on any situation we encounter.
As to how complicated computers vs organics are, i remember three or four years ago reading that silicon information encoding technology (after all, what are computers?) had 1/100000th the information density capability that organic tissue has. DNA has silicon all beat to heck, 6 ways from sunday.
Being, that computers are among humanity's first halting steps at duplicating the wetware that many organics are carrying round, we haven't really come that far at all!
cheers
70 • In reply (by Chris Smart on 2009-03-17 02:46:24 GMT from Australia)
Hi everyone,
Firstly, let me publicly apologise to Robert Shingledecker. No offense was intended in the news article on Tiny Core and yes, in hindsight I should have sought to clarify the issue with him. I did however try and follow the forum posts back and forth and piece together what I thought happened, but obviously I got it wrong. I have offered to interview Robert for next week's DistroWatch Weekly where he can set the record straight and discuss Tiny Core in more detail.
As for LVM, yes it may scare away users to Linux but as some have already stated, this is a website about Linux, for Linux users. I see nothing wrong with putting up some technical articles from time to time. In fact this was requested by a DistroWatch reader last week. Why do we always have to cater for newbies? Linux has grown quite well so far with many aspect still very complicated.
Sure, LVM may not be for you, so don't use it. But you'll be surprised how many users do use it on their everyday desktops. If you've installed Fedora and gotten the default LVM layout, you might now understand some more about your system. Is is bad to understand more about your system? In fact, if you need more hard drive space you might just extend your LVM next time, instead of re-formatting. And if not, then so be it.
I didn't have to give the background on partitioning (which may have made it seem more complicated) but I did it to help users understand. I do not believe in a step through 'do this, do that' method of teaching, but conveying ideas and getting users to _understand_ what they are learning.
You can install Linux on a single / partition if you want to, just like a single C: under Windows. If you want you can use a graphical tool to shrink the partition and make a new one, just like Windows. Linux partitioning is not more complex, but it is far more powerful.
@30
In a simple LVM configuration if one drive fails you do not lose all your data, just the data that was stored on that drive. The contents of your original drive will still be in tact. You can use LVM to do more fancy stuff, like striping across two drives, in which case you will lose your data as part of every file is written to
Yes, if you move your LVM drive to another computer, you can read your data. If you have LVM configured in two drives and split them apart,
@43
I agree that this is not a general ext4 bug that makes it unstable, and I hope that wasn't what was implied in the newsletter. In my opinion, ext4 is absolutely safe to use. The file corruption issue is only a problem if your computer crashes, you turn it off without safely shutting down, or there's a power outage (get a UPS). This is a problem when you use proprietary drivers like ATI's horrible fglrx driver, which is just too unstable. This probably was noticed under Ubuntu more than other distros because they do lots of work to get non-free drivers into the kernel.
Using other modern file systems will present the same issue. XFS for example, yet the problem is not also considered a 'XFS bug'.
I dunno if this will work, but if you do experience this problem then try to sync your file system using magic key shortcuts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key).
Remember this line:
Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken
Hold down ALT+SysRq, and press R, E, I, S, U, B keys individually.
R: Switch the keyboard from raw mode to XLATE mode.
E: Send the SIGTERM signal to all processes except init.
I: Send the SIGKILL signal to all processes except init.
S: Sync all mounted file systems (IMPORTANT).
U: Remount all mounted file systems in read-only mode.
B: Immediately reboot the system, without un-mounting partitions or syncing.
I'd be interested to hear back from anyone who does experience the problem and see if this stopped their files from becoming corrupt.
-c
71 • @ 30 (by Chris Smart on 2009-03-17 02:49:27 GMT from Australia)
@30
Whoops, forgot to finish that sentence.
You can use LVM to do more fancy stuff, like striping across two drives, in which case you will lose your data as part of every file is written to both drives.
-c
72 • Damn Small Linux and TinyCore (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-03-17 05:42:09 GMT from United States)
I've read the apologies that both Chris and Ladislav have written to Robert Shingledecker and I hope that they are accepted and that Mr. Shingledecker will avail himself of the offer to be interviewed. I am a longtime user of Damn Small Linux. It's currently installed on my circa 1998 Toshbia Libretto SS1010 (Pentium 233MMX, 64MB RAM, 2.1GB HDD), a frugal install in a dual-boot configuration with Vector Linux Light 6.0 beta 3. DSL is effectively my maintenance partition from which I install an OS into the larger partition. A few years back I wrote about reviving an even more primitive Mitsubishi Amity CN at http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/07/atticware_revisited_stepbystep.html with step by step instructions for installing DSL at http://www.mizuhoradio.com/personal/caitlyn/lightweightlinux/amitycn.html I no longer have the Amity but I still get e-mails from folks who are installing DSL onto them.
I am also find what Mr. Shingledecker has achieved in just 10MB of space with Tiny Core interesting. It's a skillfully done little distro, or at least the base of one.
For someone like me, on the outside, who had nothing to do with the dispute between Robert Shingledecker and John Andrews I find myself wishing both of them well with their respective projects. Mr. Andrews has made clear that he intends to continue Damn Small Linux, albeit at somewhat larger size (100MB) and with a newer kernel and newer apps. Mr. Shingledecker remains focused on keeping things small. They are going in different directions and both projects seem worthwhile to me. Continued success to both of them.
73 • @70 & article suggestions (by Woodstock69 on 2009-03-17 07:37:22 GMT from Papua New Guinea)
Thanks Chris for a well formatted and written article on LVM.
For the detractors : Too hard for some? Too easy for others!
Given the interest and stated opinion (fact?) that DWW is not necessarily for noobies, I'd like to suggest another article : HD recovery.
Having managed to delete the partition table last week from my Linux box whilst making room for another distro test install (no I didn't back the PT up. I'm a masochist and prefer to spend days recovering from my stupidity...) I wasn't particularly phased as I've done that before, and using GPart, recovered the PT.
This time however I realised that GPart doesn't handle extended partitions well. I had a data partition and a swap partition which GPart converted to a primary partition. Since the system can only handle 4 primary partitions and GParted wanted to create 6, things didn't quite work. I eventually read about testdisk and one other but that was after the fact. I have recovered the HD successfully now BTW after some more fiddling...
Something that surprised me was that not all the LiveCD distros have GParted as part of their kit. Its indispensable
!
So an idea for you, Chris and Ladislav, for a future article.
Keep up the great work and thanks again for your efforts!
74 • Wolvix & organic growth (by Tom on 2009-03-17 10:32:52 GMT from United Kingdom)
Yes, DSL & TinyMe are great and very worthwhile ventures. Of course bad things happen and people find "the juicy gossip" more interesting than positive news. Now we have 2 great new distros where we only had 1 before :) Actually, make that 3.
2 new developments from Wolven seem to have gone un-noticed this week. The Wolvix 2.0 beta1 released in the same week as Wolven became a new dad! Sorry Wolven if you were trying to keep that quiet! Wolvix 2.0 doesn't seem to be as tiny as previous releases, preferring more top-end machines now. I'm still posting this from my old PII tho ;)
Good luck and happy hunting to all,
Tom :)
75 • Tiny Core Linux (by Tom on 2009-03-17 11:43:27 GMT from United Kingdom)
I haven't tried this one yet but am always looking for a good tiny distro. Wolvix 1.1.0's were great. As i said ages ago DSL and TinyMe just don't install as easily but are much higher in the charts which i found frustrating. Both are good though, certainly better than M$ equivalents for a number of reasons. Wolvix 1.1.0's seemed to 'just work' very well tho and i'm interested to try out this TinyCoreLinux too.
Apols for errors in my last posting, from
Tom :)
76 • Sesame Street (by Jack on 2009-03-17 12:48:15 GMT from Canada)
Is there a live cd that will access Sesame Street "out of the box"?
The live CDs that I have tried all immediately show a window telling me to download flash
(a "live" CD is required so that little fingers pushing all the keys in sight don't mess up my computer)
thanks
77 • RE: 76 (by Landor on 2009-03-17 13:44:26 GMT from Canada)
I would believe distros like mint, mepis (not sure) pclos etc would be what you're looking for. There's always the option of a remaster with so many making it easier now, you could remaster a lighter distro adding flash so it's a bit quicker live, possibly even running in ram.
Hope that helps, wouldn't want any little ones to ever miss out on Super Grover in any way!
78 • @25 converting analog to digital (by john frey on 2009-03-17 15:16:28 GMT from Canada)
I did not comment before on this because I have very little personal experience with this. What you need is some sort of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to scan the manuals. That will convert the scanned images to text. At that point you can convert to PDF or any document format you want.
I don't know the current state of OCR. What little experience I had several years ago was very unsatisfactory. The quality of the hardware you use will be important for OCR. I was using a low quality scanner and I'm sure that had a lot to do with my bad experience. If your manuals have illustrations you will probably need to scan those separately and simply include them as image files in your documents. I expect you will have to proofread your OCR'd documents. Don't think you can find some software that will convert your manuals into electronic format without a lot of fiddling and editing to get a decent quality document unless you are willing to accept the manuals as a collection of image files.
You might also want to consider adding metadata to scanned image files as a way to search the manuals. You won't be able to search by text but you could search by subject, chapter, etc.
79 • Citrix (by Notorik on 2009-03-17 16:30:26 GMT from United States)
Does anyone know of any distros that have Citrix included? I think PCPuppyOS has it, any others?
80 • RE: 78 (by IMQ on 2009-03-17 17:08:02 GMT from United States)
Although I have very little experience with scanning software, I know there are OCR apps available for Windows as well as Linux. From my recollection of reading about them a few years back, they were not that great. They do a very basic job that still requires lots manual editing.
Since it has been awhile, I don't know how much progress has been made in the OCR. That was why I asked the question to get a good start.
I am going to do some googling to see what out there.
I was hoping with the creation of virtual libraries from various projects by the universities, etc., there would be a jump in the OCR technologies. The question would be weather these software freely available to the general public or they would cost prohibitive to end users like individual home users.
81 • LVM (by Jesse on 2009-03-17 17:51:57 GMT from Canada)
Some people have raised questions about storing data acros drives in an LVM and what happens if one drive dies. While I can see the concern this might raise, it begs a more important question: Don''t you backup your important files?
In the end, it doesn't matter what file system you use or if you have one disk or many. If you don't backup your data, sooner or later it'll get lost.
82 • @80 (by john frey on 2009-03-17 18:01:38 GMT from Canada)
Back in the early 80's I worked for NCR doing QC in manufacturing on their cheque encoders. My friend working there was involved in developing the OCR for reading the cheques. It was very difficult to get accurate recognition and they were reading numbers and symbols printed specifically to be machine readable (I'm talking about the account#, bank# and branch# encoding you have on the bottom of your cheques). The printers had to be very accurate or the readers would fail. I suppose the printers are much better these days as are the readers.
I don't know why it is so difficult. It seems to me it should be easier than converting vocal input into text and that seems to have come a long way and been very successful.
I've read some claims for really excellent OCR done with costly apps. I take those claims with a large grain of salt. A vendor of expensive proprietary software would say that.
83 • RE: 81 (by Landor on 2009-03-17 18:38:31 GMT from Canada)
In a sense for me anyway, that would defeat the reasoning behind using LVM. Sure, I know mass storage is fundaemental in the use behind it. On that note though, mass storage doesn't happen overnight, thus in my opinion negating the justification for the home user.
Home user A) goes out and buys a 1TB drive to supplement his 500GB drive via LVM. Now user A) needs to back-up 1.5 TB frequently. So in essence needs another 1.5 TB++ for the job. Home User B just backs up the data they want to keep on their 500GB drive and in the long run has a more responsive drive (as we all know they slow down when they get fuller) and saves quite a bit of cash since 479GB in DVDs is far cheaper than the same in HDDs
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
84 • @ 79 - Citrix (by DeniZen on 2009-03-17 18:55:14 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re Notorik: "Does anyone know of any distros that have Citrix included?"
Sorry I don't know of any off top the of my head, - but I'm curious as to your requirements TBH ;)
The 'Linux' Citrix ICA client is a very simple to install, script based routine, and can be installed by a user to /home, or system-wide as root.
(openmotif and openssl are likely dependencies, AIR).
I have to use it a fair bit for remote access to some of my work stuff , but had to install firefox, as konqueror (even in KDE 4.2.1.) didnt seem handle the sockets well.
(same on my Mac TBH - Firefox fine with Citrix , Safari - no-go ;( )
No doubt milage will vary - and anyways, you probably already knew that already so -
I'm curious - are you looking for a Live/'USB-able' Distro with Citrix ready enabled?
I'm surprised Citrix is included by default even in Puppy - its somewhat 'proprietary' by nature ;)
85 • @79 (by kell on 2009-03-17 23:06:45 GMT from United Kingdom)
I seem to remember an ICA client in the MEPIS repos, but it's been a while since I've tried it. I think there may be some older clients in some thin client distros (Thinstation?)
As DeniZen mentioned, the citrix client is a lot easier to install these days. OpenMotif is required (which I think was removed from the Fedora repos a while back, in case you use that), but you know longer have to add symbolic links and hack the browser too much.
I use it daily on Mandriva: Download the latest rpm, install accepting the dependancies, and if you're using the Web Interface, use Firefox and associate the .ica file type with /usr/lib/ICAclient/wfica. Done.
86 • Announcement Timing (by Just Curious on 2009-03-18 00:14:12 GMT from United States)
Is it just me, or do more distros (do the smart thiing) and typically make announcements just after DWW drops for maximum nerd exposure? It seems more pronounced lately. Maybe I'm just crazy, or it's just people getting back to work, but news always seems to ramp up on Mondays... I wish I had more time to find some data on this.
Please no flames, just a tongue-in-cheek "observation".
87 • linux-swap (by Tom on 2009-03-18 00:32:36 GMT from United Kingdom)
@ 32 gk
With 2Gb Ram you're unlikely to need much swap unless you do lots of heavy gaming while watching movies with a few virtual machines open on that spinning compiz cube. Unless you use hibernation mode.
@ 58 Weekend Fun
Unfortunately you seemed to pick the wrong 2 distros for your machine. Perhaps try Wolvix or TinyCore this weekend? Both very fast tho so perhaps time for 2 more?
http://wolvix.org/get.php
@ 66 Still_Learning
One person got his old dvd working by using a sanding machine on it. Not generally a good idea tho. Not sure if he wore cotton gloves ...
G'nite all :)
88 • latest offerings, thoughts. (by gknifemonkey on 2009-03-18 02:01:59 GMT from New Zealand)
unless i'm mistaken there's a bit of good old fashioned separatist motion going on here to divide WM's and core philosophy's of the linux derivatives, more so than usual!
KDE is going "power user", ie. requires more power but gives more features, clean lines etc.
More people are finally recognizing Openbox as a key component in the lightweight gui department with help from LXDE.
Then there's enlightenment which is refining itself as a truly useful work of art.
Then there's Gnome which is well, still Gnome... (which is a good thing! It does simplified functionality and mediocrity like no other).
Meanwhile the actual software repositories and methodologies of initialization, distribution and advertising strategies of individual projects are really working their angles to find a niche in their target audience and avoid collisions with related or similar distributions.
Combined with the recent, mind blowing and valuable developments in kernel, filesystem and repo packaged software technologies (for me notably, much improved peripheral device support, improved compression support from intrafms, kernel and the fruition of the KDE teams efforts and improving support from the community, and improvements to all popular packages accross the board)....
The development hive is buzzing alot lately! I feel that economic pressure is just the kick needed to justify replacing costly and inefficient systems with ones that are free and ultimately, superior. Just to make the point even more blunt and visceral, it looks like Open Source Operating Systems (OSOS?) just keep getting better while the competition's overall performance just keeps getting worse and worse, i could explain that with a mathematical formula here based on real world facts but i'll leave that for later.
I hope this comment doesnt get lost here on DW comments box, maybe it's time for a DW forum or DW blogosphere? ^_^_^
install the most appropriate distro to as many computers as you can!!! Saving wasted CPU cycles is good for the environment!!!!! JUST STOP TO THINK ABOUT IT FOR A MOMENT!!!!
thank-you... feel free to copy and paste my rant to as many places as you want lol
89 • Re 85 , 88 (by sertse on 2009-03-18 02:58:47 GMT from Australia)
The other thing about timing, if you're a "major" distro you might want to announce it on an otherwise slow week...
Personally I thought there would of been a PCLOS review this week but I suppose that was put aside because DW was halfway into the LVM guide, and it wouldn't have been right to break it up.
90 • #84, 85 (by Notorik on 2009-03-18 03:00:29 GMT from Sweden)
Thanks for the info. I think I will try to install it. Just curious, is there a GPL client that will work?
91 • No subject (by Still_Learning on 2009-03-18 04:36:27 GMT from Canada)
Re 87 - Using Sanding machine to restore a CD/DVD:
(Mock horror) I hate to see how you treat the rest of your computer equipment! Seriously, there IS some validity in the technique, although a bit crude. If all you are dealing with is a slightly scratched surface, there are a number of products to resurface the media. They essentially boil down to using a fine polishing compound, much as lens makers do in making optics (eg - grinding your own telescope optics). A typical commercial preparation is "DiskRestore" from DiscRestore International in San Jose, California. Any very fine polishing agent should work. Avoid Comet, toothpaste, etc. too rough, but similar mild abrasives with finer particle size should work. If the media is defective or substandard to begin with, the data may not even get properly written in the first place! (which is why I was stressing backing up to multiple media from different suppliers, as well as using different types of media - be it hard drives, off-site storage, tape, whatever, in addition to or in place of using LVM/raid, etc). Now if the media originally DID test ok, and data WAS successfully written, and one year later proves unreadable, as a last resort if no backups are available, there are tools such as dvd disaster at http://dvdisaster.net/en/ Hope you never actually need to use this info. Remember: backup, backup, backup..... (no place here to insert irritating backupwarning beep sounds from truck backing up)
92 • @90 (by kell on 2009-03-18 07:52:49 GMT from United Kingdom)
I haven't heard of one. I think there was once an ica option in rdesktop, but it still required the citrix client installed. Citrix do mention third party clients on their site, but I've never seen one, certainly no open source.
93 • Sesame Street-live CD (by jack on 2009-03-18 12:47:47 GMT from Canada)
Thanks Landor
It seems that Sessame Street requires Flash 10.
I tried updating 9 to (i think) the latest 9; no go
So my question is really
Is there a live CD with Flash 10(OOB)?
thanks
94 • MoonOS (by Anonymous on 2009-03-18 13:43:45 GMT from United States)
I'm glad to see that MoonOS has made it onto distrowatch.
95 • New Logo (by Barry on 2009-03-18 14:29:57 GMT from Russian Federation)
Hey, that's not good!
Where is the other part of the world???
Where is Asia, Oceania?
I deem there linux-users in China, Japan and NZ too...
96 • TinyCore on older hardware (by Verndog on 2009-03-18 14:37:37 GMT from United States)
Those that think Tiny Core Linux being small in size is made for older hardware, may want to think again.
Read these comments at TC forums:
http://tinycorelinux.com/forum/index.php?topic=308.0
Specifically read this comment:
"Older hardware of said class( 200Mhz) is not very capable in running much of any of the newer software.
There are existing distributions Deli and DSL that support older hardware very well."
I personally had problems , not with boot, but using newer programs on limited ram and older hardware. Deli is good choice.
97 • RE: 93 • Sesame Street-live CD (by Adam Drake on 2009-03-18 16:11:40 GMT from United States)
Perfect timing! I just helped my kids watch some Elmo videos on sesamestreet.org last night. I'm running Mint 6 and it takes about 30 seconds to click the link to the flash install, select Ubuntu 8.04 (.deb), and enter your password. If you have to use a live CD, it wouldn't be much extra time beyond waiting for it to boot. If your kids are young enough to randomly smack keys and click the mouse (as mine are), you probably want to be there with them while they're on the net anyway...
98 • well that talked it up... (by Steve on 2009-03-18 16:47:47 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re my own post 38. I now have a "won't boot" laptop with some sort of HD problem.
Looking at research tools to use on this (XP) box, I have been playing with MS's OneNote - which looks... reasonable. It comes with a indexer / search tool - so I started that running (much HD activity). Also using Word; did a save of my current work - and all goes quiet. With the HD light permanently on.
The rig still goes, just cannot see the HD at boot time (but will after a live CD boot). Looks like some minor damage.
Back to the USB stick idea in 38. Anybody actually done this to make an HD-less laptop??
:(
99 • Linux frustrations (by Frisco on 2009-03-18 17:02:46 GMT from United States)
We now have Mepis antiX-8 running on 3 of 5 machines at our facility. Our frustrations with finding a linux distro in common for all machines seem to be coming to an end; began our search in 1997 with our old, now gone, IBM.
The search grew once we acquired two laptops and two more PCs. The varying nature of the hardware in these machines has been the challenge, and we were resigned to searching for a distro that could run on the laptops, maybe more than one for those, and at least one for the PCs, maybe two because of the different specs on them as well.
Networking was the roadblock for one of the laptops, the one with the Realtek rtl8187b adapter. That is now resolved with antiX.
The issue on the oldest PC, nVidia FX5200 (old style pci) graphics was the big bugaboo for linux distros until antiX.
This is a report of confidence for antiX, which may end up residing and working on all 5 of our machines (one used HP just arrived yesterday and is being checked out). antiX really has caused us to breathe a sigh of relief after so much installing and configuring of other distros, uncountable other distros. :o)
100 • #99 (by Notorik on 2009-03-18 17:34:09 GMT from Germany)
That is very interesting. Can you give more detailed specs on your machines? I am interested in seeing "how low can it go"? I am currently running Tiny Core on a very old machine (pre Pentium II). It runs Opera without flash. It is very fast on the web. I can't even change the wallpaper though or it will crash. It might be different if I could install it but haven't figured that out yet.
101 • 2009-03-09: Distribution Release: JUXlala! 2.0 (by Eugen Labun on 2009-03-18 18:42:51 GMT from Germany)
A new major version of the wonderful educational live cd for pre-school children 3+ (in german).
Homepage: http://www.jux-net.info/
Release Info: http://www.jux-net.info/juxlala/index.html
Download: http://www.jux-net.info/juxlala/download.html
ISO: http://sources.jux-net.info/juxlala/preview/JUXlala_2.0.iso (380 MB)
MD5: http://sources.jux-net.info/juxlala/preview/JUXlala_2.0.iso.md5
cd booklet: http://www.jux-net.info/juxlala/daten/JUXlala2_Booklet.pdf
cd label: http://www.jux-net.info/juxlala/daten/JUXlala2_CD_Aufdruck.pdf
Why is this distibution still not included in the Distrowatch base?
102 • The old machine specs (pretty "low") (by Frisco on 2009-03-18 19:26:02 GMT from United States)
Notorik, the Gateway has the .9Mhz Intel CPU (a 1.1 was offered that year, 1999, but we saved $70 by going with the cheapo), nVidia FX5200 pci graphics card (it is a card we purchased in 2002 to replace the horrid Intel graphics) with 128Mb ram.
We were given an 80Gb Seagate hard drive for it last year, that's the one with antiX on it now. The original hard drive is a 20Gb Western Digital with Vista Basic on it (it originally had the rather comical Windows Millenium on it).
Performance with Vista is pretty sluggish and requires a lot of maintenance such as running CCleaner and Auslogics defragmenter every day we use that particular hard drive. We will eventually toss it, I am sure now because of Mepis antiX running so well for so many people all with their differing requirements in graphics, multimedia and various other work that only Vista could be predictable on.
103 • forgot to mention system ram (by Frisco on 2009-03-18 19:27:34 GMT from United States)
Sorry for double posting, the ram chips in the Gateway (two of them) add up to 512Mb.
104 • #97 sesame street (by Anonymous on 2009-03-18 19:46:54 GMT from Canada)
Many thanks Adam Drake
I will check out Mint 6
105 • #104 (by jack on 2009-03-18 20:00:21 GMT from Canada)
Sorry
#104 is my post
forgot to sign
ps I find that "little fingers" require constant attention which is not always possible
Thanks
106 • No subject (by forest on 2009-03-18 21:44:51 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re #98
Not done the HD-less laptop but yes to the PC.
Currently this is from puppy interlace running of usb stick but "forced into ram".
Found that it was not a happy puppy if there were 2 usb sicks plugged in on boot. (possibly a primary and secondary usb socket and the boot usb in the secondary socket?) BIOS ignored the "boot from usb" and defaulted to next device in queue, ie in this instance the h/d.
At the risk of teaching you to suck eggs and you are up for it, have you tried removing the laptop h/d from laptop...two screws possibly...and away with the h/d. And booting of the usb with just the one stick attached.
Ref the booting that doesn't, does the bios know you have another OS?
107 • re#106,#98 boot up (by hab on 2009-03-19 01:05:37 GMT from Canada)
I have in the past booted my old tosh lappie with SmartBootManager here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/ and/or GRUB CD here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromUSB. With no harddrive within 5' off the box. YMMV.
To the best of my understanding linux dos not really use the BIOS. I have had mobos with 4 ide drives attached boot fine, with primary and secondary ide turned off in the bios. Linux simply booted as usual, all drives and partitions recognized.
cheers
108 • TinyCore re-visited (by Verndog on 2009-03-19 05:30:23 GMT from United States)
I have an old Compaq Armada, PII, 300mhz, 192meg on a 1.4gig HD.
Following Robert Shingledecker notes at TC forum, I was able to boot TC using a HD instead of CDROM, using the frugal method.
TinyCore works off of a single msdos fat32 partition, using GRUB4DOS
I copied all the GRUB4DOS files onto the root directory along with the two file to boot TC. bzImage and tinycore.gz. Then I changed the menu.lst file to include the following code:
title Tiny Core
kernel (hd0,1)/tinycore/bzImage vga=773
initrd (hd0,1)/tinycore/tinycore.gz
That's it. Fastest boot ever, period.
The hard part was figuring out GRUB4DOS numbering scheme.
GRUB4DOS is quite abit different than Grub. Many new commands.
This works great on my 11 year old laptop. I'm amased at how fast it boots...Now if I can figure out how to get mpayer or somesuch mp3 player to work.
I for one, would be very interested in reading an interview of TinyCore's author, Robert Shingledecker.
109 • Re: 101 • 2009-03-09: Distribution Release: JUXlala! 2.0 (by Anonymous on 2009-03-19 05:51:52 GMT from Australia)
Eugen Labun, wrote:
"Why is this distibution still not included in the Distrowatch base?"
I don't know if it is any good ! but has any one ASKED for it to be added ?
May or may not be applicable/etc. for some Germanic people ?
110 • No subject (by forest on 2009-03-19 09:53:39 GMT from United Kingdom)
What is it that they say about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory...? LOL
http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=2165
111 • articles (by Tom on 2009-03-19 10:46:54 GMT from United Kingdom)
It's excellent to see articles that aren't always totally aimed at noobs. Thanks Chris :) It gives me something more to aim for :)
@ 99 Frisco
It seems a shame to cripple the more advanced machines by running the same distro on all even though antiX is excellent. Surely just theming and re-organising the desktop and ensuring that all machines had the same basic applications would do the trick? I'm guessing it's the Vista that's getting the boot but you're keeping the 20Gb? Good to hear you have got it all working now and i guess there are a lot of advantages to having the same distro on all, was just teasing in the "missed a spot" way ;)
@ 98 Steve
A LiveCd should be able to help recover all your data but there are specialist tools out there. Also sometimes just reformatting a hard-drive with gparted is enough to fix all it's problems. Again there are some special tools. I've heard of Spinwrite but it only seems available in flaky Windows flavours :( Sometimes it is just 2 screws between you and a brand new hard-drive tho :)
@ 88 gknifemonkey
I like the variety. It means linux can really fly on a good range of machines and really show them off or even save them from "landfill".
There seem to be a lot of energy efficient machines out there but throwing an old machine into a rubbish dump & buying a 'green machine' seems absurdly hypocritical ;)
It's good to see distro's like TinyCore and such getting so much 'air time' in here but there's almost no mention of Wolvix which has shot up from 96th to 10th place in the last 7 days! Is this a record? DSL has always been very high in the charts and so it's no big surprise that a new distro created by half the previous team should also be very high but for a distro to jump 86 places in a week seems amazing. How different is the Wolvix 2.0beta? How low end can it go? Does it really give a top-end machine a good 'run for its money'? Can i scan for viruses on networked machines via avg or clamscan with it? It's the only distro that i've used that has been able to pick up on my local network without prompting and it surfs & runs multimedia apps well. Have other people been able to get laptops picking up wiifi more easily with Wolvix?
Good luck and happy hunting to all from
Tom :)
112 • Tiny Core (by Kaiz on 2009-03-19 15:03:25 GMT from United States)
In a word, "brilliant". R. & A. have had my attention on many old lappys and desktop boxes for several years running. DSL has been my go-to distro, though I've loved several Puppy offerings. It's a rare small/tiny distro I haven't burnt and tried in various lappys and boxes including Wolvix Cub and you-name-it. Must be a disease as I visit Distrowatch about 3 times per day when I'm online. In the end I come home to DSL and now TC. I'm still learning how to effectively install TC to hard drive as I'm only a beginner at Grub (for Dos or otherwise) but I'm learning. What a joy to get real work done off and online with a screamingly fast distro made with obvious care and precision! Looking very forward to reading DW's Robert S. interview, I sure hope he goes for it! KUDOS!!! -Kaiz
113 • standardizing our machines (by Frisco on 2009-03-19 15:06:49 GMT from United States)
Hi Tom. Yes the issue you touch on, with the wide range of machine types and specs we have here (more to come as we acquire donated laptops and PCs) has certainly been an object of discussion and many a meeting at this facility.
Windows was on everything, OEM, of course. The consensus over time has been to have *something other than Windows* on everything, little distro on low spec computers and big, Sabayon or whatever on the core duo ones, etc.
But the notion of having the same distro for all has taken hold; it was just a matter of getting one that would cover the broad range of challenges on our goofy equipment. And, as I say, more to come. :o)
114 • Struggling with that laptop (by Steve on 2009-03-19 15:39:48 GMT from United Kingdom)
Hi,
Interesting to read that Linux "does not use the BIOS".
The machine's symptom is that it can't find any HD, almost as if the controllers had gone AWOL... so I tried to boot it via an old USB stick to an on-HD Knoppix image (a 2005-04 one which the laptop has as an emergency OS). This - booted at 1/5th speed. The usual sequence was followed, except everything was very slow. And it found the on-HD .iso image, even though the BIOS could not find a device (!!). This supports the idea that Linux does not use BIOS (something I'm surprised at).
Knoopix / KDE (runs really smooth) was now up - so I copied my key files to another stick.
And would the machine now boot normally? Nope. Still refused to boot.
Next up I thought I'd try to boot from CD, so I slapped a Sabayon CD in and the machine boots from that fine.
And after that, the machine will boot normally from HD!
So I really don't trust this laptop; there is clearly some sort of (hw?) bug in the IDE area; perhaps a bad joint.
I'm going ahead with the "all-USB stick" idea, hoping to get to the point where I can pull the HD out (that'll save some battery power too).
Intent is to put either Sab 3.5.1 or mandriva 2008.1 as a .iso onto a fast-read stick (OCZ do one), the idea behind that is to minimise read/write cycles in the OS area. (? is that really an issue ?) Still need a JAFFS2 OS though to use for the read/write areas....
115 • Uses of LVM (by everettattebury on 2009-03-19 15:59:18 GMT from United States)
To those who ask why use LVM:
I used LVM to set up full disk encryption on my laptop running Ubuntu 8.10, following a tutorial I found here:
http://oei.yungchin.nl/2008/04/23/installing-ubuntu-804-with-full-disk-encryption/
Now I don't have to worry about my data falling in the wrong hands.
116 • re #114 laptop woes (by hab on 2009-03-19 18:33:42 GMT from Canada)
@steve
Laptops are sometimes a real PITA. Their hardware is far less standardized than desktops.
If you have not already done so, perhaps a bios flash to the latest version might provide a work around. If the bios has a setting for plug and play os, turn that off and try to boot. The fact that a usb boot detects the hd shows that the bios is lying to you when it says it can't find a hd. If practical, remove the drive and with 2.5" to 3.5" ide adapter hook it up to a desktop machine and zero the drive, put it back in the lappie and try again.
If the machine boots from a floppy, give SmartBootManager a whirl. It may provide some insight.
I am sure looking forward to efi replacing the archaic bios framework.
cheers
117 • linux and bios (by john frey on 2009-03-19 18:35:37 GMT from Canada)
It's mostly (if not entirely) correct that Linux doesn't use the bios. The drivers for all the controllers, etc on the motherboard are in the kernel. That is why you don't need to install motherboard drivers separately. Once the POST is finished and grub has booted a kernel image the kernel controls everything.
There are exceptions. If I overclock my cpu and or memory in the bios those settings will stay when the kernel boots. The kernel just accepts the bios output for frequency and bus speeds. Settings for fan speeds and overheating warnings can be set in the bios. They can also be set in Linux too, I believe but those are higher level routines.
I'm sure there are other things the kernel accepts form the bios that I don't know about.
118 • #117 (by Notorik on 2009-03-19 20:55:36 GMT from Germany)
Thanks for that explaination. I have often wondered about that.
119 • bios 'issues' (by Tom on 2009-03-19 22:52:22 GMT from United Kingdom)
@ 114 Steve
It sounds a lot like the bios in that machine is either very buggy or perhaps even infected (if that's possible). If it was desktop machine i would take the battery out for a good long while and then update (flash) the bios, preferably with the an upgraded version of the bios. These are usually found on manufacturers websites. It usually needs some sort of bootable Windows environment but i think gparted can help create one of those?
120 • antivirus for scanning Windows partitions (by Tom on 2009-03-19 22:58:02 GMT from United Kingdom)
Heck, sorry for posting so many times lately!
Does anyone know of a small linux distro that has an antivirus package on it's LiveCd. I'm told that ClamAv can be used from the command-line to remove any infected files on a Windows OS partition but that Panda can remove viruses from inside infected files leaving the file whole and uninfected. Personally i would rather lose the whole file as i can usually find a new one.
Thanks in advance from
Tom :)
121 • open geu (by dave the distrohopper on 2009-03-20 00:25:51 GMT from United States)
well i downloaded and installed open geu moments ago.first id like to say ive succesfully done a dual boot with pc linux os,yay its my first time and im quite impressed!!ive done dual boots with windoze but this is the first time dual booting linux op systems,and i was able too do it without a single problem.a year ago i didnt know what linux was. 9 months ago i performed my first linux installation.now here i am succesfully dual booting linux!its not like im some kind of computer wizard but i guess you could say i know my way around.now back to open geu.wow what a fantastic look its gorgeous.you can switch from a day sunlight theme to a night moonlight theme with just a couple clicks!I have too admit i love this e17 environment.along with an ubuntu base this is awesome.ive had ubuntu installed in the past but on my older winbook powerspec i couldnt achieve the higher resolution im getting with my dimension 4400.anyway i would reccomend open geu to anyone over the base ubuntu install,its sweet.
122 • Wolvix 2.0.0 beta 1 -- So far so good (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-03-20 02:50:22 GMT from United States)
I downloaded and burned Wolvix 2.0.0 beta 1 right after it was announced. Today I installed it on my six year old Toshiba Libretto Satellite 1805-S204. As expected the Live CD Is a bit slow but it's usable, something that isn't true of major distro Live CDs. The install went absolutely smoothly and everything works out of the virtual box, again something that Ubuntu can't do on the same laptop.
It's a first beta so I'm sure as I test it I'll find something broken to report but so far it's all good. Kudos again to Wolven, Oithona, and company.
I'm current downloading the newly released Vector Linux Light 6.0 rc1. See: http://forum.vectorlinux.com/index.php?topic=9052.0 Hopefully the results will be better than beta 3 which did not correctly install on the same Toshiba. (VL Standard and Deluxe did install correctly and everything worked.)
123 • Grub4dos can boot iso file (by RollMeAway on 2009-03-20 04:52:16 GMT from United States)
Recently discovered that grub4dos can actually boot an iso file without having to burn a CD.
Anyone interested in giving it a try can use a live CD that has grub4dos already on it.
The most recent "R.I.P linux -7.8" is one I have used. There are several others.
Boot the CD, select grub4dos, 'c' for command line and type in something like this:
map --mem (hd1,2)/iso/slitaz-cooking.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)
boot
First line contains the path to the iso file you want to boot, and says to load it into memory.
Next 3 line don't change.
I have installed grub4dos, and created menu items for several small iso's , currently the iso has to be small enough to load into available RAM.
I have read that a larger (than RAM size) iso will work if the iso file is contiguous.
Have tried several and failed. Don't know how to make, nor verify if a huge file IS contiguous.
The start of something NEW.
Try out the latest distro without even burning a disk!
124 • @122 by CM (by Frisco on 2009-03-20 11:32:34 GMT from United States)
What network adapter is on that Toshiba Libretto Satellite?
We could not get any version of Vectorlinux to successfully see our rtl8187b Realtek on this Toshiba Satellite A205.
That was true of many distros, even struggling with ndiswrapper and installed Windows drivers. It could connect for a time, but would drop the connection at irregular but frequent intervals.
125 • Re: KDE4 (by Anonymous on 2009-03-20 11:51:54 GMT from Germany)
> and even KTorrent has just recently been released.
You don't know what you're talking about: http://ktorrent.org/?q=node/11 - first KDE4 version was released February 2008.
126 • #20, re: antivirus LiveCD (by Anonymous on 2009-03-20 14:35:56 GMT from United States)
A few weeks ago, I had trouble finding a live CD with a *current* version of an antivirus program. I was at my parent's house and they *needed* it!
I think I tried INSERT Linux, but the versions of Fprot and ClamAV were outdated enough that I couldn't just download the new definitions.
I forget everything that I tried, but I ended up downloaded Vector Linux live and installed clamav.
If you can live with a Windows CD, you can try The Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (http://www.ubcd4win.com) or just Bart PE (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) which is what UBCD4Win is built on.
127 • @ 114 (by Patrick on 2009-03-20 14:41:03 GMT from United States)
Steve,
About JFFS2 or YAFFS2... (I assume one of those is what you are referring to when you wrote JAFFS2? :))
I don't think you need to worry about using them for read/write areas when you are using a USB stick. Those are file systems that are designed to work on MTDs (memory technology devices), ie on "bare metal" flash chips. They take care of wear leveling, bad flash pages, etc. and are typically used in embedded devices running Linux.
On the other hand, when you are using a USB stick or SD card or whatever, they already have a controller chip built-in that takes care of these low level details like wear leveling. To the Linux kernel, they appear as block devices, not as MTDs. So you can use normal file systems like ext3/4, ReiserFS, JFS, etc on them and the controller in the USB stick should take care of wear leveling.
Note though that it might still not be a good idea to install a normal desktop distro on the USB stick, even with this wear leveling going on. There tends to be a lot of writing going on all the time in most distros, especially to areas like /var. Distros like Puppy, TinyCore, probably others more tuned for this purpose tend to keep changes mostly in RAM, then write them to disk at specific times, for instance when shutting down. This will significantly extend the life of your USB stick.
Of course you could probably modify a normal desktop distro to be more USB-stick-friendly too, for instance by mounting /var and maybe other directories on a RAM disk.
128 • #126, #120 antivirus live cd (by Anonymous on 2009-03-20 16:49:45 GMT from United States)
It seems Tinycore has a clamav package which could be used along with ntfs-3g to deal with Windows installs. Both packages seem current and though they are not included in the cd iso image they are easy to take along on usb key or downloaded from the web if there is net access.
129 • #124: rtl8187 chipset (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-03-20 16:56:30 GMT from United States)
@Frisco: You are mixing up two Toshiba laptops. The Satellite 1804-S205 has an Intel wired ethernet chip. For wireless I use an Airlink 101 PCMCIA card which uses an Atheros 5212 chipset. The Libretto (10 years old) doesn't have wireless at all. I use an old 3Com PCMCIA card for wired internet.
The issue with the Realtek rtl8187 chipset has nothing to do with Vector Linux. The driver provided by Realtek for Linux is horrible in any distro. When I had the Sylvania g Netbook (original version) which had that chipset it was automatically detected by and configured by Vector Linux 6.0. The range was VERY limited but I didn't have it drop connections. Using ndiswrapper and the Windows driver is the correct answer. A number of people have gotten this to work in the Vector Linux forums. Do a forum search and you should be able to find instructions.
130 • wolvix 2.0.0 beta (by brotherinbluejeans on 2009-03-20 17:21:04 GMT from United States)
@ #122
yes, i too installed wolvix easily and everything was working correctly on first boot! ... and this is only the beta version. it the beta release already beats the socks off of other popular distro's official releases, it makes me wonder what else might be awaiting us in wolvix's official release!
in recent years i have been steering away from the monster distros.. i do a wide variety of things on my machine but nothing that ever needs a system larger that 500MB ..why have all that extra junk that i never use just slaowing down my computer? if i decide i want something i can always install it form the repositories.
i recently tried out wolvix after reading about it here on distrowatch and was very impressed. it has all the power and configurability of slackware, all the user-friendliness of distros like mandriva or ubuntu but with far superior hardware detection/configuration. :) it is now my default system.
like i said: i can't wait to see what the official release will be like!
131 • thanks (by Frisco on 2009-03-20 19:45:07 GMT from United States)
Appreciate your comments.
We're successful with antiX; Vector is not an option (nor those forums) even if it did work because we've been through it and had it drop connections, etc plus were so grateful to find a distro that works on our widely varying machines, old and newer.
Thanks again.
132 • antivir (by Tom on 2009-03-20 20:38:58 GMT from United Kingdom)
@ 128 & 126 both Anons
Thanks for the tips there. It's much appreciated :)
@ 122 Caitlyn
Good to hear Wolvix being used :) It's amazing how everything works. I'm pretty much a total noob and can't even use a file-browser or command-line to navigate to a shared folder on a networked drive. Yet emailing and torrenting out uploads was easy
@ 130 brotherinbluejeans
Wolvix seem to be progressing quite fast. All the artwork and wm chat in their forum looks interesting. It seems like a lot of changes could happen very fast. Is that often the way with Slackware?
133 • 2 problem of dist (by maurice on 2009-03-20 21:18:42 GMT from Canada)
The Vector new bringg bad connrctm. But too "haughty" of vector peopel . Here also notic. Leaev "bad taste" then making me decide for slackwar .
134 • re 130 (by corneliu on 2009-03-20 21:30:07 GMT from Canada)
brotherinbluejeans wrote:it has all the power and configurability of slackware, all the user-friendliness of distros like mandriva or ubuntu but with far superior hardware detection/configuration. :)
Wow! Take it easy mate. There is no way in the world that wolfy is superior to Mandriva as far as hardware detection/configuration is concerned. Maybe Fedora is better but only by a tad.
I don't know about Ubuntu but I can assure you that you can install Mandriva with just about any existing desktop environment or window manager. I very much doubt that wolfy is faster than Mandriva with Fluxbox or IceWM.
135 • #132, 133 responses (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-03-20 21:56:49 GMT from United States)
#132: @corneliu: I don't doubt botherinbluejean's report at all. Mandriva gets a 5 out of 5 in being user friendly for sure. Speed? No, IME on my 32-but hardware the better Slackware-based distros do outperform Mandriva every time. You say there is "no way in the world" that Wolvix is superior to Mandriva for hardware configuration. How do you know that? Have you tested the two? So far Wolvix has handled everything I've thrown at it. In fairness so has Mandriva so on my hardware the two are equals in that area.
#133: I have never found a friendlier group than the people in the Vector Linux forum. I have no idea what the problem you had was but "haughty" is the last word I'd use for the people around VL. Are you sure you're not confusing VL with Zenwalk? Zenwalk is a great little distro with iffy forums, at least in English.
136 • #121 OPENGEU (by jack on 2009-03-20 22:01:37 GMT from Canada)
I seem to have a picky computer
It installed Kubuntu 8.04.2, and Pardus. In a previous life it installed XP.
Also live boots a number of distros.
But will not install opengeu, nor ubuntu 8.10
It hangs at initramfs.
says:
init:line 231
cannot open /root/dev/console
no such file.
Pressing f4 offers "safe graphic mode"
same result
A third option "use driver update" I did not understand
137 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2009-03-20 22:49:46 GMT from Canada)
Why did I have this feeling that I'll get your attention Caitlyn?
Well, let me re-quote that guy in blue jeans: "far superior hardware detection/configuration"
Far superior? WTH? that sounds like a fanboy to me.
How do I know that Mandriva is at least as good as Wolvix? Very simple. The version of the kernel used by Mandriva is always more recent than Wolvix's.
I'm not sure whether you got my point. So let me ask you: have you used Mandriva with Fluxbox or IceWM? Can you please explain why would Wolfix be faster?
138 • #137 - response (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-03-20 23:09:19 GMT from United States)
#137, Aninymous: It's Wolvix, not Wolfix or Wolfy.
Second, not all hardware is detected by the kernel. X.org handles graphics chipset and ALSA/Pulse Audio handles sound.
Third, a newer kernel (or X or ALSA) generally helps with newer hardware. It doesn't always help with older hardware. There have been cases where specific support for older hardware has been dropped. Using Ubuntu as an example when dexconf came in it could no longer handle the Trident CyberBlade video chipset in my six year old Toshiba laptop. I now have to manually override what Ubuntu autodetects with an xorg.conf file. Otherwise I get a blank, black screen. Other distros including Wolvix still handle this chipset correctly. So, in other words, you can't possibly know that hardware detection is "superior" just because the kernel version is slightly newer.
Yes, I have tried Mandriva with minimalist window managers. I tend to prefer PekWM to both IceWM and Fluxbox and it's lighter than either of those. I have 2009.1 rc1 running on one machine now. Why it is faster is something I explained at http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/linux-performance-different-di.html Please note that I said it is faster on *my* 32-bit hardware. On a system with a 64-bit CPU a native 64-bit build of Mandriva will run significantly faster than Wolvix for several classes of tasks as detailed in my article. It is very much hardware dependent. In general, however, for 32-bit desktop/notebook/netbook hardware the Slackware derivatives generally get the fastest benchmark results and fastest subjective performance.
139 • #138 - response (by corneliu on 2009-03-21 00:00:18 GMT from Canada)
#138, Caitlyn Martin: It's Anonymous, not Aninymous :)
Yes, newer X.org and alsa/pulse help detect hardware better. Mandriva includes versions of X.org and alsa/pulse that are newer than Wolvix. That is yet another argument on my side.
It may be that for Pentium 1 Wolvix does a better job at detecting hardware. If that's Wolvix's pride so be it.
I do have 64 bit arch and I believe that the majority of Linux users have 64 bit as well even if they run 32 bit versions of their distros. If that's true then for the majority of Linux users Mandriva with PekWm is faster than Wolvix.
As for the Wolfix thing it was unintentional. Sorry, it was a typo. Wolfy was intentional, I am not sorry for that :)
140 • No subject (by Anonymous on 2009-03-21 00:24:07 GMT from United States)
@corneliu: My six year old laptop has a Celeron chip, not Pentium I. The fastest selling computers nowadays are netbooks, all of which are 32-bit. 64-bit is hardly universal. I've already pointed out that new X.org doesn't mean better hardware detection in the case of Debian and Ubuntu. You cannot assume that Mandriva, with *SLIGHTLY* newer versions, will do better with autodetection or hardware. Not everyone is running brand new 2009 equipment. I make no assumptions about what users have. I'd also be willing to bet that 64-bit Slackware (BlueWhite64 or Slamd64) will benchmark faster than Mandriva. Did you even read my article for O'Reilly?
You still haven't given any supporting facts for your argument which reads like a Mandriva fan saying "Mine is better than yours." Can you honestly tell me that 64-bit Mandriva running Fluxbox will be faster than BlueWhite64 running Fluxbox? You can't. I can, however, tell you that 32-bit Mandriva benchmarks slower on my Intel Atom 1.6GHz netbook than Wolvix or Vector Linux on the same machine. Don't believe me? Try it for yourself. You haven't done that, have you?
141 • Yes, the last post was mine (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-03-21 00:24:44 GMT from United States)
Sorry for clicking without filling in all the boxes.
142 • @debate around me (by Nobody Important on 2009-03-21 01:47:35 GMT from United States)
And I'm going to tell you that Windows Vista benchmarks better on my Celeron desktop from 2001. You won't believe me, mostly because it isn't true (I have tried Win7, but that's another story).
It's pointless trying to benchmark different distros on different computers made for different things. Wolvix is made for a different purpose than Mandriva. Wolvix is a lightweight distro with Fluxbox, compared to Mandriva's more mainstream uses. So while Mandriva installs with more bloat out of the box, I'm sure it can be whittled down to a lighter install, just like every other distro out there. Heck, while Fedora technically runs with more processes in the background, I still feel like it's more responsive than Ubuntu. Are you going to tell me I'm wrong? No. You can't.
So it doesn't matter, shut up and stop arguing about which distro is better at whatever they happen to be good at. They're all made from the same source codes anyway.
143 • TinyCore up and browsing (by Verndog on 2009-03-21 01:54:27 GMT from United States)
Well this is my first post using TinyCore and Opera. I can hardly believe my eyes. :) TinyCore booted in under 20 seconds! That's on a circa 1998 Compaq PII 300mhz, 96mb Laptop.
It was fun getting it installed using USB HD and then moving that drive to the Compaq.
I followed the intatll instruction at TC headquarters. I finally found a Linux distro that beats Windows on bootup. It takes Windows 45 seconds on this machine.
144 • The Great Speed Debate...yawn... (by forest on 2009-03-21 02:46:50 GMT from United Kingdom)
And there you have it folks, for the nth time, it all depends on what machine you have and what hardware is nailed onto it.
I thought, Caitlyn, you had put this particular baby to bed weeks ago...we all know it can't possibly be true to say "a" is faster than "b" cos' it's meaningless in just about any context...
And what is this assumption made earlier ref Linux users using 64 arch to the exclusion of 32 arch? Where did that come from? LOL
If we were to do a bit of induction from comment on this forum "most" of us are using stuff that Noah chucked in the skip/dumpster after the Flood...
Re Wolvix, yes quite interesting and straight into wif,i AND it's beta, so it will be a difficult act to follow for the final release. Certainly Wolvix holds onto the wifi as well as the puppy clones do. (flexxxpup, off usb/ram, has managed nearly three days in one session...I had to sleep but left the PC running continuously...very green...)
Re #127. Thanks for that nugget...all is made clear, LOL, I have heard about the wear problem on usb sticks or "solid state" memory but was unaware of the wear balancing function...and you are spot on about the memory being written at the end. It writes during the session too. Occasionally you get the hint that the ram is full so you are invited to reboot.
145 • age old question with no answer (by brotherinbluejeans on 2009-03-21 04:45:37 GMT from United States)
first of all let me say i'm sorry for making a statement that inspired debate without staying to answer the questions raised regarding my words... ( i had a busy day)
first of all: i never claimed that my computer was faster than anyone elses.. i never, in fact said that my computer was fast at all -it is not. but out of the dozens of distros i have tried on this laptop, wolvix has performed the best while still maintaining a good variety of apps.
#2 i never said "my distro's better than yours" .. such statments are demonstrations of pure ignorance as diferent distros are made for different uses or hardware platforms. i understand this
#3 the only claim of supteriority i made was in hardware detection adn this was not just an arbitrary comment iof something i made up. i have done dozens and dozens of or mandriva installs and at least half a dozen ubuntu installs on a wide range of hardware. i have used mandriva extensively since mandrake 8 through to mandriva 2009 rc1... i know exactly what problems i have had installing different distros and usually plan on dedicating a good amount of extra time after install to tweak the system and correct coniguarations untill it works smoothly. while i have only performed two wolvix installs so far, the only adjustment i have had to make after install was to uncheck the external amplifier in the sound mixer... and i remind you: this is only a beta release. i stand by my claim. if you would liek to see for yourself you can compare the wolvix and mandriva forums' help section: go into the "hardware configuration help" and see what kinds of problems users of each respective distro are encountering.
146 • Did anyone read what I linked? (by Caitlyn Martin on 2009-03-21 05:29:04 GMT from United States)
My point was precisely what the last several posters have said: it all depends on hardware. Read my article. What I objected to was corneliu's post that Mandrake is faster than Wolvix or pretty much anything else, period. Yes, 64-bit vs. 32-bit OS on a 64-bit system makes a big difference with certainl types of apps, certain tasks, and accessing memory >4GB. That is well documented.
Those who are saying that one distro isn't always better/faster than another are making my point precisely.
147 • No subject (by forest on 2009-03-21 10:55:29 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re #146
What you say is all too true Caitlyn and we are only too happy to agree.
We have all proved this a gazillion times ourselves and why folk can't "accept" this is amazing...virtually every other post is on the same subject, LOL.
Changing the topic slightly, but still following the theme of DW...I have been experimenting with using the "install to usb" option in the admin department of U8.10.
I am quite impressed that it is possible to install not just the U8.10 iso image to usb. I tried U 8.04...victory...then madness took over and this is coming via Xubuntu 8.10 booting off usb (4GB for those who care, LOL).
The image was not installed to ram so this may mean, from #127, thanks Patrick, ultimately I end up buying a load of usb sticks...
Will try some other non Ubuntu distros later this weekend.
If this is known already then apologies for saying "hope this is not a repost", as they say in other forums...so I'm told...
148 • No subject (by forest on 2009-03-21 11:09:17 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re # 147/127
When I say the iso image was not installed to ram, obviously it is to be able to work, but not the same way as the puppy installs, or so I gather.
Please feel free to correct my impression...
149 • re Caitlyn and Brother (by corneliu on 2009-03-21 11:54:19 GMT from Canada)
@ Caitlyn
I never stated how much better Mandriva is compared to Wolvix at detecting/configuring hardware. I'll do it now. Mandriva is *SLIGHTLY* better than Wolvix because is features *SLIGHTLY* newer kernel, X.org and alsa/pulse. But when you compare Brother's claim that Wolvix has "far superior hardware detection/configuration" than Mandriva with my claim that Mandriva is *SLIGHTLY* better than Wolvix then you'll notice a *HUGE* difference.
@ Brother
I'm happy for you. I haven't been so fortunate. On my machine Slackware and all Slackware-based distros that I tried refuse to install. At some point the computer reboots and drops me to a limited shell.
@ Everybody
My point is that Mandriva (and many other major distros) can be what Wolvix is but Wolvix can't be what Mandriva is.
150 • Problems with distros or other OSs (by Frisco on 2009-03-21 12:15:42 GMT from United States)
I wish it were only a hardware issue. As anyone knows who deploys computers across many users and in more than one environment, there are three (or more) important elements which affect the usability of an operating system: the hardware, the user and the actual mission of those first two things put together.
Think about what we have out there in the computer universe; some distro developers throw multiple versions of their product into the market, not just with different window managers, but with whole differing apps and environments wrapped around their core bundle.
And that's just linux. There's Mac and the BSDs and others.
We settled on linux here in our facility after a vote involving several dozen users and faculty; Windows was slow on old machines, people were actually getting up and leaving their work while apps loaded or downloads were going. Mac and Linux were voted on and then it came time to find a distro that would work across the range of differing machines we owned *and across the range of computer savvy we observed in users.* Plus the varrying needs, whether it was a journalism student or a person preparing for Divinity school, we need standard operating procedures and reliability.
We went through countless linux distrubutions. The "top 10" here is what we first concentrated on. Mistake. Page hits here are a count of page hits, not an indication of distro compatibility with those three things I pointed out at the beginning of this post.
So we just poked around with our concentration on the bottom end of our hard ware and the bottom end of our "linux savvy" we'd all talked about.
Mepis antiX is it, we have had no network dropouts since deploying antiX (ndiswrapper which Vector and many other distros attempt to solve for our Realtek driver on this laptop depends on Windows drivers, which are at this point only about 75% effective). We've also watched in amazement as users have taken to this distro, wide-eyed and productive.
It's been a long struggle, but we feel like it's been a learning experience and we're now merely gathering donations to send to the antiX people and doing our work.
:o)
151 • #149 (by Notorik on 2009-03-21 12:42:04 GMT from United States)
I know what you are saying about dropping to a limited shell. That happens to me with quite a few distros and it is frustrating. Mandriva isn't one of them though. For me, it works and looks great. However it won't detect my sound card. I have to use ALSA to configue it and I haven't figured out how to get it done using Mandriva. To be fair though, I haven't spent time in the forums. I know there is a problem (ref. Caitlyn) with sound drivers and older sound cards with Debian based distros. However, I think Mandriva is originally an offshoot of Red Hat/Mandrake and I haven't heard of any problems with them.
I agree with you that "Mandriva (and many other major distros) can be what Wolvix is". But (and really, not trying to be snide here) they aren't and that is exactly the problem.
I installed Wolvix Beta 1 a couple of weeks ago and it has been nothing but blue skies since then. I have not had a single problem and, as mentioned above, this is only beta. I am as I have said before, a fan of Wolvix. But, I wouldn't come on here a touting a distro that doesn't work. I am not a "blind follower" with some sort of agenda. If there was something wrong with it I would say, "I like Wolvix but...". The real truth is that up to this point that has been no "but...".
If anyone is interested in more information just go check out the Wolvix website. I also started kind of a Linux "how-to" for beginners but it has sort of unintentionally turned into a page about Wolvix with some screenshots:
http://wolvrik-howlatthemoon.blogspot.com/
I understand though, if Slackware won't run on your machine then this whole thing is meaningless to you. Having said that, a nod of respect to Patrick Volkerding.
152 • re 151 (by corneliu on 2009-03-21 13:40:20 GMT from Canada)
@ Notorik,
When I said that Mandriva can be what Wolvix is I meant that you can strip it down to command line if you like. Its flexibility allows you to male it almost like Wolfix if you like.
For alsa/pulse issues you can disable pulse in Mandriva Control Center and go with alsa only. You can also install alsamixer and play with the settings. If you use KDE then playing with Kmix settings fixes the issue sometimes.
@ Brother
Indeed you haven't mentioned that Wolfix is fast. But I read too many times how fast this or that distro is or how bloated this or that distro is. That's plain bullshit. In Mandriva's case (and may other major distros) it's you who decides how bloated or how slim, how fast or how slow it is going to be.
With Wolvix your options are quite limited. Certain packages are not available in the repositories or the versions are outdated sometimes. No Mandriva Control Center or equivalent in Wolvix.
153 • #152 (by Notorik on 2009-03-21 14:24:25 GMT from United States)
Actually it does have a control panel. In fact, the Wolvix control panel is so nice it has been used in other distros. You seem to have a lot of information but I am beginning to suspect that you haven't even tried Wolvix (oh that's right Slackware doesn't run on you machine).
Anyway this is all nonsense. If people want to use Mandriva fantastic. If you want to use Wolvix fantastic.
154 • re 153 (by corneliu on 2009-03-21 16:17:55 GMT from Canada)
Interesting, now that you mentioned the Control Center I think I'll try Wolvix. I never attempted to install Wolvix. Last time I tried to install a Slackware based distro was about half a year ago. I think it's about time I try it again, maybe they fixed that issue. For the record I have a lot of respect for Slackware and I like the fact that they use vanilla stuff. I like vanilla in icecream too :)
155 • Wolvix (by corneliu on 2009-03-21 16:37:40 GMT from Canada)
I have a question: is Wolvix binary compatible with Slackware? Can I install packages from Slackware repositories? What are the chances to break the system if I do so? I googled a little bit and it seems that it is entirely possible to break the system if I install Slackware packages. I just need a confirmation please. I am sorry but I have no desire to compile stuff. I'm too lazy for ./configure, make install clean and fixing dependencies but I like to have the latest (or very close to latest) packages :)
156 • #155 (by Notorik on 2009-03-21 17:04:02 GMT from United States)
Wolvix links to both the Wolvix and Slackware repositories. In the past, as I understand it there has been very close compatibility (99%) between the two. Keep in mind though it is still beta. If you want to see the control panel and installer click on the link I provided above.
157 • re 156 (by corneliu on 2009-03-21 17:36:48 GMT from Canada)
Thanks Notorik, i'm downloading.
158 • @146 (by Nobody Important on 2009-03-21 19:45:25 GMT from United States)
I think that your response of "Nuh uh, that distro isn't any better, no why!" was a little off handed, however. You know what you do when you see fanatics post something incorrect or obviously biased? You walk away. That's it.
When those Ubuntu-detractors state something like "It's dumbing down the Linux experience" or something idiotic like that, you just don't respond to them. don't give them more attention than they deserve.
@another conversation around me: Speaking of Wolvix and Slackware, I'm using Absolute Linux and liking it quite a bit. I'll try Wolvix once it's stable.
159 • AMSN (by Landor on 2009-03-21 20:49:10 GMT from Canada)
I was hopin' that via the search option and package criteria I could find out if a distro had Amsn by default. Sadly it's not an option here in the search.
Anyone know what distro by default has amsn installed? It has to be fairly recent though, and supports uvc webcams out of the box. A friend of mine is in need of such a live cd.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
160 • re#160 (by hab on 2009-03-21 21:33:00 GMT from Canada)
You could, of course. use your fav distro that includes amsn and has a remaster facility and build an install disk. Then you could have a distro that you have totally customized to suit your own wants, needs, desires, aspirations.
cheers
161 • #159 (by anticapitalista on 2009-03-21 22:15:15 GMT from Greece)
I'm sure one of the Puppy livecds will have amsn
162 • Logical Volume Management (LVM) (by Max Bernard on 2009-03-22 01:05:04 GMT from United States)
Chris,
Due to a busy schedule, I never got a chance to read last week's article
that introduced LVM. Now, when I try to access it, by clicking on the link
provided in this week's article, I get an error message saying that it's either
no longer available, or being redesigned. Any idea what's causing this?
Thanks,
Max
163 • Wolvix (by corneliu on 2009-03-22 01:11:23 GMT from Canada)
I tried Wolvix as live CD and I was actually impressed. The only thing that didn't work out of the box was the screen resolution. I fixed it however very easily. Wolvix's Control Center is impressive. Mandriva's Control Center has more features but Wolvix's is impressive considering the size of this project. Heck, even Ubuntu doesn't have such tool. This was also my first contact with XFCE 4.6. It's very nice, very slick. And XFCE has got a Control Center of its own which is very nice. I'm definitely going to try the final release when it becomes available.
164 • RE: 162 • Logical Volume Management (LVM) (by ladislav on 2009-03-22 02:01:52 GMT from Taiwan)
The links is fixed now, sorry about that.
165 • Required reading, before posting here. (by RollMeAway on 2009-03-22 03:35:08 GMT from United States)
http://linuxcanuck.wordpress.com/2009/03/21/my-distro-is-better-than-yours-not/
Well worded response to a number of posts I've seen here.
166 • Wolvix (by Tom on 2009-03-22 09:34:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
@ 163 Corneliu
I tip my hat in respect Corneliu, i am impressed :) Not many of us would test the validity of our assertions. Time moves on and progress is made but we often get stuck in the past. In previous posts i think you've said that slackware distros just don't work on your machine and last night Wolven said that he hadn't really started on hardware detection yet on the new 2.0-beta1 so i imagined it would be a complete disaster for you. I'm really glad you had a positive experience :)
@ 58 Weekend fun by Anon
Just wondering how this weekend went? Did you try different distros with better luck?
@ 99 Frisco
Does Wolvix as a LiveCd, or dual-boot, work on your various troublesome machines? I think we'd all like to know if our various favourite distros work. I wonder if there's any money to be made in testing out the various distros on such a unique collection of hardware? I'm guessing that you kept notes on what did work and many of us might be interested in the good-news parts of that as an article in here or perhaps somewhere that earns you some loot and link us to it. A few of the distros, especially ones in the top 20 here seem to have commercial organisations that support their Free Software side, Canonical of Ubuntu springs to mind.
@ Chris Smart, thanks for a great article again this week it's good to have something that stretches people!
@ Ladislav Bodnar thanks for responding to my incessant emails and treating me with kindness even when i was unnecessarily rude.
@ all at DistroWatch and everyone here, thanks for all the hard work and entertainment again this week :)
167 • No subject (by forest on 2009-03-22 10:54:06 GMT from United Kingdom)
Re #165
Usual iteration we've all heard before, so nothing new there. In fact all this so called internecine comment is a good thing...it's probably akin to displacement activity or catharsism or something, I expect, probably...
Anyway, the whole ethos of this forum, to quote the strapline, is "to put the fun back into computing". And if this means animated discussion...
To continue shredding the comments in that blog, LOL, the general public are merely the end users and, by definition, use whatever is placed before them, witness MS and Mac.
The readers of this forum found themselves here by any number of routes and have learned there are far better ways, mostly...to do "computing".
Linux stuff will be spread by global economic necessity, so to speak, by the bean counters anxious to get their balance sheets approved by the shareholders.
Remember, there is a silver lining to even the cloud of recession.
168 • Wolvix website (by Tom on 2009-03-22 16:45:13 GMT from United Kingdom)
Does anyone know what happened to the Wolvix website? I normally have a few people downloading the torrent from me by now but there's only 1 leecher and even some of the other seeders have vanished. I didn't touch anything!
169 • Wolvix torrent download (by Tom on 2009-03-22 16:56:22 GMT from United Kingdom)
Ok, this is fine for Wolvix 2.0-beta1 but very slow for the 1.1.0's both Hunter and Cub
http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?page=torrents&active=1tracker=0&category=377&order=data&by=DESC
Anyone who can help with this would be much appreciated.
Thanks, good luck and regards from
Tom :)
170 • re#167 (by hab on 2009-03-22 18:41:41 GMT from Canada)
Spot on!
Linux is far more accessible now than it has ever been earlier. The entry bar is far lower now. To whit, some of the commentary that gets made here!
I ran a slackware install, FROM A COMMAND LINE, several months before the gods conspired to grant me a graphics card that COULD actually do X. Don't frackin' try to "convince" me that you need a gui to do anything meaningful. cli works just fine.
As to distro x is better, quicker, faster, than distro y, please post your double blind study results here. Anything else is .........well......... just moving air.
cheers
171 • #170 (by Cabesa Dolor on 2009-03-22 21:05:40 GMT from United States)
Wow! That is so impressive! You are such a hardass! Ya know some of us actually prefer a GUI. This ain't 1932. Maybe I should send you a morse code message that it's 2009!
172 • its ok now (by Tom on 2009-03-22 21:08:41 GMT from United Kingdom)
Well a few improvements to the site & it's looking nice now :)
173 • RE 160/161 (by Landor on 2009-03-22 22:38:27 GMT from Canada)
#160
Thanks Hab. My buddy is doing a remaster of Ubuntu using Remastersys. You were bang on with the right method. My friend was looking for a bit more mature code for the uvc project in the kernel, just to be sure of course. They have a QC Pro 9000 and need it for travel and such to keep in touch with family and loved ones. Which brings me to yet another famous rant of mine. The decisions of projects like Pidgin that won't even consider adding webcam support. In my opinion though, and my friend's, Amsn is a far better project/app.
#!161
Thanks Anti...I don't even know if the uvc code was in the kernel then. I did find one though that had Amsn by default but didn't try it out due to the kernel and such. Sure it's not that hard of a fix, but from what my friend says, they'd prefer to have a go at a Remaster. I couldn't believe some of the puplets, they really have some nice stuff over there goin' on with puppy. I loved a couple of the E-17 ones and one that was based on LXDE was really nice as well. From an asthetic point of view of course since I didn't run them.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
174 • Re Wolvix (by the doc on 2009-03-23 00:46:37 GMT from Australia)
Complete newb here, :) no CLI guru; found Wolvix while 'setting up' for change over to *nix, used DW as resource for testing: very happy to see Wolvix working so well oob for v1.1 and now the 2.0 beta release also going well.
Nice to see Wolvix getting some attention. Virtually all reviews for 1.1 were good:
http://forums.wolvix.org/index.php/topic,1000.msg4425.html#msg4425
My ISP mirrors Wolvix for subscribers free DL ( Telstra in Oz) and equal DL numbers for Wolvix and PCLOS 2009.1. :)
For my simple home enduser needs Wolvix has it all with out appreciable problems. Good dev support in forums Nice of DW to donate: much appreciated I'm sure.
Horses for courses. Wolvix is a credit to the ongoing development of user friendly distros.
Thabnks to DW for a GREAT resource.
175 • best distro (by Frisco on 2009-03-23 00:48:14 GMT from United States)
No "study" of any kind is needed to prove which distro is best.
Just install and configure, tweak and use. Is it best, worst or something in between?
Next distro. :o)
Number of Comments: 175
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Robolinux
Robolinux was a user-friendly and intuitive operating system based on the latest long term support release of Ubuntu. One of the project's more interesting features was the availability of a pre-configured virtual machine support pack with Windows XP or Windows 7 - a VirtualBox setup which allows the user to install and run the Windows operating system seamlessly alongside Robolinux. This was an optional add-on that must be downloaded from the project's online store.
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