Elapsed time: About three days.

I’ve a history of making my computing experience far more interesting than it really needed to be. When I switched to Linux (Debian Etch, thank you very much) I wasn’t entirely able to change my ways. Soon after I became a full time Linux user my main computer went stone dead. Because the light wouldn’t even come on I decided it must be the power supply so I took off the cover (something I’d never done before I started tinkering with Linux), removed the power supply and took to a small shop about 20 miles from here. He checked it, said it was bad and sold me a good used one for $10. I put the used one into the computer, put the cover back on and fired it up. Everything was back to normal.

Elapsed time: Less than one day.

ISO files, from which one can burn Linux CDs are usually around 700 MB in size and I never noticed how full my 20 GB hard drive was getting until I got an error message while I was downloading yet another ISO file. I just thought maybe there was some problem with the download server and it was late so I decided I’d try again the next day and, thinking nothing at all of it, I shut down my computer, as I do every night. The next morning my computer wouldn’t boot up and one of the error messages said something about there being no room on my hard drive. I thought about it for a few minutes, grabbed a Linux live CD from my collection (I’ve forgotten which distro it was but any of several would have worked fine), plugged it into the CD drive (which I opened with a bent paper clip), turned on the computer, let the live CD boot up, opened a file manager, located the trash folder on the main hard drive and deleted it’s contents which freed up close to 2 GB of disk space. I then exited the live CD and rebooted my computer. Everything was back to normal.

Elapsed time: Less than an hour.

As an experiment, I tried installing Nimblex to a 2 GB thumb drive but it didn’t work; my computer wasn’t able to boot from the thumb drive and I was unable to simply reformat the thumb drive and return it to it’s normal duty (moving data from one non-networked computer to another). I hated having destroyed a perfectly good thumb drive so I kept going back to it every couple of days trying to figure out how to restore/repair it. I did manage to get the 900 MB swap partition reformatted as fat32 but I couldn’t do anything with the remaining 1.1 GB ext3 partition. It had three folders in it, labeled “boot”, “lost+found” and “nimblex” and I figured if I could delete them, even if I couldn’t figure out how to delete the partition, I could reformat it, thus making it usable but every attempt to delete any of these folders got me an “access denied” error message. When I plugged the thumb drive into my computer, two Konqueror windows popped up; sde1 and sde2 with the latter (sde2) being the one that’s hosed. I closed the sde1 window and, in the sde2 window, clicked on “Tools” , “Open terminal”. When the terminal window opened I typed “su”, typed in my root password and typed cfdisk. When cfdisk opened I could see the two partitions. I deleted them both, hit the “write” function and that left me 20 GB of free space….. wait, that wasn’t right….. ARGH! cfdisk wasn’t in sde, it was in hda, my main hard drive…

Yes gentle readers, in my typical bull-in-the-china-shop fashion, I deleted the partitions in my main hard drive. At that point it was running but on the reboot I was going to be in serious trouble so, as quickly as possible, I plugged in my external hard drive and made backup copies of my address book and all my personal files. With no functioning swap partition my computer started slowing down and finally froze up entirely but not before I’d backed up all the files I’d need to recover from the crash. With everything frozen, having no alternative, I held down the power button for a few seconds until it shut off and, as expected, when I turned it back on it wasn’t able to boot up. After some thought, I decided to try reversing the damage before reinstalling the OS.

I booted into a live CD, opened a root terminal, opened cfdisk and recreated my partitions based on my “best guesses” as to their size and configuration and tried once again to boot up. It worked! My computer booted up just fine but the video resolution came up at 640 X 480 and it seemed sluggish, as though it had no swap partition. I opened gparted and sure enough it found an unmounted parition on my hard drive. I right clicked on it, selected “Mount as Linux Swap” and my display instantly became more stable albeit at the wrong resolution. I wasn’t sure what to do next but felt it wouldn’t hurt to reboot. Yes, I know, that’s the hallmark of a long-time Windows user, “when in doubt, reboot” but it worked. I rebooted the computer and everything was back to normal.

Elapsed time: Less than two hours.

I’m not saying my Debian Etch system is bullet-proof or overlooking the likelyhood that I’ll eventually manage to hose it up beyond redemption but, put yourself in my place. My most serious, user induced, Windows crash put me out of commission for three days, I lost some data, and I had to reinstall Windows. My Debian Etch system has survived not one but three serious crashes (two of which were user induced), I’ve lost no data and in the worst case was out of service for less than 24 hours. Add to this the fact that I’ve had no trouble with viruses or malware since switching to Linux and it’s not hard to see why I’ve become a Linux believer. Do the math.

Two years ago I couldn’t find a Linux distro which I liked on older hardware; now I have choices.   This is good.

Don Crowder

DSL, a live CD distribution which I like to call "Darn Small Linux", has worked just fine almost every time I’ve tried it but it wasn’t able to configure the PS2 mouse on the machine. I switched to a USB mouse which DSL found and configured with no problems and since everything else seemed to work just fine I opened a root terminal (in the menu the path is XShells/Root Access/ and I prefer "Light"), typed "cfdisk", used cfdisk to set up two primary partitions (hda1: 600 MHz, type 82, Linux swap and hda2: the balance of the drive, type 83, Linux), rebooted into the live CD and ran the "Install to Hard Drive" process (in the menu, the path is Apps/Tools/Install to Hard Drive). A few minutes later I was able to "test drive" DSL as an installed operating system and it performed very nicely indeed. I found it very easy to install additional software to the MyDSL folder and there are many more choices than I recall seeing in previous versions of DSL.

Before getting into the second machine, I visited distrowatch.com, did a little research to see if there were any new distros designed for older hardware and rediscovered KateOS. I tried KateOS a few months ago and wasn’t happy with it but I could tell they were onto something. I downloaded the latest version (3.6), learned how to burn an ISO file in GnomeBaker (yes, I’m still learning to use my Debian Etch Linux machine and this was the first time I’ve used Gnomebaker with an ISO file) and burned a CD with no problems. KateOS has followed the lead of several other popular distros and produced an installable live CD. The live CD ran fine and had no trouble configuring the PS2 mouse. This is a nicely done distro running Xfce with lots of popular software (Firefox, Thunderbird and the Gimp to name a few) preinstalled but the installation gave me some pause. When the text-based installer reached the HDD formating point in the install the software opened gparted to permit me to manually partition the hard drive. I’ve never used gparted and the help file for gparted wasn’t included with the live CD. Fortunately, there was a terminal icon on the Xfce toolbar beneath the gparted window so I opened a terminal, typed "su" for Super User (i.e. root) access, entered the root password (which was simply "kate"), typed "cfdisk", hit Enter, used cfdisk to partition the hard drive exactly as I would if I were installing DSL, closed cfdisk, closed the terminal, closed gparted and resumed the installation at the next step. KateOS was as fast as DSL on these machine, feels more like a "genuine" desktop distro (DSL is designed to be used as a live CD or flash drive distro), comes with more software choices and is built on a newer kernel version. What’s not to like?

KateOS or DSL are good choices for anyone who’s still using Win9x, 98SE or 98ME because they can’t afford a new machine and a newer version of Windows won’t run on the machine they have. Because they’e both live CDs, it’s easy to try them out without making any changes in the computer.

Don Crowder

Recently, through the generosity of a friend, I was able to acquire several identical 600 MHz Celeron systems and, with a bit of careful scrounging and eBay shopping I was able to equip each of them with 256 MB of 100 MHz RAM.   These systems represent a special challenge for the operating system because the onboard video only has one (1) MB of RAM.   The OS must “borrow” some system RAM in order to produce any sort of video.   A few months ago, working on a very similar system, I found that several then-current versions of popular distros simply wouldn’t run on the computer but, knowing I might never again have such a unique opportunity I set out to try as many distros on these computers as possible.   In all honesty I didn’t expect any surprises.   I was wrong.

I can’t afford to buy distro CDs and my “fast connection” (Verizon DSL) isn’t all that fast so, excepting only OpenSUSE, I avoided distros which required more than one CD and I consulted with Distrowatch to find suitable candidates.   What follows is my own, purely subjective, personal opinion of several distributions I’ve tried in the last two weeks.

Debian 4.0 (Etch): I don’t believe any distribution offers more choices than Debian or runs better on older hardware.   Even if I had a newer, nicer computer to use for my own personal Linux computer I’d still be using Debian because it suits me mentally, emotionally, morally, philosophically, and, best of all, financially (because it’s free).   Insofar as I’m concerned, Debian rules and it worked beautifully on these machines.

Xubuntu 7.10:   The last time I tried Xubuntu on an older computer I didn’t like it at all, it seemed klunky and kludgy.   That is absolutely no longer the case.   Xubuntu ran very nicely on a 600 MHz machine and is easy to install and use.   If I didn’t love Debian Etch with KDE so much I’d most assuredly be using Xubuntu.

PCLinuxOS 2007:   This is the most user friendly and powerful distribution I’ve ever seen.   Yeah, it runs a little slowly on a 600 MHz machine but run it does and perfectly at that.   Everything about PCLinuxOS is thoughtfully designed to be sensible and user friendly.   Try it, you’ll like it.

Fedora 7:   The installation was smooth and easy.   The look, feel and performance is superlative.   Like PCLinuxOS, it’s a bit slow on a 600 MHz machine but it worked and very impressively too (I tried the KDE version).   Fedora is the Open Source child of Red Hat Linux and, as such, is a mature and very well developed distribution.   Fedora comes with a preconfigured firewall and very tight security settings by default.

Blag:   I signed up for a free copy of Blag (on a CD) a while back and promptly forgot about it so I was pleasantly surprised when it came in the mail a few days ago.   Blag is based on Fedora but has been carefully (I’ll even go so far as to say lovingly) crafted into an integrated, user-friendly, and comfortable distro.   I can’t think of a better way to describe it.   My wife and I both liked it very much.   This is our favorite Gnome desktop (and we really don’t care for Gnome so that’s saying something).

Kubuntu 7.10:   The installation was very easy, albeit slow, and the look, feel and performance is easily equal to PCLinuxOS or Fedora.   If I was building myself a second Linux machine, with newer, nicer hardware, I’d have a terrible time deciding between PCLinuxOS, Fedora and Kubuntu.

Ubuntu:   Like Kubuntu, the installation was slow and, once installed, I got a non-specific error message telling me that some processes might not work properly, each time it booted up. I tinkered with it for a while looking for an obvious solution and didn’t find one so I moved on.

Sabayon:   I had some sort of problem with the install, every time it boots up there’s a display error which requires a keystroke to continue booting up.   It looks and feels very nice but I gave up on a post-install update of the software.   I couldn’t figure it out, I’ve no idea whether the problem was caused by me or Portato and didn’t explore it any further.

OpenSUSE 10.3: The installation was easy, though slightly more complicated than some, and it seemed to work well enough but it didn’t shut down by itself.   I had to manually turn off the computer on shutdown.   There were two CDs on the download page, one of which was described as “add ons”.   After some thought, I decided to download them both but I couldn’t figure out how to install the second CD.   I tried asking for help on their IRC channel and was subjected to the most rude treatment I’ve ever received from any group of Linux users so I moved on.

DSL-N 01RC4:   Not particularly easy to install, looks fabulous, couldn’t access a CD or USB drive.   It’s designed to be a live CD and one should leave it at that.

Zenwalk 4.8:   The installation ran beautifully but, once the installation was complete, it never came back after the reboot.   I tried it both with, and without, adding an nVidia graphics card to the system and finally gave up after five (5) unsuccessful attempts to install it.

LInux Mint:   Wouldn’t boot up on these machines.

NetBSD:   Wouldn’t boot up on these machines.

Mepis 6.5.02_32:   Wouldn’t boot up on these machines.

Slax:   This is my favorite of the small, live CDs but the developer recommends against installing it to the hard drive and I respect his wishes.

Puppy 3.0:   I keep coming back and trying Puppy because of all the glowing reviews I’ve read but it never works for me.   Oh it booted up as a live CD but didn’t run very well and it got worse when it was installed to the hard drive.   I don’t think Puppy is fond of older hardware.

I didn’t subject any of these distributions to a rigorous regime of tests or keep meticulous records on the process; I installed the operating system, surfed the web, and simply played with it for a while.   I was surprised that several of them “just worked” on these computers when I’m quite certain that as recently as a year ago this would not have been the case.   Of course that makes me a victim of Windows mentality; “things don’t always work that well but they’ll be better in several years when the next version of Windows is released”, just as it’s always been.   Linux doesn’t work that way; there are frequent updates to the software and operating system (just lately they seem to be occurring almost weekly) and with each update things work a little better.   What an incredible concept; an operating system which gets better all the time!   It just takes some getting used to; I’m working on it.

Don Crowder

[tags]Linux, older hardware, subjective review [/tags]

If you’re having a problem, you can google for “Linux forums” or, once again, you can replace the word “Linux” with the name of a specific distribution or software. If you can reduce your question, or the description of your problem, to a few clear words you can string them together with plus signs and place the name of the distro somewhere in the string. When you have a problem, remember to google for a solution instead of for the problem. For example, if you have no sound in Puppy Linux, don’t google for
no+sound+puppy,
instead, google for:
sound+puppy+fixing OR configuring
If one string doesn’t work, try another. Finding the answer to any question with a search engine is ALL about finding the right question.

My most valuable Linux resource has been the email lists of my Linux User Groups. I belong to our local Highland Lakes Linux User Group, and to the email lists of the Austin Linux Group and San Antonio Linux Users Group. We’re an hour and a half from Austin and over two hours from San Antonio so I’m not able to attend their meetings but they’ve made me welcome on their email lists. Of course I treat them as the invaluable resources they truly are by trying hard to find my own answers before asking them questions and by helping to answer questions others have asked. I have to admit, I’d been on those lists for months before I was ever able to make any sort of contribution and even now, it doesn’t happen often but that’s not the point. I contribute what I can, whenever I can; that’s what matters and I’m not the only non-resident contributor on the Austin and San Antonio lists. Clearly there are other Linux users who feel the same way I do; they don’t care where the email list is coming from as long as they can find other knowledgeable Linux users with whom they can network. Keep that in mind if you get interested in Linux and find that there’s not a LUG near your community, on the web “near” can be a very flexible concept if that’s what’s required. Here are a few places where you can look for a lug.
http://www.linux.org/groups/
http://www.linuxforu.com/ShowLugs.php
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Linux/User_Groups/
http://www.tux.org/luglist.html
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Readers/Usergroups
If you can’t find a LUG on one of these lists, you should consider starting your own and here are a couple of sites which might help you with that:
http://www.linuxusersgroups.org/search.html
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/User-Group-HOWTO.html
If you just want to check out a few LUGs, there’s even a webring.
http://q.webring.com/hub?ring=lug

Every Linux distribution I’ve seen, whether it was a live CD or fully installed, comes with an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Client. There’s a learning curve attached to using an IRC client but if you’re patient and persistent, you can literally get 24/7 help with your Linux questions or problems. Frédéric L. W. Meunier wrote the definitive treatise on Linux and IRC which can be found in many places on the web. A couple of other potentially useful documents might be The IRC Prelude by David Caraballo and Joseph Lo or A beginner’s guide to IRC by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier. Given an IRC client and a general understanding of how to use it, you need only google the name of your distro, followed by a plus sign and the letters IRC to locate an instant source of information or help. Here, for example, is a google search on Ubuntu plus IRC:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Ubuntu%2BIRC&btnG=Search

If you happen to be using Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Simply Mepis, Linspire/Freespire, or PCLinuxOS you can Just Ask Matt right here at Lockergnome or if you have Debian Etch questions you can ask me. I may not have the answer but I usually know who to ask *grin*

Don Crowder, Buchanan Lake Village, served by the U. S. Post Office in Tow (rhymes with "cow"), Texas
These words were written in gedit on my 800 MHz Debian Etch computer.

[tags]Help with Linux, forums, email lists, LUGs, IRC, Just Ask Matt[/tags]

I spent a lot of time trying to sort out the best way for a new user to get a look at several distributions and different desktop environments as well and the only thing that made sense was a small collection of live CDs so I went looking for such a collection and couldn’t find one I liked so I got in touch with OSDisk.com and asked if they could put together a special package of Linux CDs and they liked my idea so they did. It’s called the Serious Sampler Pack and it costs less than $20 delivered to anywhere in the world. Let me tell you what’s in it and why.

Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS, respectively, use the Gnome and KDE desktop environments and they are currently the top two most popular Linux distributions. Damn Small Linux is the most popular distribution which uses the Xfce desktop environment. Knoppix wasn’t exactly the first live CD (that honor belongs to Yggdrasil or so I’ve read) but it was the first live CD that really captured people’s imaginations and it’s still very popular. Puppy and Xubuntu are both popular with older or RAM challenged systems. KateOS is specifically designed for older hardware and Slax is a comparatively small but very nice distribution which uses KDE. These are all live CDs and by the time you’ve tried them, with luck, you’ll know if you prefer Gnome, KDE or Xfce. Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS and Xubuntu can all be quite easily installed to your hard drive from the live CD, if you so desire. Damn Small Linux, Knoppix, Puppy and Slax were all designed to be run as live CDs and I don’t recommend installing them to your hard drive unless or until you’ve gotten past the beginners stages in learning Linux.

So, the Serious Sampler Pack gives you installable live CDs of the Current top two Linux distributions and a good look at both the similarities and the differences in a diverse group of mostly popular distributions. Or, if you have a fast connection, a CD-RW drive and some patience, you can download each of these distributions, for free, and burn your own live CDs. DistroWatch lists links to all of the downloads and, for that matter, other CD vendors as well.

Still To Come:

How Can I Find Help With Linux?

Stay tuned…

Don Crowder, Buchanan Lake Village, served by the U. S. Post Office in Tow (rhymes with "cow"), Texas
These words were written in gedit on my 800 MHz Debian Etch computer.

[tags]Which LInux Distro, live cds, Serious Sampler Pack[/tags]

I’ve found two Linux distributions which claim they can coexist with windows, as though they were Windows applications.   This is an interesting concept that might be worth investigating.   I’m assuming you’d need to be a fairly knowledgeable Windows user to try one of these and even then you’d have to do some research to learn whether you’ve sufficient disk space for one of them.   Still, here they are for your consideration:
Phat Linux
Topologilinux

If you’re like me, you’ll want to keep your Windows system in a near pristine state until you’ve decided whether or not you’re ready to make the “big switch” and you’ll find live CDs interesting but inadequate for giving you a “real world” notion of Linux.   If it comes to that, you’re simply going to need another computer.  I’ll say more about that in a moment, but first, if you acquire another computer, you don’t necessarily need another mouse, keyboard and monitor.   My wife and I each have two computers, one Windows and one Linux, which share a single monitor, mouse and keyboard through the use of a gadget called a KVM switch.   The “K” is for “Keyboard”, “V” is for “Video” (i.e. the monitor) and “M” is for “Mouse”.   With a few keystrokes we can switch from Windows to Linux.  A basic 2-port KVM switch goes for around $20 from any of numerous online merchants.   I’m not comfortable recommending any particular merchant but if you’re unable to find one drop me a line and I’ll tell you where I bought the KVM switches we’re using.

It’s not necessary to go out and purchase a new computer for your Linux adventure.   You may have an old computer stuck in the back of a closet somewhere or ask around, one of your friends may have an old computer they’ll let you use. Failing that, every computer shop I’ve ever seen has several nice used computers on their shelves and, in many cases, they’re willing to sell them very reasonably or go to eBay and type "computer, used" into the search window.  Most up-to-date Linux distributions are happy with just about any 500 MHz PC computer that’s got at least 128 MB of RAM but more-is-better if you can find it.   My own Linux computer, for example, is an 800 MHz AMD Duron with 512 MB of RAM while my wife’s Linux box is a 1.7 GHz Intel Celeron with 512 MB of RAM.
What’s all this MHz, GHz stuff anyway?
Ok, how about MB?
Ok, what’s RAM?

Still To Come:
Which Distribution Should I Try?
How Can I Get Help With Linux?

Stay tuned…

Don Crowder

[tags]trying linux, live cd, linux in windows[/tags]

[tags]Why try Linux[/tags]

My wife Lisa has been teaching a friend of ours who’s never owned a computer, to use Etch and found there was no sound when they clicked the pronunciation button at Merriam-Webster Online.  Solving the problem was a simple matter of installing mplayer (from the repository) and resetting the browser preferences to use mplayer to play wav files but, of course, being a newbie I’m not "permitted" to find simple solutions on the first try so, instead, I spent two days learning how to enable multimedia features.   I shouldn’t complain though because my Etch machine will now play wmv files whereas my Windows 2000 Pro machine won’t always (which I assume has something to do with DRM).   The best tutorial I found for adding multimedia capabilities to Debian Etch was from a fellow who calls himself Machiner.   When I got confused and couldn’t make sense of his tutorial I emailed him and he carried on a conversation with me, via email, until I finally understood what he was saying at which point I had no trouble completing the process.  That may be my favorite thing about Linux users as a group; I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered a more helpful, friendly group of people.   I’ve seen comments from people who’ve had negative encounters but my own experiences have been 100% positive.

[tags]Linux Editors, Multimedia in Etch, giving up Windows[/tags]

This is no revelation. If you’ve recently ordered DSL service you’ve been down the same road and many of you are contentedly using AOL, MSN or Yahoo! having plugged in the CD and let it "do its thing" because that’s what they said you had to do and it never occurred to you that they would encourage you to do something that wasn’t in your own best interest. It certainly never occurred to me; I was "rescued" by a fluke when the CD failed to function properly. It did manage to trash my Outlook Express identity but it was the one given to me by my dial-up ISP which service had just been replaced by Verizon DSL so no real damage was done.

The thing is, it bothers me a great deal to know what lengths corporations will go to acquire an inside track to my bank account. The fact that ethics are being so badly abused is nothing new, human history is full of new ventures whose participants were openly attacked by human predators of one kind or another. Whether it was armed marauders or advertising executives in three-piece suits, do not doubt for a moment that their nature was predatory and society has a habit of letting them run rampant for a while before it clamps down on them. Billboards along our roadways were totally out of control before laws and regulations began to limit their proliferation. Television commercials were totally out of control before laws and regulations began to cramp their style. Telephone solicitors were totally out of control before laws and regulations forced them to slow down a bit. Now these same predatory forces have moved onto the Web in a big way and right now they’re out of control but when enough of us cry for mercy, laws and regulations will follow. I’m just a little tired of waiting.

Don Crowder

[tags]crapware, dsl, isp[/tags]