Linux, anyone?

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

After the weekend's foray into dual-booting, I've decided to explore Linux.  A triple-booting machine. 

Anyone have any recommendations, for a dyed-in-the-wool Microsquish user?

Something that Just Works? 

If it works out, I may dedicate the Linux to web-surfing primarily, and perhaps E-mail.  I'm already on FireFox and Thunderbird, so porting those would be not-a-problem.

Thanks.

[ivor]

Are you looking for an OS recommendation?  I'd go with Ubuntu Desktop...

[beagle]

I'm a few years out of touch but SUSE used to be good.  Seemed to be heading rapidly downhill under Novell's ownership though. It was more MS-like than most in that the installs and updates were largely automatic, and instead of having a choice of twenty apps that sort of worked but with strange crashes it had two or three that really worked, for any given application area.

[ivor]

I had Ubuntu running for a long time. Never crashed once.  Ubuntu is the best as far as I know.  They do more through user interfaces than anybody else.  I think they've gotten over the fact that not everybody is gonna be a Linux expert one day.

You can make your own private elastic clouds with Ubuntu Server, utilize public clouds if you need to and it's free!

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

And Ubuntu can be configured to have far better graphic effects than any fruit themed toy, 90% of times it will work without issue on your HW (some printers and webcams may require fiddling) and the UI is pretty straight forward.

You can download and burn an image and it will allow you to run it from the CD without touching your partition.

The only recommendation is to be careful to leave enough space to install updates and SW as the automatic install may leave too little (unnecessarily).

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Thanks, all.  I plan on burning a CD to install it onto a bare drive.  It can have the whole drive, 120g-- it's a drive I replaced with a larger one a while back, and I'd forgot I even had it in my parts bin.

Anything special I'd need, to make a bootable install CD?  Or is that a newbie "duuuh" question?

The drive is SATA, not PATA, but the bios sees it fine.   For safety, I plan to de-connect all other drives until I'm done-- then I cannot make a mistake and accidentally install over something I want to keep.  (long story, but learned the hard way.....)

Once it's up and operational, I'll re-connect the remaining disks.  Would this cause issue with Linux?  I know that it (or so I recall) compiles itself during the install process-- would adding 4 NTFS drives after the install is complete confuse it?  I wouldn't think so, but....?

Ubuntu.... that seems to be the consensus here?  Or am I presuming?

Thanks, all, by the way.

[ivor]

If you get it up and running then I doubt you'll have any problems with it.  The only thing that's and issue is hardware which isn't as big a problem as it is for Microsloth.  After that you'll be impressed.  Then you'll be upset that there isn't as much software that runs on it like I was....

[beagle]

Ubuntu.... that seems to be the consensus here?  Or am I presuming?

I'd go with that. I'm 3 years out of date, and you can always buy one later if you don't like the free one.
I'd check whatever you go with understands your hardware though (does Ubuntu have a compatibility check program?) Support for new graphics cards used to be an issue once upon a time.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Hardware compatibility:  check.

So, I suppose the first order of business is to compile a list of my hardware, then check before starting?

I was not aware there were non-free versions.  Is there a major advantage to purchase vis a vis roll your own (free)?

[ivor]

I'd just wing-it and see what happens if you're not worried about another OS on the hard drive.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Other consideration re: install, is that ubuntu comes with a boot loader so if you remove the disks you may have a problem accessing either ubuntu or any of your windows systems. The bad side of ubuntu's boot loader is that it assumes by default that you want to run ubuntu, that is, if you turn on your PC and leave it alone you will find it on ubuntu unless you select other OS on boot.

Boot magic (used to come with partition magic) can do the trick but it isn't transparent sometimes.

[beagle]

I was not aware there were non-free versions.  Is there a major advantage to purchase vis a vis roll your own (free)?

At one time it was worth (at least for us as a business) paying SUSE £80 in order to get a version which came with CDs/DVDs, installed without hassle, and just worked.
That was more than 5 years ago though, so maybe the free ones are just as good now. Also since Novell took over the SUSE support pages plummeted in quality (IMHO). To give you some idea by how much, we used to use the German SUSE support site rather than Novell's English one (despite us all being appalling German speakers), because it seemed to be the last to get converted to the new corporate standard of nastiness.
Having stuff on DVDs  and a good automatic update  system avoided endless round trips downloading packages (which was once a Linux feature, but again is probably better now).

[ivor]

I haven't played much with the boot loader...  I always had a dedicated machine...

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Ubuntu practically updates itself for free. IIRC Red Hat has a pay version but it is used for servers so it wouldn't apply.

[ivor]

Yup, Ubuntu has auto update just like Microsoft.  It works great!  There's even a free virus scanner called ClamAV.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Okay, that's all very well.

I'm planning on dedicating a specific hard disk to Linux.  During the entire install, I'll be removing all my windoze drives (temporarily) so as not to confuse anything-- a long-learned lesson from the past.

Once Linux is up and running as it should, I'll re-connect the other drives one at a time.

As for booting, I'm planning on using my BIOS build-in drive selection menu-- obscure, true, but Just Works.  And a nice label takes care of the obscurity issues (the seemingly random mix of numbers and characters that 'identifies' the disks appears to be arcane magic.  )

Anyone see an issue with the above plan?

Or will Linux futz with my Windoze drives once it gets a chance to see them?  That would be a deal-breaker...

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

ubuntu (I can't tell about other flavors because the last time I played with mandriva was long ago) won't harm your win disks.

In theory your bios solution seems workable but I had some headaches with a similar config because the boot part is usually in only one disk on the system. In theory once you tell it to boot from certain disk it should do it, in practice can be tricky. If each disk has the installation completely isolated it should work.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

ubuntu (I can't tell about other flavors because the last time I played with mandriva was long ago) won't harm your win disks.

In theory your bios solution seems workable but I had some headaches with a similar config because the boot part is usually in only one disk on the system. In theory once you tell it to boot from certain disk it should do it, in practice can be tricky. If each disk has the installation completely isolated it should work.

I'm only too familiar with the MBR issue.  That's why I always disconnect the data wire from other working disks.  I learned that problem, back during an upgrade from Windows NT to Windows 2000.... I mistakenly left the WinNT drive in place when I cold-installed Win2K.   I had heck fixing that one.... eventually, the creation of a MBR repair disk solved it, but it was touch-and-go for a bit.

The fact is, as far as I can tell, the BIOS really does not care if there are multiple, primary, active drives in it-- that convention was likely invented by some basement dweller back at IBM in 1963 or something.  And nobody's bothered to fix it since.   

But the only way I've found to create multiple, primary, active drives, is by creating the partition with just that drive in place. 

Hence, the disconnect all the others, every time I'm doing a system install.

I usually always do it this way, regardless:  drives are cheap (relatively).  If I want a fresh install of Windoze (a recommended practice-- I used to say bi-annually (win95/98 days) but now, things have improved, and once every coupla years seems enough) I would buy a new, larger drive, and bare-metal install Windoze on it-- with nothing else in the system.  Then, I could re-connect the old drive and fish for files.   But, in a pinch, I could re-connect it and boot from it, if I needed.  Once in a great while, a fresh out-of-the-box drive is bad, but only after a week of burn-in.... having the previous install still intact has saved my butt a time or two.

I find I like the idea of using the BIOS, even with it's arcane language    There's nothing else burdening my system that way, and it's a literal key-press away.

That way, if I decide in the future, I could remove 2 of the 3 OS disks, and I'd still have a working PC... 

I'll post my results when I get around to making the Linux disk.

[Lindorm]

A bit late to the party, but I can only add to the choir of praise. Installing Ubuntu did wonders for my blood pressure and productivity. It just works, period. And it talks to most peripheral devices without any hiccups, even some Windows-based stuff that is supposedly only useable with proprietary programmes ( i e certain MP3 players, our notoriously diva-tastic HP printer etc.)

A caveat, though: Since Ubuntu is distributed as free, Free and Open Source, some media formats and programmes (DVD player among them) may require a bit of tweaking in order for them to play all your media properly. This is mostly just a matter of writing a few lines of text in the command-line editor and very well documented on various forums, How-tos etc, and really just a minor inconvenience.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Thanks, all for the info.

I've burned a nice bootable CD of the latest stable Ubunto.  I did locate a nice website with a questionare about which linux to choose, here:  http://lifehacker.com/146963/which-linux-distro-is-right-for-you

I took the quiz, looked carefully at the results, then checked out the various websites the results produced.

Ubunto was one of the 100% "compatible", according to how I answered the quiz, and the site confirmed it.

I already sent them 2 feedback comments, as two of the supposedly 100% compatible offerings were not, in fact, all that compatible when looking closely at their sites-- mainly a lack of 64bit support.   Since I have 8gigs of ram, I want to make full use of it, and the 4 processors-- which means 64 bit as far as I can tell.  Sure, the 32 bit will run-- heck, I'm on XP at the moment (due to that's how I'd left my machine from last night, and I'm too lazy to re-boot into 7).  But XP is 32 bit, and it sees only 2gig of my memory-- ignoring the rest, I presume.*

In any case, this weekend, I'm planning on cracking the case open, installing that last SATA hard drive, disabling the other two active, primary drives, and seeing what happens.  With any luck?  It'll just work.

Hmmm.   I probabily ought to pre-load some Linux drivers onto somewhere or other, in case the network card won't network...   In fact, I may go back to MSI's website, and choose "Linux" and see what sort of drivers they offer, first. 

I could stash these onto my storage volume drive, I suppose-- there's nothing there that's propriety to microsuck, and it's neither a primary, active, nor bootable anyway-- strictly a storage disc (500gig).




))))))))))))))))))

_{* I'm going to look for a crack/patch for XP to see more RAM, but I've not got around to it}

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

They have an x86-32 and a x86-64/AMD64 version, you can download both .iso files from this link:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

Note the alternative download options to change to the 64 bit version.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

They have an x86-32 and a x86-64/AMD64 version, you can download both .iso files from this link:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

Note the alternative download options to change to the 64 bit version.

Thank you-- but I already discovered that setting.

I should have posted a link myself, I suppose.

That's the version (64bit, complete) that I burned into the CD.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

A bit of thread necromancy, and a bit of a serious complaint.

I had twiddled with Linux awhile back-- and I see nearly 3 years back (I knew it was awhile).

I tried and tried to beat Linux into submission, both with the printing issues and the multiple-monitor thing.

Never did get either one to work-- at all.   Eventually gave it up as a waste of time and energy, beating one's head senselessly against an immovable object.

But the other day, I realized that one (or more) of my hard drives was failing, gradual slow-downs, longer and longer waking from sleep, etc. 

I presumed it was my oldest drive, a 320gig that I had been using for my programs' installs, as I noticed the hesitation anytime I accessed programs installed on that drive.  I was wrong, but didn't figure that out at first.  So, I'd been in the market for a new(er) drive, and Best Buy the other day, had some pretty good specs on one for less than $100.  64meg cache, SATA 6, etc.  So I got it.

Here comes the Linux thing-- I reconnected my external Linux drive, and told BIOS to boot from it, so I could use Linux to clone the 320gig onto the new 1000gig.  I'd extend the partition to fill the whole drive in Windoze (very easy to do, if the space is unallocated).

And there began my Tale Of Linux Arrogance:  Linux wouldn't let me do much of anything, until I upgraded to a later version.  (And I'd forgotten my password.. meh)  Fine.  Upgradealready.  Sheesh, arrogant $*^(#^%& software...

... and THAT was a horrible, horrible mistake.  At least with the old Linux, I could actually read what was on the duplicated-desktop (the 3rd screen remained 100% unused... stupid OS).  But post- "upgrade" the video was all hash.  Meh.  Finally, looking on the Web, using my Android tablet, I found a way to both recover my password & boot into a "low graphics safe mode" (whatever that is).  At least I could see the words, now. 

I wasted another 45 minutes in a futile attempt to find a reasonable way to make the graphic card work (that did not involve arcane Linux spellcasting that only SuperUsers understood fully... arrogant is what I would describe the majority of the Linux [no]Help forums.  Gave up.  Will keep booting into "low level graphics safe mode" in the future.   

Anyway, I did manage to recover (or more properly, reset) my admin Linux password--that was relatively painless, and not a little bit concerning-- it' really was too easy to do, I could have walked my mom through the process over the phone... not really a good thing, security-wise.  And also makes me quite irritated that I have to key in the damn password for nearly everything I wanted to do!  Why bother?  Since it's so very simple to change with just a few steps.... !!

meh.  But I did manage to duplicate my (what I thought was) ailing P: drive (programs) onto the 1000gig one, using a terminal command (diskrecover, I think.. was going to use DD, but it doesn't continue after an error, so I used the recover one instead-- had to install it, which was actually explained quite well in the one thread, to my astonishment...)

Power off, no problem.  Remove the old P: disk, and the now unneeded Linux disk, and power on.

Fail.  Epic-epic fail.   My original Windows disk would no longer boot!  It put up a 100% useless message having something to do with a Grue or a Grep some nonsensical crap from ... it could only be ... that massively--^)#^*()#$ Linux update!  How.  Utterly. Completely. ARROGANT-- to write over my MBR without so much as a "by your leave".... !!!!   To say I was mad, would be to say the Sun in Florida is middling bright.   Now, I had no computer at all!  Aaaaaaagh!

So.  Power off.  Reconnect the stupid Linux disk, and try again-- booted directly to Linux, with the garbled & unreadable graphics.  Reboot, only hold down the shift key (I remembered the 2nd time) so I could get into the low-graphics "safe" mode again.   Search the webs for what had happened-- Linux obviously trashed the MBR on my main Windows drive... and the only way to fix it, was to boot into Windoze, and create a recovery CD.  Catch-22.   But some fiddling about, and I managed to engage the GREP or GRUE or whatever it's stupidly called boot menu from Linux-- WHICH I DID NOT WANT.  (did I mention arrogant?  I did?  Well--it was.)

Reboot.  There's the boot menu, finally-- choose Windoze 7-- wait & finally, I'm back in Windoze land.  Dig out of the junk parts bin an unused CD.  Create the "recovery disk".  Reboot--use BIOS to boot to the CD, and let Windoze repair the MBR.   That was actually pretty easy, both to find, and to do once I had the MBR disk-- there's a little utility .EXE file that Just Works.  Command line simple.   I didn't even have to print the instructions, they were so easy (for me).

Remove CD.  Reboot with hands-off.  *sigh*  Windoze started automatically.  *sigh*-*sigh*.   Back, baby! 

Only, my halts, hesitations & slowdowns were not fixed... I'd replaced the wrong drive... !  It was my el-cheapo Windows drive, it was only 160gig when the norm was 500gig & higher.  I deliberately wanted a small system drive, so it wouldn't get burdened with extra files I needed to keep... turns out that was a bad decision, as it also meant el-cheapo, bottom-of-the-barrel quality & electronics.

During the Linux disk cloning process, it had a rather nice display of the bits-per-second during the copy process, including both instant & average.  I had noted that cloning the new drive, the average speed was in excess of 5000, and sometimes peaked at 6000+.    I didn't think anything of it at the time....

... I was now really concerned about that ailing 160gig system disk.  Hmmm... I now had an unused, but apparently still reliable 320gig I wasn't using anymore... so.... Back to Linux-- using BIOS to choose which disk to boot from-- remember to hold the SHIFT key, to get into the "emergency" low-level graphics mode....

.. and this time, I would be cloning the 160gig onto the 320gig (wiping it out in the process-- no problem).   I invoked the same spells as before, only with new targets.  And during the cloning process, I noticed the bits per second dropped to 3000 and occasionally lower.  That right there told me the 160gig was sub-par, as the target in this one had been the source in the previous test.

About an hour later--ironically about the same time as for the 320-- I had me a clone of my Window's drive.  Power down.  Disconnect the 160.  Reconnect the 320, mount it in an empty slot (I have lots in this case), connect the cables that formerly fed the 160, to the 320 now. 

Boot up and see what's what:  during BIOS POST, there's no more halt at the disk-detection phase.  Yaaay!   And Windoze was many times faster too.   Let it come all the way up-- it has to trundle a bit, to "reinstall" a few things, as Windoze knows I've changed the drive (serial number), but is happily trundling away.  When that was done, I went in to Disk Manager, and extended the Windoze partition to fill up the rest of the unused space (why not?).  Then rebooted to let everything settle in. 

This final reboot, things just flew by-- like it was new, in fact-- and I believe I've isolated & repaired my hesitation issues.  I'm so delighted, I think I'll go ahead and order a high performance WD Velocitiraptor drive, who runs at 10,000RPM, and has about 500gig or so space.  About $100US (or so).  A nice 64meg cache, SATA 6mb interface, a nice drive.  Reviews were positive for the most part.  It apparently runs a wee bit hot, so I'll likely move things around in my trays, to put this one up-top, in front of a fan.  But that's for another day... (and I'll have to deal with the Linux-beast too... maybe I ought to download & create a new, fresh install-- that one was only 10.xx something, and I think they are all the way up to 12.xx now.... meh.  As bad as Windoze 98 days, with daily updates... )



So.  Why did I bother with Linux at all, if I only wanted to change disks in Windoze?  Because Windoze does not play well with hardware changes, if you make them within Windoze' full attention-- it insists on doing nefarious things to a brand-new drive first, and can get it's registry really befuddled if you do it that way.

By doing these hardware swaps outside of Windoze, it pretty much remains ignorant of the new hardware, and you don't need to modify the registry pointers to the new stuff-- the clone process makes the new disk exactly like the old one, as far as Windoze & it's funky registry is concerned.  Not a trivial concern.   

Back in the day, I would've done all this in DOS.  But, alas, DOS does not understand NTFS, the preferred format for drives larger than 2 gig in size.  I'd go into it, but this is long enough as it is.  So my choice was use XP or Linux.  Unfortunately, my XP install is completely hosed--I had done something bad to it, and it's now in an endless boot-loop.  I haven't bothered to fix that, as I don't use it anymore anyhow....  I had foolishly thought that Linux would be a painless way of cloning the disk...

... silly me.

[Griffin NoName]

I always buy WD. At least, if I buy them seperately and am not constrained to the choice the actual computer manufacturer provides.

Sounds like you had fun !

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Actually? I did--once I had beaten out all the knots in the system. 

There is a great deal of satisfaction in finishing such projects. 

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Were you using a CD boot version of linux? That is the way to do such things BTW.
--
Also, you can do partition cloning from Win using Partition Magic without major complaints (at least in my experience).
--
And as for the graphics/3rd monitor, etc, that isn't the OS fault but the manufacturer of the hardware not making a fully working driver (and admittedly both AMD and nVidia make some half-a$$3d jobs on their linux drivers, hopefully that should get better now that Steam is in linux).

[Griffin NoName]

I always buy WD.

Actually?

Yes, actually.  Oh, wait a minute, that's a film   oh no, that's Love Actually. Must stop rambling//......................

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

I always buy WD.

Actually?

Yes, actually.  Oh, wait a minute, that's a film   oh no, that's Love Actually. Must stop rambling//......................

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Were you using a CD boot version of linux? That is the way to do such things BTW.
--
Also, you can do partition cloning from Win using Partition Magic without major complaints (at least in my experience).
--
And as for the graphics/3rd monitor, etc, that isn't the OS fault but the manufacturer of the hardware not making a fully working driver (and admittedly both AMD and nVidia make some half-a$$3d jobs on their linux drivers, hopefully that should get better now that Steam is in linux).

Frankly, I can't be bothered to go to all the trouble to create a boot version of Linux.  Yes, I know I know it's supposedly pretty easy.  But I really had wanted to like Linux, and I had this extra 120gig drive lying around, and a nice, quality external case....

I am well aware that many of the drive duplication software runs on a custom version of Linux-- my past-favorite Acronis did exactly that, and came with a nice utility that would create a bootable CD/DVD to do the duplication.  But I have not kept up with them, and the copy of Aronis I have does not speak SATA.   Too cheap to upgrade.  Besides, I had a nice pure-install of Linux on a 120gig drive... right?  Right?  meh.

As for the graphics thing?  I could not even figure out how to get it, let alone figure out where the damn thing was installed (or not) or what the unnecessarily-opaque Linux was using instead of what it ought to have been using.  The no-help forums were very little help to anyone who wasn't deep into Linux culture and understood the subtle nuances of Terminal-speak. 

There was once a time, when I had the energy to dig into that-- I still remember 90% of my DOS commands for example.  But that was due to 17 years of doing DOS on a daily basis, and very complicated DOS it was, too.  Tweaking, by hand (and trial and error) the memory, the interrupts, the PORT settings?  Yeah, I did that.

And I do not miss it even a little bit.   Windoze, for all it's piggyness?  It just does that carp for me, good enough, too.  Is it perfect?  Nope-- so what?  It Just Works.

I cannot say the same for Linux--not even superficially does it work-- forget the 3 monitor fiasco.  Forget that I cannot print in Linux--ever.   It can't even be smart enough, to automatically put my graphic card into a mode where I can read the damn screen!   And the fix?  The fix requires a PhD in Linux.

So do I blame the OS?  You damn betcha I blame the OS.  At a bare minimum, it should be able to be--easily-- put into a simple, low-level graphic mode and stay there.  Can I beat on it to do that?  No-- I can get it into the low level mode temporarily, by jumping through some very silly hoops first.  Each. and. every. time.

Fail.  Epically so.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Creating a boot is a matter of just burning the ISO you download, and that will run in almost anything precisely because it's configured for compatibility. Running 3 screens though, being something that only a tiny portion of users do, that requires 3rd party drivers, that are underdeveloped by the videocard manufacturers, will not happen out of the box.

Forgive me but it would seem to me that you expect Linux (and you didn't even specified which flavor) is supposed to magically do everything easier that windows itself, and at this point that isn't a logical expectation (because not even windows is able to do so).

[Griffin NoName]

I have always regarded any flavour of Unix to allow more fiddling than Windows but that says nothing about easy or not.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

No, I expect Linux which is touted as superior in every way to windoze, to behave at least as well as windoze does.   As a bare minimum.

And I could even forgive the no-3-screens issue-- if it would work with just one. It doesn't.   I cannot boot to a readable screen, unless I jump through several "recovery mode" hoops each and every time.

And it won't print to my printer, no matter what I try. 

Windoze does all of these things right out of the box, without me doing a darn thing.   It just works.   Linux, just does not: without a PhD expert to tweak it first.

That's a failure of epic proportions, right there:  Two of the most basic functions, right out of the box, do not work.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

I have always regarded any flavour of Unix to allow more fiddling than Windows but that says nothing about easy or not.

That could very well be true-- I'm pretty ignorant with regards to Unix myself.  I know DOS backwards & forwards (even still), and I know Windoze pretty well (but not as well as I used to-- new versions and all that).

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Update to the Linux Saga.

I managed to put an update onto a USB drive, and using that, install a newer version of Unbuntu on my Linux drive.  At the same time, I figured out how to install Catalyst drivers for my screens, and more to the point, got them to work-- well, 2 of the 3 work as 2 separate spaces.  The 3rd one is a duplicate of one of the others.  I can move the duplicate about, but cannot get 3 unique spaces. Oh well--2 is twice as nice as 1. 

And it also boots into a readable form each and every time-- yaays!