Having some fun

English Soapbox
1

Well I was bored and annoyed at Vista. I tried to install it and had nothing but headaches. It came with my Compaq computer and is bundled with HP crap. So I un-installed everything except the basics (and Roxio) including un-installing all the HP stuff on it. Strangely enough it made Vista boot faster, which isn’t really saying a lot since it IS Vista, lol. Anyways it would not update correctly. I finally downloaded a program from MS, stand alone updater, that got me up to SP1 but no further. So after several hours of trying everything I could to get sp1 installed I just said the hell with it and…

I tried some other os’s. OpenSolaris, nothing but headaches though I do look forward to seeing where it goes. I think it has come far but it still has a ways to go yet. It finally installed for me when I realized it was a bit cranky and had to have the first partition of the drive. After that I had issues with sound and the bigger one with the network. It seemed to show what my card was, had the correct ip address, etc. But it would not connect. I tried to do it manually and the whole computer just shut off. I had to hit “e” at the grub menu so I could boot with the debug “-kv” I think it was. I got it to boot but still had the same problem with the internet. Then it just stopped working again and I said the hell with that one too, for now, lol.

Free-BSD installed fine, but that is about it. When it boots I get an error that says hit ctrl-D, etc. But then it freezes.

I tried PC-BSD but it is NOT linux, I was lost, lol. I am going to try it again in a couple of months when I redo my whole set up. I only had one problem that I saw and that was the sound not working right. Not a huge deal.

So now my set up on my computer is:

Suse 11.1 (My Main OS)- I am going to wait and install 11.2 rather then any of the milestones.

Ubuntu 9.04 - I did briefly try 9.10 but I decided to stay with this one and redo it all together when I install Suse 11.2

Fedora 11 - I think the last one I installed was 2 or 4? Should be fun to see what happened with it.

Mandriva 2009 - I briefly installed this a couple of times over the years but I never really kept it on too long. The last time I used this as my main OS it was still called Mandrake, and dammit I still keep saying that by accident at times.

Windows XP (Until I can get that **** Pinnacle card working. I will try that again soon.)

I have a total of three sata drives, sata-sda=320GB, sata-sdb=320GB, sata3-sdc=160GB. Suse has sata1 all to itself. But when Ubuntu 9.10 comes out and I do a clean install of Suse 11.2 they will both share that drive. I might split it into 4 primary partitions: swap, Suse /, Ubuntu / and storage. I might encrypt the storage partition as well.

sata2 has Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu on it now. After it will have Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSolaris and PC-BSD (Eventually for the last two.)

sata3 has 40GB for XP and the rest is a fat32 storage partition that I keep media files on, etc so I can share it with all the operating system I have installed.

So I would like to thank Microsoft and Vista. If they didn’t **** me off so much I wouldn’t have ended up having so much fun playing around with all of this, lol!

2

So what the hell did they do to Mandriva? It has been awhile but correct me if I am wrong. Isn’t a distro suppose to get better as it grows? This is by far one of the least friendly ones yet, well as far as the “top” distro’s go.

Good thing I know how to use vi, though I had to Google and refresh my memory on the save command, lol.

By default you can’t log in as root. Fine, this can be changed. But the only way to do it is to edit a file as root and that has to be done in Konsole. Ok no big deal. So I get that taken care of and I log in as root (GUI.) and I remember that during the install Mandriva installed correctly to sdb3 but for some reason it made Grub point to hdo rather then hd1. I fixed everything with Mandriva while I was in the Ubuntu livecd (which I was installing to sdb4.) But I forgot to change the splash image path to hd1,2 (it was pointing to hd0,2.)

So I was just going to log in as root. Open Dolphin, got to /boot/grub/menu.lst and change it. Simple huh. Well kwrite doesn’t want to do it so back to vi I went to change one freakin number.

I am keeping Mandriva for now. They did make it look nice, now if they can get it to work as well as it looks. (By the way I don’t hate Mandriva. I don’t think there is a Linux distro out there I hate, lol.)

Ok. I am done. Have I mentioned lately how much I love OpenSUSE?

3

I am really trying to give Mandriva a fair shot here. I wonder why they don’t have the update mirrors automatically set up. It tries to get them and I get an error.

Have I mentioned at all today, at any time today, how much I love OpenSUSE? Thank you for having the repos all set up for us to update and add packages. (well I do have to add the packman repo but that is easy and I don’t get errors, lol.)

Ok back to it. There has to be a logical reason why this is not working.

4

Screw this. I am going to give Fedora a drive around the block. I will come back to Mandriva later.

1 - OpenSUSE installs great, updates great, etc.
2 - Ubuntu installs great, updates great, etc.
3 - Mandriva…

5

Well Fedora is not bad so far. Had an issue with the uuid. I installed Fedora before I installed Ubuntu and Mandriva. I added an entry so it would mount /dev/sdb3 and /dev/sdb4 (where I installed Ubuntu and Mandriva after) but then the uuid got messed up. No big deal I knew how to fix that fast enough in fstab.

A strange problem is that I use the Febe add-on for Firefox. Every OS I have used to restore my profile with Febe has worked perfectly. But in Fedora for some reason it restores it but leaves out the bookmarks. Oh well. I can figure that out later.

So far out of the four the lead goes to OpenSUSE 11.1, however Ubuntu 9.04 is a close second.

Fedora is third.

Mandriva is tenth.

6

Well if no one has noticed, this thread has turned into a journal of sorts about my other distro experiences. I put it in this section at first because I didn’t know how strong my thoughts and opinions where going to be. Seemed to fit this section better.

Anyways. I am getting rid of Mandriva. I am not seeing anything with it that makes me want to keep it. My guess is that they are more worried about people signing up for their club then they are about anything else which is why they make things more difficult. To each their own.

I thought about going with Debian in place of Mandriva but I already have Ubuntu. Close enough, lol.

So in place of Mandriva I am going to go with Arch. It is an Independent distro. It sounds interesting and I never tried it before. I am not worried about having to do things the hard way to set them up and long as I am not restricted in what and how I can do things. I already have two very easy to install distros, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu, so I am good with that. And since OpenSUSE with KDE4 is my main one I already have things set up the way I want them, except the TV card of course. Ubuntu with Gnome is coming along as well as a back up main OS. I am thinking XFCE with Arch. I don’t really want all the distro’s I have installed having the same DE’s.

I am also thinking about, after a few days of playing around with it, changing Fedora to Slackware. I haven’t tried that one in a long time, 5 years maybe?

I am not really sure why people complain about having problems with OpenSUSE or even Ubuntu. From my experience so far they are the top of the list as far as ease of install for the average user and stability with the options to go further if you want more then that.

OpenSUSE still remains my favorite. The community is great and a lot of work goes into OpenSUSE which says a lot about the developers. People complain all the time, even I do sometimes, but the fact is a lot of hard work goes into each release which can be seen by the finished product. Of course nothing is 100% and things do pop up every now and then. Which is no reason to give up and say it is all crap. Honestly if one gets a flat tired are they going to get the tire fixed or junk their car and say the car is a useless piece of crap?

Now Ubuntu is just popular. They had a lot of money, 10 million I believe, right from the start as well excellent PR. With that they have a huge amount of, well everything. That distro had better be good considering all they put into it and the resources they have. While I like Ubuntu I am really sick of seeing all the spin offs. I can understand Ubuntu giving back to Debian, while things are still compatible, but if I see one more new distro based on Ubuntu I am going to :sick::sick::sick:

7

Arch is great! And the installer isn’t as hard as it’s cracked up to be. Just have another system switched on, so you can follow the documentation as you go… Or I believe you can access it on another virtual console, because it’s on the installer somewhere in the filesystem.

They are somewhat inundated with people who think they’re cool cos they use Arch on the forums, but that’s not their fault - they’re just suffering the misfortune of being fashionable :wink:

But it is a nice distro…

I also really want to try out something Solaris ish at some point, maybe even Nexenta (although I think the packages are a bit dated). And then there’s NixOS. Which just sounds awesome… BSD sounds clever, but doesn’t have a lot of appeal for a desktop I don’t think.

[Oh, and also - play with different window managers too. Fluxbox / openbox / pekwm are cool, but at the moment I’m really into the tiling ones like xmonad…]

8

I’ve heard ion3 is very worth using as well… unfortunately the creator had a very unpleasant public falling out with the open source community en masse, so it has some really strange license restrictions which prevent it being in many distros.

I haven’t got around to trying it yet, and might not… Kind of takes the shine off something when you know already that it’s a development dead end.

…

If you’re on Arch, try musca as a good introduction to tiling window managers. It’s easier to get your head around than awesome or xmonad, but less versatile.

9

Thanks for the tips with Arch. I booted the network install cd just to see what it was like. It was so easy to install the base I just went ahead and did it. Of course it took me longer because I am a bit paranoid and have to at least triple check everything, especially the partitioning. It really wanted me to have a separate boot partition. Mandriva and Ubuntu are all installed on one partition each. So I had to get rid of Fedora which was the only one that had a separate boot and root partition. (Mainly because I was stuck. I could only install ext4 with the Fedora livecd I had but the boot partition could not be on an ext4 partition so I had to create an ext3 partition for it.)

I did screw up one thing installing Arch, which was Grub. I wanted it to install to sdb1 rather then the sdb mbr. I always screw up grub, that is why I use GAG boot loader, lol. I found a way around it so I can boot into Arch. Now I just need to see what my next step is. The install pretty much told me what to do. To start all I had to do was type “/arch/setup” Can’t get any easier then that. Not bad at all for a text based installer.

So Arch is the “in” thing. Finally I am part of the “in” crowd, the “fashionable” crowd… Oh wait, I hate the “in” crowd. Oh well, I still like Arch so far lol!

10

Getting the base system running is the easy bit. :slight_smile:

Now you have a whole world of obscure settings files to tinker with… Although as I said, the difficulty really is exaggerated. If you can read and follow instructions, you’ll get there (though you’re doing well if you don’t end up starting again from scratch at least once).

One thing I will say for it, is it is certainly true that it does give you a better understanding of the underlying system. Nevertheless, sane defaults is a sensible philosophy, and needn’t obscure the system from those that want to learn it. You have to get the impression that a significant part of the Arch userbase, if not the devs themselves, like things being ‘difficult’ because it makes them feel special, and keeps the riff-raff out. And in that respect you have to admire Debian for just being honest about it - they make the system relatively straightforward, then just swear at you till you go away if they don’t want you on their forums. It takes all sorts. :slight_smile:

11

That last part reminds me a little of the Ubuntu forums at times, lol.

Arch at this stage really is a pain in the backside, but in a good way not the way Mandriva was for me yesterday. I might be putting that Slackware install on hold for a bit while I learn and install Arch, and get use to it.

Well Arch is going to be stuck with me. Now that I know they want the riff-raff out (I am the master riff-raffer… uhm, something like that, lol.)

It isn’t bad playing around with this when it is not a life or death situation, the “in a rush and must have things set up fast thing.”

Though I just had a thought. Since I am spending and going to spend a lot of time on this I could finally get LFS installed instead. I have been wanting to do that for awhile and kept putting it off. Well first I want to get Arch set up, I will get to LFS later… lol.

12

>:( I am taking a break from Arch and relaxing with some VO.

13

VO? Is that booze or something? I remember being driven to booze by Arch. :stuck_out_tongue:

Yeah, take your time… It’s not the sort of distro you want to have to have functional or your boss will sack you. Think of it like a nice, big, red, fast Ducati. It spends most of its time sitting on your driveway in pieces, but if you like that sort of thing, it’s worth it…

Alternatively, just whip out LFS (or even Gentoo). That should make Arch seem like fun again!

14

VO is Vendetta Online, a space mmo game. It is fun but I just started playing that and I am lost there to, but at least I get to blow up the things that frustrate me, lol. Now that you mentioned it maybe some booze would work out good while installing Arch. Then again I can see me getting drunk, frustrated and screaming at my computer, rotfl! Now there is a youtube video for all to see. A drunk argument with a computer…

I think I will just do that. Install a little bit each day and just take my time with it all. There really is no rush.

15

That’s the way to do it. When I first tried I thought “Well, screw it, I’ll come back to that bit - for now I just want to get it working.” and I rushed through it. And it died. Spectacularly.

You want to read each paragraph of the install guide carefully, and work out what it’s asking you to do - hopefully even why (though it does skimp on this sometimes, and just asks you to do things on trust… fair enough, but again, I have to ask, are they just putting hurdles there for the sake of it? If you’re going to say to new users: “Type XYZ in the console” with no explanation as to what XYZ does, wouldn’t making it set up with XYZ in the first place then letting anyone that wanted to change it do so have the same effect? :). It doesn’t actually ask you to do that much, once you know what you’re doing; it’s just a question of working out how to set each thing for your system. Once you know that, you could breeze through it in half an hour…

And I wouldn’t drink while you’re doing it. I can’t see that working. It didn’t for me. :wink:

16

Well I was going to work on Arch today but something at Distrowatch caught my eye. Chakra, (The Chakra Project.) I had already decided to go with Absolute Linux rather then Slackware and now I am thinking about giving Chakra (LiveCD Alpha 3) a try. I am guessing I can do an HD install, (maybe I should read up on it first… Nah, more fun to jump in blindly and take my chances, lol.)

I installed Puppy Linux to my HD yesterday but that was just to do it, I never planned on keeping it on my HD. I am going to install Puppy to a 2GB flash drive instead. The only thing I don’t like about puppy is that the default system is only root. But there is a pet package that lets you easily add users, well from what I read. I haven’t actually tried it yet.

17

Chakra is now installed. The Chakra installer, called Tribe, crashed twice but it worked the third time. When Tribe got to the bootloader it gave me an option, which it choose hd0, to install grub. I typed in hd1,2 (sdb3 partition where Chakra was installed.) For some reason it added an entry hd1,2,2 in menu.lst and I also can’t boot off of sdb3. No big deal. I just changed it to hd1,2 and added the menu.lst info from Chakra>grub>menu.lst to Suse>grub>menu.lst. This is in the Aplha stage so I expected more problems then I actually had with the install. I do like what I am seeing so far. I just wish they would choose something other then KDE. But I can install something else myself later. Right now I am going to get Puppy on the USB stick and then get Absolute installed. Then that is it for now, probably.

18

I never got Chakra to work. At least it’s KDEmod though. You think that’s unwieldy - you should try the original KDE.

Arch just isn’t designed for such a system - it’s great at what it does, but I don’t think that’s it.

If you want a complete, integrated desktop environment, then it makes much more sense to have a complete, integrated distro.

Arch is more about… ordering pizza from the command line using emacs shortcuts. :slight_smile:

19

Excellent, As long as I can get a beer with that pizza. Hmmm, maybe that is what I can use that old floppy drive for. Rather then a dust collector it can be a beer and pizza dispenser.

After I installed Chakra I haven’t had the time to play around with it as much as I want. I am more curious then anything else plus I can use it as a learning starting point for Arch, well sort of.

20

It is the same - it’s a standard arch install, with a few graphical tools stuck on top.

I think they share my nagging belief that Arch a bit too puristic about their own philosophy, so they’re trying to make an installable live image that is arch through and through, but prepared to have sane defaults.

I just couldn’t make it work - perhaps because it puts the wrong hooks in the initramfs for an external USB drive, though who knows…

But good to have it on a partition lying about the place. It’s nice when you want access to a recent feature in upstream software… But I certainly wouldn’t rely on it as a workhorse. That said, I’m sure you can, if you’re very knowledgeable, and prepared to put in a few hours.

The other distro that piqued my interest for a while was sabayon. It’s a gentoo live image, I suppose similar in a way to Chakra’s relationship to arch, but a bit more non-standard.

Interesting in that you have the power of the source based portage system running alongside a conventional binary installer - so you work out where your specific bottlenecks are, and recompile them for extra speed. Interesting, but I’m not sure how well it works… For me it didn’t seem very professionally put together. Not that I played with it for long…