Gregg's Nearly Interminable Adventures in Linux Land

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by cromag

Yes, AbiWord and Gnumeric.

As I suspected. Open Office/Libre Office are simply too big and resource intensive for low end gear.

(And if you want to use the Base module, you have to have Java, because Java is used to create/maintain the databases. LO/OO will both let you install the Base module without Java installed, but it won't work.)

But, no, she doesn't really use it anymore. She just finished her sophomore year at college (majoring in Mechanical Engineering, Minoring in Chinese) and needed something with (much) more "horsepower" -- and greater compatibility with her courses.

The Compaq still works, though.

And it served well till she needed more power.

There are a fair number of people who make it something of a hobby to resurrect old hardware by turning it into Linux systems.
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Dennis

[Gregg Bell]

I've got this Verbatim 3GB flash drive that I just love but it's always acting up. Sometimes it works right. Sometimes not. Sometimes it's locked (see screenshot); sometimes it's not. There is no switch to lock or unlock on the flash drive itself. Any way of running this thing down?

Next problem. Already ran this by Dennis. I've got a black line across my address bar in Firefox. It happened on both Xubuntu computers at the same time. (see 1 009 screenshot). Any idea what's up with that? Thanks.

[signum]

I've had several flash drives mount themselves as "read only", which will lock up on a write. This was usually because the file system had become corrupted. Running "dosfsck" from the command prompt fixes it up. Make backups first, even if you never use them. This is the only time you can do that. Do a "man dosfsck" from the command prompt to see what you are getting into first.

The black bar in the navigation toolbar in Firefox is often caused by trying to use a buggy theme. Go to Tools ->Add-ons ->Appearance to see what theme is in effect. Select and enable a different one (I suggest the inital default theme) and see if the black bar goes away.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by signum

I've had several flash drives mount themselves as "read only", which will lock up on a write. This was usually because the file system had become corrupted. Running "dosfsck" from the command prompt fixes it up. Make backups first, even if you never use them. This is the only time you can do that. Do a "man dosfsck" from the command prompt to see what you are getting into first.

Dosfsck is the equivalent of the DOS/Windows CHKDSK program. (SCANDISK on Win9X.)

Backups are good ideas because flash drives, by default, come formatted as FAT16 (for drives <= 2GB) and FAT32 (for drives > 2GB). The FAT filesystem is understood by just about everything, but it's not terribly robust. In FAT, the smallest area of disk readable/writable in one operation is the cluster. How large a cluster is depends on disk size. Each cluster must have a unique address.

FAT16 uses 16 bit addressing, so there are 65,536 possible unique addresses. The largest cluster the FORMAT program can create is 32KB. This leads to a 2GB volume size limit for FAT16 volumes. FAT32 uses 32 bit addressing, so many more clusters (and much larger volumes) are possible.

The FAT table is where track is kept of what clusters on disk belong to what files. If the file system gets corrupted, that table has been partly trashed. Running CHKDSK or dosfsck fixes it, but FAT lacks the redundancy to let CHKDSK/dosfsck know what blocks used to belong to what files, so you are likely to have lots of "lost clusters". CHKDSK repairs file system by assigning the lost clusters to files with names like FILE0000.CHK, and putting them in a FOUND.000 directory. About all you can usually do is delete the FOUND.000 directory and it's contents, as the individual *.CHK files are unlikely to be complete or usable.

NTFS and extfs have more redundancy, and CHKDSK/fsck can generally repair the damage and put everything back where it's supposed to be. (The only time I had a problem on NTFS, a directory happened to be sitting on a bad block on disk. The contents had been properly recovered under the original file names, so it was just a matter of renaming the FOUND directory CHKDSK created to hold them.)

Bottom line, if the stuff on the flash drive is important, make sure you back it up regularly.)

The black bar in the navigation toolbar in Firefox is often caused by trying to use a buggy theme. Go to Tools ->Add-ons ->Appearance to see what theme is in effect. Select and enable a different one (I suggest the inital default theme) and see if the black bar goes away.

Yep. Good call.

I use the default FF these in Ubuntu, and have never seen this issue, but themes are tricky things in Firefox on any platform. (I see complaints all the time about addons that don't work correctly with some themes.)
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Dennis

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by signum

I've had several flash drives mount themselves as "read only", which will lock up on a write. This was usually because the file system had become corrupted. Running "dosfsck" from the command prompt fixes it up. Make backups first, even if you never use them. This is the only time you can do that. Do a "man dosfsck" from the command prompt to see what you are getting into first.

Wow. That was easy. Thanks signum. The dosfsck seemed to do the trick. I haven't done a lot with the flash drive yet but it did copy from and paste to perfectly so far. Thanks a lot.

Originally Posted by signum

The black bar in the navigation toolbar in Firefox is often caused by trying to use a buggy theme. Go to Tools ->Add-ons ->Appearance to see what theme is in effect. Select and enable a different one (I suggest the initial default theme) and see if the black bar goes away.

Don't think this would be the case as I'm using the Xubuntu default screens on both computers. Although one Xubuntu has the Xubuntu screen (w/the mouse icon in the middle) and the other just has a big solid dark (not the Xubuntu bright blue) background.

I'd been using Chrome a lot and my best guess is the black line came in when I upgraded from Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04. I checked on the one Xubuntu and it was indeed the default. And that does look (4/30) like the day I upgraded the two computers. Any other ideas? (Thanks!)

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

As I suspected. Open Office/Libre Office are simply too big and resource intensive for low end gear.

You answered my question without me even asking! LO works fine on my two pcs but on the laptop (see screenshot for my laptop specs) the screen will just jump to another page while I'm typing. It's not a deal breaker. I don't lose any data. But it's not pleasant. It baffles me a little because on the same laptop I can run MSOfficeWord 2003 perfectly.

So, my question is: If I get a bigger laptop with more memory (And some of the ones on ebay are great because they don't have an OS installed.) will LO run smoothly on it?
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Dennis[/QUOTE]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Dosfsck is the equivalent of the DOS/Windows CHKDSK program. (SCANDISK on Win9X.)

Backups are good ideas because flash drives, by default, come formatted as FAT16 (for drives <= 2GB) and FAT32 (for drives > 2GB). The FAT filesystem is understood by just about everything, but it's not terribly robust. In FAT, the smallest area of disk readable/writable in one operation is the cluster. How large a cluster is depends on disk size. Each cluster must have a unique address.

FAT16 uses 16 bit addressing, so there are 65,536 possible unique addresses. The largest cluster the FORMAT program can create is 32KB. This leads to a 2GB volume size limit for FAT16 volumes. FAT32 uses 32 bit addressing, so many more clusters (and much larger volumes) are possible.

The FAT table is where track is kept of what clusters on disk belong to what files. If the file system gets corrupted, that table has been partly trashed. Running CHKDSK or dosfsck fixes it, but FAT lacks the redundancy to let CHKDSK/dosfsck know what blocks used to belong to what files, so you are likely to have lots of "lost clusters". CHKDSK repairs file system by assigning the lost clusters to files with names like FILE0000.CHK, and putting them in a FOUND.000 directory. About all you can usually do is delete the FOUND.000 directory and it's contents, as the individual *.CHK files are unlikely to be complete or usable.

NTFS and extfs have more redundancy, and CHKDSK/fsck can generally repair the damage and put everything back where it's supposed to be. (The only time I had a problem on NTFS, a directory happened to be sitting on a bad block on disk. The contents had been properly recovered under the original file names, so it was just a matter of renaming the FOUND directory CHKDSK created to hold them.)

Bottom line, if the stuff on the flash drive is important, make sure you back it up regularly.)

Thanks for the education. Very interesting.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I use the default FF these in Ubuntu, and have never seen this issue, but themes are tricky things in Firefox on any platform. (I see complaints all the time about addons that don't work correctly with some themes.)
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Dennis

Same as I wrote signum. I already have defaults installed.

[signum]

OK, next step. Start Firefox from the command line in "safe mode" -

firefox -safe-mode

and see if the black bar still appears. This is not something you want to use all the time, it's just to narrow down the problem to see if it's fixable in a certain way. The safe mode will disable all extensions, themes, file associations, user customizations, etc., basically resetting it to factory defaults. But only temporarily - i.e., for the duration of the session. Nothing is changed on the disk.

(edit) When you start Firefox in safe mode, you'll get a popup window with a choice of "Reset Firefox" or "Start in Safe Mode" buttons. Click on "Start in Safe Mode" at this time. "Reset" is a serious commitment.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

You answered my question without me even asking! LO works fine on my two pcs but on the laptop (see screenshot for my laptop specs) the screen will just jump to another page while I'm typing. It's not a deal breaker. I don't lose any data. But it's not pleasant. It baffles me a little because on the same laptop I can run MSOfficeWord 2003 perfectly.

So, my question is: If I get a bigger laptop with more memory (And some of the ones on ebay are great because they don't have an OS installed.) will LO run smoothly on it?

It's all about RAM.

I have LO on a low end machine - a Fujitsu Lifebook p2110 with a whopping 256MB RAM (and a Transmeta CPU that grabs 16MB off the top for code morphing). I run Ubuntu 12.04 and Puppy 4.31 on the box.

LO runs, but is slow to load and somewhat sluggish in execution. (I don't see the quirk you mentioned.) Large apps are problems in general. I don't even try to run current Firefox releases.

Part of the problem is a slow IDE4 HD with anemic transfer rate. The other part is insufficient RAM so Linux must swap a lot, to that slow HD.

On my desktop with 4GB RAM and a faster HD, pretty much everything can be in RAM and swapping seldom happens.

RAM is good. More RAM is better. 2GB of RAM is a good starting point. How much you really need will depend on that you do. I'd call 2GB adequate for your use cases. If I were getting a laptop to run Linux, and I wanted to do things like software development or video editing, I'd want more.

You might also look at using an SSD instead of a standard HD. SSDs use flash memory instead of the spinning platters of a standard HD. They are much faster, and you don't care about things like disk fragmentation.
______
Dennis

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by signum

OK, next step. Start Firefox from the command line in "safe mode" -

firefox -safe-mode

and see if the black bar still appears. This is not something you want to use all the time, it's just to narrow down the problem to see if it's fixable in a certain way. The safe mode will disable all extensions, themes, file associations, user customizations, etc., basically resetting it to factory defaults. But only temporarily - i.e., for the duration of the session. Nothing is changed on the disk.

(edit) When you start Firefox in safe mode, you'll get a popup window with a choice of "Reset Firefox" or "Start in Safe Mode" buttons. Click on "Start in Safe Mode" at this time. "Reset" is a serious commitment.

Thanks signum. Tried it but no luck (see screenshots).

I did notice one thing though, maybe two. One is that sometimes the first page that opens (the Firefox default page) has no black bar in the address bar. The other thing is when I put the cursor in the blacked-out address bar and go left or right (depending whether I start on the left or right), it removes the black line.

And thx for telling me about "Reset." (I'm not one for serious commitments. )

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

It's all about RAM.

I have LO on a low end machine - a Fujitsu Lifebook p2110 with a whopping 256MB RAM (and a Transmeta CPU that grabs 16MB off the top for code morphing). I run Ubuntu 12.04 and Puppy 4.31 on the box.

LO runs, but is slow to load and somewhat sluggish in execution. (I don't see the quirk you mentioned.) Large apps are problems in general. I don't even try to run current Firefox releases.

Part of the problem is a slow IDE4 HD with anemic transfer rate. The other part is insufficient RAM so Linux must swap a lot, to that slow HD.

On my desktop with 4GB RAM and a faster HD, pretty much everything can be in RAM and swapping seldom happens.

RAM is good. More RAM is better. 2GB of RAM is a good starting point. How much you really need will depend on that you do. I'd call 2GB adequate for your use cases. If I were getting a laptop to run Linux, and I wanted to do things like software development or video editing, I'd want more.

You might also look at using an SSD instead of a standard HD. SSDs use flash memory instead of the spinning platters of a standard HD. They are much faster, and you don't care about things like disk fragmentation.
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Dennis

Thanks Dennis, You know I spoke too soon on that quirk of the cursor jumping around on the screen. Well, it did, but I found that it was my palm glancing the touch pad that did it. (Talk about a low-tech solution, but hey, it worked!)

I have identical pcs with Trusty Tahr 14.04 on them. One I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB. On the other I left it at 1.125GB. They both work great. (And were both dogs until I converted them to Ubuntu.)

And the laptop in LO is pretty damn fast (for me anyway). And now I see there is a new LO version available, but I'm sticking with mine for a while, as I just finally got used to it.

[signum]

That's about as far as I can go with this. I saw a vague reference to a black bar in chrome under "low memory conditions", but couldn't find anything more about it. The suggestion was to use Firefox instead!

Your best bet now is to ask your question in the Firefox support forum. Go to

forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=38

If they can't handle it, well...

[Glorfindel]

While we are discussing low powered computers... I have a tablet running Win95 with a 200 MHZ CPU, 64 MB RAM, and all of a 5GB hdd

[Glorfindel]

that costed $9,000 new.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Glorfindel

While we are discussing low powered computers... I have a tablet running Win95 with a 200 MHZ CPU, 64 MB RAM, and all of a 5GB hdd

Win95 will run nicely in that configuration. Personally, I'd use Win98SE, which would run as well and work better. There's even an open source package that adds a large subset of full the Win32 infrastructure, so things that ordinarily need Win2K or XP will run under it.

See http://kernelex.sourceforge.net/
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Glorfindel

that costed $9,000 new.

Sounds about right. Way back when, I worked for a bank when the original IBM PC was first appearing on desks as an engine to run the Lotus 123 spreadsheet. One of the folks in the area I worked in got a PC with a <gasp!> 5 MB hard drive. As I recall, the hard drive cost $5000.

Instead of $1000 a megabyte, we are in times when storage prices are 50 cents a gigabyte.
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Dennis