Gregg's Nearly Interminable Adventures in Linux Land

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Good to know. To me it always seemed like something you added to hardware. But yeah, in the light to thinking about it terms of hardware vs software it's definitely hardware.

Correct.

See, that's what I was saying in an earlier post. When I went to Crucial to buy memory for a Xubuntu machine they said their tool didn't work on Linux.

Their tool you can use to examine your system and see what RAM you need is a Windows program. They haven't released a Linux version.

The RAM will work just fine if you get the right kind.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

@DMcCunney,

I wasn't aware that Brasero was able to burn an ISO to a USB drive...

Good question. I haven't tried it, and don't know. If it doesn't, there's likely another tool that will. One way or another, he needs to burn the ISO to a disk image to do what he wants.
_____
Dennis

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Just ignore him.

Nah, Jon's a good guy. I think he just likes to be around Linux people.

Hey, yeah, I'm psyched out trying that 'death and destruction' method. I would try it but I have a helluva time finding the usb drive and how to display it in the terminal with all the /dev/blahblahblah stuff. (It almost makes me want to go over to the other side!)

Now I'm using Startup Disk Creator. It just made me authenticate to install a boot installer and now it's calling the file "persistence." But this is what I did before and it didn't work. (I have no idea why I'm doing it again.)

The only thing that has worked so far has been burning an iso to a CD via K3b.

The Startup Disk Creator said it was making an ext2 in the file system. (I'm kind of giving you a play-by-play here.)

And get this, searching for your Image Writer I found this (see screenshot). I tried to find if from the Application Finder, the Applications list and the terminal. Does this (the "Disk Image Writer") look like the kind of thing you're talking about with the 'Image Writer' and if it is, happen to know how I might find it?

You know, I just tried it. It didn't work. And was very weird. I think the box may be goofy.

I pointedly put Bodhi 3.2 and yet Bodhi 3.1 showed up. (I thouoght maybe I'd left the CD in there but I hadn't. Well, anyway, since it's there I'm going to try and install it anyway. (Because the Xubuntu I had on there was all screwed up--I'd done all this deleting with that BleachBit and whenever I tried to do something in the terminal it was telling me I needed this or that.)

Anyway it looks like it's installing. Sorry about the novel.

You know what, it worked. I mean the Startup Disk Creator. I was thinking it was a 2 in the file name but it was 32bit. Ha.

[eschwartz]

That is part of Gnome Disk Utility -- which also works, see the "Restore Disk Image" option.

The one I am thinking of is apt://usb-imagewriter <== This apt link *should* open up in the Software Center.
If not, just look for "usb-imagewriter".

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

That is part of Gnome Disk Utility -- which also works, see the "Restore Disk Image" option.

The one I am thinking of is apt://usb-imagewriter <== This apt link *should* open up in the Software Center.
If not, just look for "usb-imagewriter".

Thanks. I'll check. (And I'll check out Brasero (to see if it burns USB drives)--I've got it.) Here's what the other one looks like.

No luck on the link. I'll check in the USC.

[Gregg Bell]

Nope. Couldn't find it. (and adding the hyphen wiped out all the choices). And Brasero is only for burning CDs and DVDs.

But hey, that Startup Disk Creator seems to be working.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Correct. An ISO file is a file that can be burned to a drive to create a disk image on the drive. A copy does not work.


FAT32 is the standard format flash drives use out of the box. It's well understood, and readable/writable by just about everything. But it does not support *nix links, hard or symbolic.

The FAT filesystem originated on MSDOS. The earliest version was a 12 bit file system. Later versions were 16 bit. The current version is 32 bit.

In a FAT filesystem, the smallest unit of disk readable/writeable in an operation is the cluster. Each cluster must have a unique address. The filesystem used on MSDOS used a 16 bit address, for a total of 65,536 unique addresses. How big a cluster was depended on the size of the drive being formatted, but the maximum size of a cluster was 32K. This meant the larget disk volume possible under DOS was 2GB. As drives got steadily larger, it became necessary to partition larger physical drives into more than one logical drive to keep each logical volume to the 2GB limit. This got old fast.

(And because a cluster was the smallest unit of space possible on a drive, and each cluster could only hold one file, large cluster sizes wasted space. On a 2GB dive volume, a one line batch batch file would occupy 32K of disk space. The unused portion was referred to as "slack" space.)

As Windows gained prominence, the need for larger drive volumes caused the development of FAT32, which used a 32 bit address, and permitted much larger volumes.

On a FAT file system, you have a FAT table that is the entry point to the file system, directory entries in the FAT table that point to files, and files directory entries point to.

A *nix* file system works differently. The entry point is the superblock. But directory entries don't point to files, they point to inodes. An inode is a kernel maintained construct holding basic information about a file system object, like what its name is, what userid owns it, what group that id is a member of, the size of the object, the date/time it was created, the date/time it was last modified, the permissions that apply to it, and pointers to the beginning disk blocks it occupies. Under DOS and Windows, the file extension tells the OS what kind of file it is, and whether it's a program. Under *nix, it's considered a program because the execute bit is set in the object's permissions mask. Applications under *nix may use file extensions to identify files they work with, but *nix itself does not.

Under *nix, a directory entry points to an inode. More than one directory entry can point to the same inode, so it's possible to have the same file appear in more than one directory, or under more than one name in the same directory. These are called hard links. When you remove a file, you are actually removing a link to the inode. The actual file does not go away until you remove the last link if it had more than one.

The limitation with hard links is that they can't span file systems. Hard links can only be created on the same file system. To get around that, *nix has symbolic links. A symbolic link is similar in concept to a Windows shortcut, but more powerful. The OS follows the link and accesses the file on whatever file system it lives on. The possible issue with symbolic links is broken links. If you remove a symbolic link to a file, the underlying file is still there. If you remove the underlying file, the symbolic link is not automatically removed. You'll get a broken link pointing to something that no longer exists. *nix will throw an error if you try to access such a link.

NTFS does support both hard links and symbolic links, but the functionality is not exposed by default. You need an optional MS utility package or a third-party tool to use them. Under Windows, I use William Schinagl's Link Shell Extension for the purpose.


You aren't. You need to burn the ISO to a drive. Brasero is the default tool installed on Ubuntu for the purpose.
______
Dennis

Thanks Dennis. (That was like reading a Wikipedia entry--no better!)

[arjaybe]

Gregg, Unetbootin should work for putting your iso on a USB stick. It's what i always use. Just make sure the stick is fat32. The dd method works too. It's just a little scarier.-)

[Dngrsone]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Y
I have Puppy on an older machine. It works, but it's quirky. I began on *nix with AT&T Unix System V a couple of decades ago, and I've been an admin on multi-user Unix and Linux machines. As someone who has spent the odd hour locking down machines so users can't get root, Puppy's "You always run as root" approach gives me hives.

For something I'd boot off a flash drive these days, I'd probably look at Tiny Core Linux.
______
Dennis

I was looking at Tiny Core a while back, but haven't played with it yet.

I spent a couple decades working with (and repairing) Harris H100 mainframes running Vulcan OS, so I am quite comfortable with command-lines.

But I like me some GUIs, too; which is why I run Mint KDE on my laptop.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

Gregg, Unetbootin should work for putting your iso on a USB stick. It's what i always use. Just make sure the stick is fat32. The dd method works too. It's just a little scarier.-)

Thanks rjb. You know, I used Unetbootin and it worked really good, but lately it's been snarky. And yeah, I do make sure the stick is formatted to FAT32. And I'm looking forward to trying the terminal. Although there's this way of doing it called mkusb that supposedly takes the risk out of the process.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/mkusb

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

I was looking at Tiny Core a while back, but haven't played with it yet.

I spent a couple decades working with (and repairing) Harris H100 mainframes running Vulcan OS, so I am quite comfortable with command-lines.

But I like me some GUIs, too; which is why I run Mint KDE on my laptop.

I installed Tiny Core a while back. Super innovative idea. But it was pretty complicated too and more labor intensive than I was willing to invest at the time.

[Dngrsone]

Speaking of labor intensive, Dngrswife wants me to resurrect my firewall... certain people in thee house are up way too late surfing the internet.

This means I will have to hack my ADSL modem so that the firewall can operate through it.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

I was looking at Tiny Core a while back, but haven't played with it yet.

I haven't either. The concept is interesting - start with the core, and add the pieces you like.

I spent a couple decades working with (and repairing) Harris H100 mainframes running Vulcan OS, so I am quite comfortable with command-lines.

Never had occasion to work on Harris kit, and know nothing about Vulcan OS. Out of curiosity, what did it use for an editor? (I maintain the TextEditors wiki, and am trying to document editors on things that aren't PCs.

But I like me some GUIs, too; which is why I run Mint KDE on my laptop.

I also like GUIs, but KDE is rather more than I need.
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

Speaking of labor intensive, Dngrswife wants me to resurrect my firewall... certain people in thee house are up way too late surfing the internet.

This means I will have to hack my ADSL modem so that the firewall can operate through it.

Which ADSL modem?

I have a cable modem, and the current version is a combo modem and router. It includes a hardware firewall. The various machines here have software firewalls as well, but that's partly to keep Windows happy. (On the desktop, at least. Other things travel.)

How do your various devices connect to the Internet? If what you want is outbound control by device, I'm not sure hacking your router should be needed.
______
Dennis

[Dngrsone]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Never had occasion to work on Harris kit, and know nothing about Vulcan OS. Out of curiosity, what did it use for an editor? (I maintain the TextEditors wiki, and am trying to document editors on things that aren't PCs.

My goodness... I don't even remember. Let's see, Vulcan was a basic OS; the Machine itself was 24-bit mainframe with I think 512KB RAM. We used two HP7906 or 7907 hard drives (the 7906 had 18" platters, one fixed, one removable, total storage, a whopping 20MB; the 7907 went down to 8" platters, same capacity, IIRC). I think we calculated teh clock speed at something like 3MHz...

Job Control Language (JCL) ran on top of Vulcan, though we spent most of our time in Test Executive, which ran in the JCL shell.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Which ADSL modem?

I have a cable modem, and the current version is a combo modem and router. It includes a hardware firewall. The various machines here have software firewalls as well, but that's partly to keep Windows happy. (On the desktop, at least. Other things travel.)

How do your various devices connect to the Internet? If what you want is outbound control by device, I'm not sure hacking your router should be needed.

I've got a crappy Motorola NVG510 that AT&T insists I use for U-verse. The built-in firewall is basic. I have an old gaming server with Smoothwall on it: CLAMAV and content filtering, usage restrictions and monitoring, etc... I can even set up a separate network for a server, if the son decides he wants to host a Minecraft server.

Problem is, I can't get the NVG510 to go into true bridge mode for my external firewall to work; hence the hacking part.

It's either that or try and get AT&T to admit that there are other (perhaps even better? modems that will work on their lines.