Gregg's Nearly Interminable Adventures in Linux Land

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

<grin> I've looked at stuff like that. It's a bit too minimal.
______
Dennis

A friend swears by dwm.
I took the easy route and used Cinnamon. Middling fair-ish, not nearly as bad as heavyweights like Gnome3, Unity, and KDE.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Which one did you get?

I have a 240GB Crucial MX-100 here. I have no need for a TB model.

Crucial_CT1024M5
I spent a lot of time researching options and selecting manufacturer.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

A friend swears by dwm.

Depends on what you want. There are many *nix Window Managers

A chap on the Puppy forums detailed how he got a Puppy installation intended as a dedicated media server that would run on an ancient Toshiba laptop with 16MB of RAM. To do it, he had to strip out everything that could be stripped out and still have a running Linux system, and actually build the Puppy image on a more powerful machine, then remove the HD from the Toshiba, put the image on it, put it back in, and reboot. He used the Puppy default of JWM as the window manager.

Eric Raymond was going on a while back about getting i3 to work on a dual monitor setup. Eric spends most of his time developing and largely lives in emacs, so i3's tiled interface is a good fit.

I took the easy route and used Cinnamon. Middling fair-ish, not nearly as bad as heavyweights like Gnome3, Unity, and KDE.

Unity isn't that bad in terms of weight. The interface paradigm is what puts off most folks.

Gnome3 is what Jamie Zawinski termed "teenage attention deficit" development. Gnome2 had a list of bugs as long as your arm that hadn't been fixed. The problem was, fixing bugs isn't fun. Writing new code is fun. So we got Gnome3, with a number of changes long time Gnome users despised, and a whole new list of bugs that won't get fixed.

If you go with KDE, you buy into the KDE ecosystem. It's highly developed and stable, but huge, and you really need to add all the various pieces written for it to make proper use. I respect it, but don't need what it offers badly enough to make the investment in running it.
______
Dennis

[arjaybe]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Thanks to you I've got MX14 on one of my ancient laptops (Dell Latitude 550). I only use the laptops for word processing. The MX14 is great. I love it. But now (while not abandoning the MX14 on the one machine) I'm looking for something even lighter (so I can put a later version of LO on it). Any suggestions?

Look into antiX. Many of the same people who work on MX. It comes in varying sizes, so you can surely find one to suit. They tend to have minimal desktops, but if you just want it to run LibreOffice then that shouldn't be a problem. They've also created a nice collection of tools to simplify management. And they're really lean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AntiX - has a link to their webssite.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

The minimal CD can be useful -- IIRC, it requires the command-line to install, though, since it saves space by not including a desktop or GUI.

But if you avoid UNetbootin and simply write the Xubuntu ISO download directly to the flashdrive, it should work fine.
UNetbootin is known to cause weird problems.

Thanks eschwartz. Okay, so I'm downloading a xubuntu iso file now. Then by "write" I just copy and paste it onto a usb flash drive?

I thought I had to use Unetbootin or some Universal Installer-type thing to break the file down so it was bootable.

Okay, I think maybe I figured it out. Maybe. I downloaded the Xubuntu file. Then I extracted it. Then I 'selected all' and copied it and pasted it to the flash drive. HOWEVER now at the very f#%&*!@$ end of it I got this (the 032 scsreenshot).

I googled around and it says FAT32 (which is what the flash drive is formatted as {and what everybody says it should be formatted as}) doesn't work with symbolic links, which were obviously in the Xubuntu iso. (And btw when I extracted the file all the individual folders and files had padlocks on them. I checked that out and it said it was to prevent other users. So I ignored it.) I also read that NTFS doesn't work with symbolic links.

And I don't even know if I'm doing the right thing to begin with. LOL

So anyway I said 'Yes to all' and it finished. And now there are only padlocks on two files. (see 033 screenshot)

I'm going to leave it as it is until I hear from you as it took a while to get it there. Thanks.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Well, you could only it would involve upgrading your motherboard as well.



dmidecode requires sudo.
sudo never asks to be run -- if you need it but don't use it, you get a permission denied error.
If you use sudo, it might ask for your password.

Yeah, okay. Brain cramp. I guess I was just thinking it was going to tell me I needed to do sudo to run it.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

<sigh> RAM is hardware.

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.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I like Crucial too, and have also used MemoryX. Crucial is a unit of long time DRAM manufacturer Micron Technology, and a Name Brand. Their tool to examine your system and tell you what kind of RAM you need is a boon. You don't have to pop the hood and peer to see what's installed.

Dennis

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.

[JSWolf]

If I was going to a computer, I'd go for the one that runs Windows well. Windows just works better for more than Linux ever will.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I used the Minimal CD to install Ubuntu on my old Fujitsu notebook. It works fine, and is certainly small enough.

But what you get is a bare ones command line installation. It does not install a GUI. That's not a huge issue, as "working installation" means "working network support", so you can use apt-get from the command line to install a GUI and whatever else you want. Select the GUI you want to use, and Xorg and the necessary support to run a GUI will come along as dependencies. You can then reboot into the GUI and proceed as you normally might.

I'd be more interested in why your installing from USB stopped working. When was the last time it did work? What changed since then?
______
Dennis

Thanks Dennis. I don't know what the hell happened. I always made my bootable disks on Unetbootin and then stuck them in the target computer. Booted the computer up and then tapping (I think F12) a key during the bootup and then choosing "Boot from USB." Voila. No problems.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Thanks eschwartz. Okay, so I'm downloading a xubuntu iso file now. Then by "write" I just copy and paste it onto a usb flash drive?

I thought I had to use Unetbootin or some Universal Installer-type thing to break the file down so it was bootable.

It's similar to burning a CD. You need to burn it, as opposed to just copying it.

Gnome Disk Utility has an option to "Restore Disk Image" if I remember correctly. I don't know offhand what other GUI software is capable, although for Windows users I would recommend Rufus.

As I said, though, UNetbootin is known to cause weird problems even though it purports to be the one application to rule them all.



Personally, I use `dd` -- a command-line tool humorously nicknamed "disk destroy" since it is easy to make a mistake and delete your operating system.

EDIT: Try "ImageWriter" -- it should be available in the Kubuntu repos,

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by arjaybe

Look into antiX. Many of the same people who work on MX. It comes in varying sizes, so you can surely find one to suit. They tend to have minimal desktops, but if you just want it to run LibreOffice then that shouldn't be a problem. They've also created a nice collection of tools to simplify management. And they're really lean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AntiX - has a link to their webssite.

Thanks rjb. I downloaded the core one for the 32 bit. I heard people talking about this antiX in another forum and it went in one ear and out the other because I'd never heard of it before. I love MX14 (and now it seems a miracle I got it on the laptop) and so if I can get this antiX on the other machine maybe I can get a bigger LO. Appreciate it. And thanks for the link too.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If I was going to a computer, I'd go for the one that runs Windows well. Windows just works better for more than Linux ever will.

Hi Jon. Oh, agreed. However most of the things Windows does better I don't do (eg. gaming). And I love learning about Linux.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Hi Jon. Oh, agreed. However most of the things Windows does better I don't do (eg. gaming). And I love learning about Linux.

Just ignore him.

Given the thread title, that post was rather inappropriate.
He is a well-known Windows evangelist.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Thanks eschwartz. Okay, so I'm downloading a xubuntu iso file now. Then by "write" I just copy and paste it onto a usb flash drive?

I thought I had to use Unetbootin or some Universal Installer-type thing to break the file down so it was bootable.

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.

I googled around and it says FAT32 (which is what the flash drive is formatted as {and what everybody says it should be formatted as}) doesn't work with symbolic links, which were obviously in the Xubuntu iso. (And btw when I extracted the file all the individual folders and files had padlocks on them. I checked that out and it said it was to prevent other users. So I ignored it.) I also read that NTFS doesn't work with symbolic links.

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.

And I don't even know if I'm doing the right thing to begin with. LOL

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

[eschwartz]

@DMcCunney,

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