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Wish me luck.

Ayanami

By Ayanami,
in Linux - *nix

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Ayanami
Ayanami
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I have 2 hours and 44 minutes until my 51 GB of music finishes moving from my media partition to my external...then the fun begins.

 

Historically, I've had trouble with wireless and Linux, but I'm ready to set some time aside and really work with things.

 

Hopefully this one won't trash my bootloader like SuSE 10.3 did.

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Alessandro17
Alessandro17
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Hopefully this one won't trash my bootloader like SuSE 10.3 did.

 

My advice has always been the same, for years: don't install GRUB to the MBR, install it to the / (root) partition, then use something like Acronis OS Selector.

Good luck anyway :)

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SDRacer48
SDRacer48
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No matter what distro you go with, you would probably still have wireless problems...

 

And a tip, install your bootloader (grub or lilo) to a floppy disk or cd or jump drive or something. Never install it to the MBR, you are just asking for trouble...

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(MoC)
(MoC)
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If I had to recommend a distribution of Linux it would be Slackware. It is EXTREMELY customizable in all fields of a system and works on anything from a 486 to a C2D. Just stray away from any n00b edition of Linux that tries to imitate other operating systems. You need Linux, not some stupid stripped down version of it with almost no control over how it works. Good Luck anyway!

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~pcwiz
~pcwiz
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I wish you luck, and I also give you the advice to NOT install GRUB to the MBR. I made that tragic mistake last time I installed Ubuntu and I had no way to get it off other than by overwriting the bootloader with XP, which happened by accident (after replacing a burnt video card :P). And to this date, the partition with Ubuntu on it is still there on that old computer, doing nothing. So either don't install GRUB, or install it somewhere other than the MBR.

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chachawpi
chachawpi
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If you want a Linux that just works, you can't go wrong with Debian Etch. It is no harder to install than Ubuntu and all the packages are throughly tested. Granted, it won't be bleeding edge... but you will have guaranteed stability and security. Ubuntu is just unstable Debian with a few of their own tools added.

 

Slackware is another great distribution, but it is definitely not newbie friendly.

 

I dislike SuSE/Fedora and all other RPM based distributions just because of all the dependency nightmares that you run into with package management. What seems like a simple system "in theory", turns out to be the most complex rats nest of an OS imaginable.

 

As far as wireless problems go, you should not have any if you use ndiswrapper. It is a wrapper that allows you to select your Windows XP .ini file and then it will work. You might run into a situation where you have to blacklist some troublesome modules, but that is why Google is your friend.

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Alessandro17
Alessandro17
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I dislike SuSE/Fedora and all other RPM based distributions just because of all the dependency nightmares that you run into with package management. What seems like a simple system "in theory", turns out to be the most complex rats nest of an OS imaginable.

 

I have also always liked Debian (the real thing), but dependency hell with RPM distributions is a thing of the past.

For instance openSUSE 10.3 has a new YaST module called Community Repositories, adding more repos is as simple as ticking a box. YaST has become very good at solving dependencies. On top of that you have one click installs, Smart Package Manager...

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chachawpi
chachawpi
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I have also always liked Debian (the real thing), but dependency hell with RPM distributions is a thing of the past.

For instance openSUSE 10.3 has a new YaST module called Community Repositories, adding more repos is as simple as ticking a box. YaST has become very good at solving dependencies. On top of that you have one click installs, Smart Package Manager...

 

Interesting. I'll have to try out 11 when it comes out and see how it's progressed. One good thing about SuSE is the ease of setting up servers like DHCP and Apache. I'm talking REALLY simple. DNS was a little trickier, but definitely doable. E-mail, however, wasn't so simple. That seems to be more of a problem with sendmail itself though.

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Ayanami
Ayanami
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That was the single worst experience with Linux that I have ever had.

 

The installer crashed constantly, and took about 16 tries before it actually worked.

 

Once it loaded, it crashed. Restarted, didn't boot correctly. One last time, and none of the apps worked well enough to use. I couldn't get a CD or a DVD to play, it crashed on trying to load a song from another drive, and was ungodly slow for all of it.

 

*runs and grabs his Open SuSE 10.3 disk and prays for deliverance*

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Alessandro17
Alessandro17
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That was the single worst experience with Linux that I have ever had.

 

The installer crashed constantly, and took about 16 tries before it actually worked.

 

Once it loaded, it crashed. Restarted, didn't boot correctly. One last time, and none of the apps worked well enough to use. I couldn't get a CD or a DVD to play, it crashed on trying to load a song from another drive, and was ungodly slow for all of it.

 

*runs and grabs his Open SuSE 10.3 disk and prays for deliverance*

 

Found on the Elive front page:

 

Important Note: 90 % of the problems (you may have) are caused by a bad burn of the CD. Avoid CD-RW's and use good quality CD-R's. If you have problems, verify the MD5-sum. If it works in qemu only, it's most likely a problem with the CD media. A known message due to a bad CD is "dropping to a BusyBox Shell" or read errors of "SquashFS"

 

It applies to every distro, except for the "SquashFS" part of it, used mainly by LiveCDs.

 

Also, even if not everybody agrees with me, don't burn your CDs/DVDs too fast.

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Mebster
Mebster
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My advice has always been the same, for years: don't install GRUB to the MBR, install it to the / (root) partition, then use something like Acronis OS Selector.
And a tip, install your bootloader (grub or lilo) to a floppy disk or cd or jump drive or something. Never install it to the MBR, you are just asking for trouble...
I wish you luck, and I also give you the advice to NOT install GRUB to the MBR. I made that tragic mistake last time I installed Ubuntu and I had no way to get it off other than by overwriting the bootloader with XP, which happened by accident (after replacing a burnt video card :P).

Sorry to be high jacking this thread temporarily but just a quick question. Firstly Alessandro17 I am about to try OpenSUSE finally. So you may have a convert :P here. We'll see... But thanks for publicising it and letting me know there's more our there in the Linux world than Ubuntu.

 

I wanted to ask why you're all so against GRUB? I'm not having a go at you guys but just want to know because I'm about to install OpenSUSE and would greatly appreciate knowing why possible I should avoid it. Also I was thinking of installing GRUB because I prefer it over Acronis Bootloader as that gave me problems every few weeks (seen it reported in this forum too).

Also what I wanted to ask is what are my other options. One option it seems was given by sdracer48 who sugested installing it on jump drive/cd/floopy. Firstly how and secondly would that not mean have to have the jump drive or cd always inserted when booting your system so that you can get access to grub to be able to access your OS's? Seems kinda long and not something you would want to do.

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Alessandro17
Alessandro17
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Sorry to be high jacking this thread temporarily but just a quick question. Firstly Alessandro17 I am about to try OpenSUSE finally. So you may have a convert :rolleyes: here. We'll see... But thanks for publicising it and letting me know there's more our there in the Linux world than Ubuntu.

 

Glad you are going to try it :P

 

I wanted to ask why you're all so against GRUB? I'm not having a go at you guys but just want to know because I'm about to install OpenSUSE and would greatly appreciate knowing why possible I should avoid it. Also I was thinking of installing GRUB because I prefer it over Acronis Bootloader as that gave me problems every few weeks (seen it reported in this forum too).

Also what I wanted to ask is what are my other options. One option it seems was given by sdracer48 who sugested installing it on jump drive/cd/floopy. Firstly how and secondly would that not mean have to have the jump drive or cd always inserted when booting your system so that you can get access to grub to be able to access your OS's? Seems kinda long and not something you would want to do.

 

Well, the problem with GRUB (or LILO for that matter) is that if you install it to the MBR it overwrites other bootloaders, the Windows one in particular. Most of times it works, but in a good number of cases it doesn't, thus making Windows (for instance) unbootable. Even that can be solved: boot from a Windows install CD (imagine you are using XP), go to the recovery console, type "fixmbr", "fixboot".

So what to do? My favorite solution is to install GRUB to the root (/) partition and use Acronis OS Selector.

But you said that doesn't work for you (have you tried the latest version? It is part of Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0

 

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/produ...ltibooting.html )

 

Thus using a floppy or a CD are other possibilities. I have hardly ever needed to use such options, but you could start from here:

 

http://suseforums.net/index.php?showtopic=40772

 

http://forums.suselinuxsupport.de/index.php?showtopic=50039

 

Good luck :P

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Mebster
Mebster
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Hey Alessandro17,

thanks for the helpful reply mate. I can see that if you loose access to GRUB (and you say it happens often) then it can be pretty annoying. It's just when I was using ubuntu for a few months I never had that problem. On the other hand when I was using Acronis Bootloader for a few months before every week or two I got a weird problem. When I would start my pc it would boot right into XP (thankfully it choose XP and not OS X) and not show me the bootloader at all. To bring the bootloader back I would then need to go into to select something like 'restore the bootloader' from within XP to get it all back. It took less than a minute but was just annoying that it happened so often. I mentioned it here and R2k said he'd also had the same issue. But I guess I could try it again and see how it works.

 

If I was to bypass GRUB and use Acronis what order is it recommended I install my OSs? I was going to install them in this order: XP, OS X OpenSUSE.

 

And what I don't like about Darwin Bootloader is you can't customise it very much and have it select the OS you currently use most of the time (XP in my case still)

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Alessandro17
Alessandro17
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Hi Mebster,

 

If I understand correctly, your problem with Acronis OS Selector is that sometimes it disappears.

That happens, alas. However if you create a small FAT/NTFS partition and install Acronis there, it should happen less.

If you still "lose" it,the easiest solution (IMO) is creating a rescue CD, booting from it and restauring the bootloader.

OTOH it is perfectly possible that GRUB does work, as I already said. In fact it does in the majority of cases.

However I have never seen a distro where GRUB found OS X in a hackintosh, it needs to be added manually (something I have never done).

 

As to the installing order, XP likes the first primary, active partition.

Linux is very flexible, you can install it virtually everywhere.

As to OS X my opinion is: best install it to a separate HD. The first time I installed it to the same HD where I had Windows and Linux, I messed everything up. However that was a long time ago. Since 10.4.6 it has always had its own hard drive.

Let me know :thumbsdown_anim:

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Mebster
Mebster
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However I have never seen a distro where GRUB found OS X in a hackintosh, it needs to be added manually (something I have never done).

I have asked enough questions in this place to know how to do that. I asked it in "Adding OS X in Ubuntu's GRUB?".

Boot into Ubuntu and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst: sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst

add the following lines to the end:

title MacOSX

root (hd0,1)

makeactive

chainloader --force +1

 

The second line you have to specify the partition for your Mac OSX. Check it through:

sudo fdisk -l

 

/dev/sda2 is (hd0,1); /dev/sdb3 is (hd1,2)

 

Change the title line to anything you like, for Windows partition, change it to something like "Windows XP"

I know nothing at all about using the terminal but I really liked editing GRUB for some reason. But still I saved a copy of the main bit so next time I can just copy and paste. This is what I saved:

title Win XP

root (hd0,0)

makeactive

chainloader --force +1

 

title Mac OS X

root (hd0,1)

makeactive

chainloader --force +1

 

title

root

kernel

 

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.20-16-generic

root (hd0,2)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-16-generic root=UUID=f2fbb7cb-6ea0-429b-88c5-37a03f584d5b ro quiet splash

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-16-generic

quiet

savedefault

 

title Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.20-16-generic (recovery mode)

root (hd0,2)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-16-generic root=UUID=f2fbb7cb-6ea0-429b-88c5-37a03f584d5b ro single

initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.20-16-generic

 

title Ubuntu, memtest86+

root (hd0,2)

kernel /boot/memtest86+.bin

quiet

I won't pretend I understand it all but enough to make a blank line in the middle between XP & OS X and Ubuntu installations :P

 

Anyway mate I was shocked to find out OpenSUSE was an enormously 4.10 GB but wish me luck with it all. Trying out two new OSs. Leopard and OpenSUSE. Haven't had the chance to try out Leopard yet and because I've got an old P4 I'm way behind in understanding what the new toys do. I just hope it's as easy to install as Tiger was.

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Alessandro17
Alessandro17
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Hi Mebster,

 

It would seem that you prefer GRUB to Acronis. That is OK ;)

 

As to to OpenSUSE being 4.10 GB, it doesn't have to be. There are one CD installs, including installable Live CDs:

 

http://software.opensuse.org/

 

Of course if you go for a one CD install you'll be very limited and probably you'll have to add (download) stuff later. (I have the commercial version of openSUSE, 2 dual layer DVDs!!!)

 

Good luck :)

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