Someone gave me an older PC, and it runs XP pretty snappy, but thought it'd make a good Ubuntu box. I got the Ubuntu 11.10 install ISO, and have got that started, but I have questions.
The PC has a recovery partition with an XP image on it, that I'd like to keep. The main partition (currently C: ) is where I'd like to put Ubuntu. I've got that selected in the install process but it wants to know two things:
a) what file system to use for it. (ext2, ext3, etc)
b) a dir for a mount point (/boot, /home, etc)
I'm not going to get too fancy with partitioning, so I think just knowing those two things should get me by. I'll just be using it as a web surf pc.
Thanks!
Use ext4, and make sure it's mounted as the root partition, which is just "/". That should do the job! You'll probably get asked to create a swap partition as well, though, and that's probably a good idea. The easiest way to do that would be to delete your Windows partition, and then create two new partitions: one with most of the space for /, and the other with 1GB or so for swap.
The way I generally install OSes now is to give the setup a load of blank space and tell it to do what it wants with it.
The way I generally install OSes now is to give the setup a load of blank space and tell it to do what it wants with it.
Same here. I used to dick around with trying to find an SSH server for Windows, but recently discovered Arch Linux and figured out how to set up an SSH server with it through VirtualBox that has read access to my Win7 files. Haven't tried writing yet, due to concerns over screwing up my partitions, so I'll try that on a work PC first.
I hated 11.10 when I first installed it. I went back to 11.04. Let me fire up my 11.10 VM and see if I can spot that driver thing.
OK, here it is.... click the Systems Settings icon at the end of the taskbar. It'll either be the bottom or the right side, depending on which way your bar is oriented.
The third category is Hardware, and the first option there is Additional Drivers. Run that, and see what it says.
What video card are you using, btw?
This bug seems a little similar to your issue:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...
Based on that last comment, it sounds like it's worth installing any outstanding updates and seeing if that fixes the problem. The desktop should prompt you to install updates automatically, but if that doesn't happen, you can use the "Update Manager" tool to install them. Perform all the outstanding updates, reboot, and see how you go.
Yeah, good call, pneuman. If an update fixes your problem, it's a bug in the driver for the onboard video.
Generally, Intel video works very nicely under Linux, so an update has a good chance of fixing the problem.
If you have a spare NVidia card anywhere, pretty much anything, they're very well-supported in Linux. That would be another angle of attack if the update doesn't work right. But I think it probably will.
Ok, after you've updated and rebooted (the reboot is important), try going back into that Hardware Drivers thing to see if anything changed.
It's really supposed to work, and I'm quite puzzled as to why it wouldn't. You shouldn't need an xorg.conf anymore, that's sort of a vestigial remnant of the early days. With the new kernel and updated libraries installed, maybe also try again on Detect Displays, both with the monitor you're using now and that spare you have.
I'm confused about whether it's not loading the right driver for your video, or if there's a problem with the EDID detection -- this is where monitors tell the system what modes they support. If either of these things aren't working, then you'd get the symptom you're seeing.
If you're still stuck, I think the next stop would be the Ubuntu forums. It's probably something easy, so don't dig yourself too deep down any weird CLI rabbit holes too soon. It can be painful to dig your way back out....this is true even for seasoned Linux people, as mixing GUI tools and hand-edits on configuration files is an easy way to really screw things up.
If you run the cord to the monitor through any kind of KVM switch, it will cause problems. I have a KVM switch as I play my 360 on my computer monitor and it really screwed things up.
It may not help, and I have up on Ubuntu shortly after that.
Part of the problem you're having is the massive simplification drive Ubuntu's going through. That new Unity interface sucks goat c*ck. I don't want a f*cking telephone, I want a computer when I sit down at my desk. Shuttleworth has explicitly decided to cripple the computer for the people who actually use Ubuntu, in the hope of pleasing people who don't like Ubuntu.
It's not all his fault -- over time, both the KDE and GNOME teams have lost their collective f*cking minds. KDE went insane when they shipped 4.0, deliberately calling it 4.0 way too early to trick people into testing it for them. And GNOME has completely gone off the rails of late. They're also doing the same thing -- f*cking up the computer for the people who know how to use it, in the hope of converting people who don't. But if the techheads can't use the computer very productively, who's going to evangelise the brain-dead solution to the brain-dead people?
I'm pretty upset with Linux on the desktop right now, honestly. Too many separate teams have gone off down rabbit holes to benefit themselves and not everyone else. I'd suggest trying Ubuntu 11.04, and if that doesn't work, I wouldn't waste much time with it. It's not really worth f*cking with anymore, because they've moved the power-user payoffs way out of reach.
As a server, it's still one of the better choices available, although the kernel team has all but given up on the idea of security. Running a Linux machine for multiple users is pretty much a guarantee of being hacked, to the point that even the kernel team themselves won't give out shell access on kernel.org. Internal Linux security is so bad it's laughable, and it's only getting worse.
Part of the problem you're having is the massive simplification drive Ubuntu's going through. That new Unity interface sucks goat c*ck.
I pretty much agree. I've returned to Linux on the desktop after 3-4 years away and it was bizarre to find that not only had things not improved much, they've actually got worse in many respects.
I've ended up with Xubuntu 11.10, although the UI is pretty bad in places. Cinnamon looks like a worthwhile project, but it's not done yet and it crashed my Xserver a few times.
I've gone over to linuxmint.com and quite like what they're doing. It's an Ubuntu spin off, but not trying to be everything, just a nice OS.
On a related note though, it does seem like every software has a period during which it's 'complete' and after that it goes off the rails as it expands out and encompasses more roles ("feature creep") rather than just going into maintenance mode, and reacting to what needs changing. I guess it's down to the people running it, in Ubuntu's case, Shuttleworth, and once you reach that nice 'complete' point you need to purposefully switch track, and the visionary leader needs to find something new.
No idea really. I remember the xfce variant of ubuntu being recommended as lower requirements, and perhaps it isn't affected so much by what's happened to the rest of ubuntu. Perhaps a browse of distrowatch.com will help out.
I've heard a fair bit about Puppy Linux, although I haven't tried it. I know it's supposed to be very small.
Debian is also quite good, but since Ubuntu is based off that code, I wouldn't expect Debian to like your graphic setup any better than Ubuntu.
Ohh, okay, that was a seriously ancient machine.
You could buy a PCI NVidia card. They still make them. Probably be like $25.
Or you could demote it to server duty, and just run it from the command line. I like Debian best for that usage.
The real power of Linux, and Unix in general, is that there's no dividing line between users and programmers. If you use Unix more than trivially, you'll end up writing shell scripts... even simple ones (like batch files in DOS) are a form of programming. There's no extra step to becoming a programmer, you just start doing it as a natural outgrowth of using the system.
And getting to the better languages is dirt simple. You're not just limited to bash shell scripting. Normally, you put #!/bin/sh
on the first line of a shell script, which tells the system that it's a program that's run by /bin/sh. (which is a link to bash on most systems... bash is the Bourne Again shell, a more powerful variant.) But you can put #!/usr/bin/python
, and then write a Python script instead. It can be run like any other program... it's just as integrated into the shell environment as the bash shell itself is. Scripting languages are first-class tools in the environment, able to be instantly embedded with almost no effort. Well, no effort beyond writing the program, anyway.
If you start getting really advanced, you can switch to compiled languages, like C or Haskell, and generate binaries, and all the tools you need to make them are either included with the install, or trivially downloadable.
In fact, every single tool that was used to create everything on the system, top to bottom, stem to stern, is immediately available to you for inspection and potential modification. If you want to modify the Linux kernel to say "Jeff-66 is cool!", you can actually do that.
The Unix command line is an extraordinarily powerful tool, and it's the heart and soul of any Unix. Learn it, and you will know why Unix is still so popular, and runs on essentially every system complex enough to support it, more than thirty years after it was first invented.
Oh, and because of that 'all users are programmers' thing, you'll get the most out of Unix if you force yourself to completely live in it for several months when you first start. That means converting your main desktop, and to the best of your ability, staying completely in Unix for all your computing tasks. (this isn't always possible, if you're running specific Windows or OS X proprietary programs, but you should do the best you can otherwise.)
The immersion will be painful for quite awhile, but you'll come out the other side having a reasonable grasp of just what the heck is going on with Unix, and why the seriously technical people always gravitate toward it. It's like a black hole for techies -- the smarter they are, the less likely they are to ever emerge, once they fall into its gravitational field. Even the brightest sometimes resist its siren lure, but for an awful, awful lot of the truly gifted techies, it's handing the best tool in the world to someone who absolutely loves tools.
The thing about admin/root on linux is that it is all powerful it will do exactly what you say. This is where the "rm -rf /" thing comes from, as root that will nuke your system and it will be happy about doing it (perhaps I ought to try that in a VM just once). It's very potent. *nix OSes are set up from the very foundations to support users with varying permissions, and most distributions will set you up with a safe normal user and a relatively easy to elevate yourself if you have the password. Pretty much all *nix software will fully support this. System configuration stuff will need elevated privileges, user stuff won't.
Comparing this to windows land, the OS and the software ecosystem it's better than it used to be, but poor in comparison. I'm sure either my system would either sh*t the bed or I would if it suddenly had *nix style permissions imposed on it's day-to-day operation.
Circling back around to the topic of desktop environments:
I recently switched to LXDE on my desktop. I had been using it on my netbook, and it worked well. And after frustration with some other DEs, I finally asked myself, "do I really need more than LXDE provides?". And the answer was, not really, no.
Shuttleworth has explicitly decided to cripple the computer for the people who actually use Ubuntu, in the hope of pleasing people who don't like Ubuntu.
I like that Ubuntu is doing Unity. I don't like Unity right now. I don't know if I will ever like it. But they absolutely should be experimenting with UI concepts and trying to come up with something new.
Unity is its own project. It doesn't stop users from installing any other desktop environment they want.
GNOME 3, however, is a crime. The GNOME team took a desktop that a sh*t-ton of people were using and happy with, and yanked it out from underneath them.
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