[nik at work]

Or anybody who isn't Slackers but who can solve my problem and explain the solution to me in a manner that I'll understand.
The Problem:
I've got an old(ish) laptop which I got bored of using due to it's incredible slowness so I got a netbook (which is ace). The laptop was raided for all it's important docs, pics, vids etc then shut in a drawer. Wind forward six months and the drawer hasn't been opened so methinks that I can now safely play with said lappy without erasing any "shit we need that information right now or we'll all die" type info. So decided to give this Linux bobbins a swirl. Got a DVD with Mint Linux on it knocking around so that was the flavour I picked. Stuck it in the machine and installed. Bish bosh wah wah job's a good 'un. However wireless says no. So I trawl (i.e. several seconds on Google) the net and find this "how to get your wireless working" instructions on a forum. I copy the instructions (having no idea what they mean or what they're doing) and lo after a bit of frigging the little blue wireless light doth lighteth and my little connection do-dah (bottom right of screen) tells me I am a wirelessed right up Mo Fo, Fo Sho. Aces, but for some reason it won't connect to the internet. Now when I go down the "with wires" route all is dandy (as can be seen by this post) so what's the beef?
If it helps at all when I left click on the connection doobrey with the ethernet plugged in, the box that appears has Auto eth0 in white and the other options are greyed out. However when I try and get the wireless connection I get a "wireless connection established" type message but the correctly named wireless connection in the box is still greyed out.

I know shit all about Linux. I did Google for the first part of the problem and got somewhere as I think I'm a step closer to getting it working. BUt now I don't even know whats actually wrong so I'm a bit flumoxed as to how to continue.

Please don't say things like "open terminal and put a bash shell on your *nix distro GNU" and also please don't suck air through your teeth and say "Mint Linux? You should'a gone for Ubuntu or Gluebuntu or Shoebuntu. Is that Gnomed with a KDE X window or what?". It all just goes over my head.

Sorry for waffling on, any pointers (in plain English) would be appreciated. Remember guys, you have a newbie to the fold in your hands here, you don't want to turn him back into another Micro$oft drone do you....

[Palomides]

Well, if my experiences of linux are anything to go by, you need to spend a few more hours searching the internet in the course of which time you'll desperately try installing a shitload of other components (probably including at least 2 alternative network managers) and typing increasingly random and obscure commands into a terminal (twice, because you always forget to add sudo the first time). Half the time nothing happens when you do this anyway.

Eventually, something will start working, but by this time you'll have applied so many different possible fixes that a) you're not sure which one worked and b) you can't remember everything you've done anyway.

Strangely, I quite enjoy this process, as I can pretend to be learning something - even if the only skillset I'm actually developing is how to search the internet.

On a more helpful note, if you know what wireless card is installed in your laptop, your google searches might be a bit more fruitful - some wireless chipsets are apparently a real bugger to get working under linux due to patchy driver support. Oh, just re-read your post. Sounds like it's almost working.

Have you been into mintUpdate in the control center and updated everything?

edit: did you find this ? http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php/MintWifi

[nik at work]

So essentially I'm doing the right thing by just banging things into google and following a random selection of instructions of unknown provenance with very little if any understanding of what I'm doing? Good oh.
I'd quite enjoy doing all this for some other aspect of Linux but sorting out the wireless means I have to be wired in to the router which means I have to be in the cold room in the house which removes the fun element a tad. Which is why I'm back on the Windoze netbook now. Oh well I'll give that link a play in the morrow. Cheers for keeping it understandable and reassuring me that I'm not the only one who doesn't speak fluent *nix.

[Jim]

whats going on here? the impression I get is that linux is amazing and politely installs itself and works flawlessly whilst you make a nice cup of tea and relax.
Have I been mislead?

[nik at work]

It would seem it works perfectly as long as you don't need wireless internet access, but that's just a minor point.

However I have yet to try:
Writing a document
Saving a document
Image manipulation
Video playback
Printing
Video editing

I did try to play some music, but was apparently lacking a codec.

However if you want to look at a green coloured desktop screen it's the mutts...

I did install flash player and, well it was much more complicated than on Windows, hmmmm

[lagerstarfish]

If you're not going to use wireless internet jiggery, then you might as well use Windows '95 which uses next to fuck all (if not less) resources.

Disclaimer: I am out of touch with the current value of Fuck All^tm

[slackline]

Wireless used to be tricky under Linux, and still is with some newer cards, but you say its an old laptop so its likely to be sorted.

One problem though is that you say you had a Mint Linux disc lying around.  How long has it been lying around?  It could well be that its an old version which doesn't have a kernel (the bit that gets all the hardware like wireless cards to communicate with each other) that doesn't support your card.

I'm not familiar with the distribution, but a first step would be to get a new ISO disc image, burn it and try installing fresh if you are indeed using an old disc.  See here to get a new version.

Now, despite your caveat I am going to blatantly ignore it (see general reason below*) and recommend that if you're downloading a new version of Linux Mint, you may as well make a sideways step and install one of the Ubunutu versions as they really are the some of the best "it just works" distros out there, and the beauty is you can try it without wiping the Mint install.

As you say its an old laptop I'd go with Xubuntu as it has less demand on system resources like memory than straight Ubuntu or Kbuntu.  Grab grab thexubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso (or torrent) and burn a CD.  Drop it into your laptop and on booting boot from the CD (likely familiar from your Mint Linux install). This will boot into Ubuntu, you can play around to your hearts content and in all likelihood your wireless will "just work"^TM.  If you want to install it you'll find there is an install icon kicking around somewhere (I just did an install two days ago, but can't remember where it is I'm afraid, but its fairly obvious, move mouse over system tray icons for pop ups as to what they all do).

You then go through entering a few simple details, there are bout seven or eight steps in total, the trickiest is partitioning the disk.  No idea what size disc there is, but its likely to have multiple Gb, and as with windows its sensible to install the operating system in one place and the data in another.  Set 10Gb for the OS and set it to be file system type ext3 and mark it to be mounted as root (or '/').  You'll want to have a swap partition of ~x2 the amount of memory that you have installed, and then the remainder can all be formated as file system ext3 and mark it to be mounted as '/home' (as this is where all user files will be stored).

Thats it it will install for you, and then reboot.

Writing/Saving a document : Use OpenOffice, should already be installed
Image manipulation : GIMP
Video : VLC or Mplayer
Printing : Depends on your printer, but you'll probably have CUPS, a web-based interface to do shit, open a browser and try http://localhost:631/
Video editing : Never done any, no idea sorry.

You'll likely find that you can do most of the above steps will work with Linux Mint if you want to stick with that.  If however it doesn't work with a new Mint disc it would be very easy to try Xubuntu to see if it works, then end result won't be that different and its far easier than using ndiswrapper to run the Windows driver and other technical stuff that you may not want to dig deep into.

* General reason for being direct : I wrote my car off underneath Stanage this evening when I spun out and rolled it four times coming down from Dennis Knoll car park  I'd purposefully slowed down for the corner which often has water running across it so no idea why I spun out.  Fortunately I walked away, but roof is squashed, rear windows smashed and front wind screen shattered.  Load of hassle to deal with insurance and recovery tomorrow and just generally fucked off.  Although this has been quite cathartic and has helped taken my mind off of it.  So yes anyone who sees a Ford Focus in the heather, well its mine  :'(  Derbyshire police have been informed and came out to inspect and were happy that I would get it recovered tomorrow.  I need a beer now 

[nik at work]

Cheers Slackers, I'll try what you've suggested over the next day or two then leave a progress report/further questions.
I was been a little obtuse with my "not tried writing a document.." etc post, Gimp, OpenOffice etc are installed and I have no doubt they work. Cheers for the partitioning info, that's very helpful as I had the basic idea (have three partitions) but all the mounting is a bit dark art-esque.

Hope you enjoyed your beer and bad luck with the car.

[Palomides]

whats going on here? the impression I get is that linux is amazing and politely installs itself and works flawlessly whilst you make a nice cup of tea and relax.
Have I been mislead?

That's certainly not been my experience. OK I've only done two installations, on slightly old hardware, but both times then have been a couple of things that require a bit of fiddling about to fix them.

However, I've had that kind of stuff with Windows too (usually problems with drivers rather than configuration). For me, the big differences between the process of installing and using Windows and Linux are that with Linux installs you almost never run into the Windows-style brick-wall of "you can't do that". With linux you can get everything working (somehow), it just takes more of a time investment than windows. Also, it's faster after a fresh install, and just as fast 6 months later, without reinstalling.

It's like the difference between one of those cars where you open the bonnet and there's just a plastic cover because engines are too complicated for ordinary people, and a car where you can get at all the parts, fix stuff yourself, and go faster when you're driving it.

[nik at work]

Right little update.

I downloaded the ISO you suggested Slackers and burnt it to a disc then ran it off the disc (as a boot disc?). So Xubuntu started up, wireless didn't work. I tried using the driver update installer thingy and it suggested a Broadcom B-blah-blah driver so I got it to install that. Still no dice with wireless. Hmmmm. The thought that I didn't really like the look of Xubuntu as much as the Mint so thought I'd go back to Mint as both seemed to be equally unused to my wireless doobry and installing a different version of linux to get to the same point seemed a bit silly. So I shut down and restarted with Mint and...


The wireless now works, shikading.

I think, and this is purely punter speculation, that the Broadcom thing I installed with Xubuntu has somehow worked with Mint and this has been the missing part of the jigsaw?? When I first started playing with Mint I did get the same install Broadcom driver window but I didn't have it connected to my wired network so couldn't download anything and then promptly forgot about it, hey-ho. I've probably explained that really badly but it works, woo-hoo. Cheers Slackers for specific advice and Palomides for general encouragement. Wads will be dished.

Now for my next problem:
When I installed Mint I bished up the partition-mission. As such my drive is circa 80Gb, and most of that is root partition, with a tiny bit of swap and a tiny bit of summat else. Obviously I want to change this to be inline with Guru Slacks guidance however I need to unmount the partition to change it apparently, but I can't do this while it's in use, which it is because thats where Mint is. I will try and google a solution to this but if you have a simple step bystep way of getting me sorted....

P.S. My copy of Mint is an up-to-date copy (just letting you know as it was one of the points you raised) and on one of these ECO DVD's which are amazingly thin and bendy.

Cheers for the help.

[slackline]

Cool, glad its working, broadcom are fairly common wireless network cards, the most common are the bcm43xx series and there are various tools/packages in Linux distributions called firmware cutters that take the windows driver and somehow "cut" out the bit thats needed and get it working under the Linux kernel (bit of a dark art to me that area).

The Mint install won't be working now because of the download done under Xubuntu though.  When you boot from a LiveCD everything runs from that, and sits in RAM (memory).  When you shut down from Xubuntu that download would have been lost.

Anyway, its all up and running now 

Just looked and Mint is based on Ubuntu anyway (although the base it uses is a few stages behind the current Ubuntu releases which are on 9.04).  So you'll find that under System -> Administration is the "Synaptics Package Manager" from which you can install packages (unless Mint are using their own package management).

You may well have an application called Network Manager installed and running with a little icon in the system tray, left-clicking this shows what networks are available, right allows you to get into settings and configure connections and enable/disable specific interfaces (you'll have two, one wireless and one wired).

You can sort out your partitions using a program called gparted which may well be hiding under the System menu somewhere, have a poke around.  If you can't find it your other option is to run it from a terminal (I noted the aversion in the original post, but its nothing to be afraid of really).

Fire up a terminal and then type the following...

Code: [Select]

sudo gparted

You'll likely be asked for your password and then you'll have a graphical interface to resize your partitions, just shrink the root, this will free up more space, you should be able to set the format and mount point under gparted as previously described, but shout if not I can talk you through how to do this (might need to edit a file called /etc/fstab which defines what partitions there are and where there mounted, but thats again fairly straight forward).

Beer was nice, car is now recovered and awaiting official insurance bods to declare it a write-off.  Ah well, live and learn, at least I walked away 

[nik at work]

After a timely reminder of this thread I thought I 'd give an update.
I've got Linux Mint installed, it boots very quickly and seems to run briskly enough. It is very much a windows-esque environment once up and running so the transition in terms of the basics is easy. In fact in some respects the layout is better,especially the Menu button(it's version of the start button), which has a really well thought out interface.
Word-processing etc has been with Open Office which I use anyway so was no problem. Except when I first saved a document it saved the formatting but none of the text (wierd) subsequently it's been fine.
Image stuff is GIMP which I also used previously.
Music and Video was VLC which was also my media player of choice previously.
I have installed and updated all the above easily with the Mint Installer. This makes installation of programs windows easy, just click install and bish bosh. It has a database of available software that it can install so if you want something a bit obscure on the software front you're going to have to get your hands dirty with the techie schnizzle.

So for video editing there is
Kino - not really tried this
PiTiVi - doesn't actually have any editing capability, if it gets developed it could be good but right now all you can do is drag clips onto a timeline and cut them up, no transitions, text overlay, animations etc...
Kdenlive - Looks the most promising but buggered if I can install it

Printing
I have a lexmark printer, the simple rule seems to be if you run Linux don't buy lexmark.

Burning CD's and DVD's has been easy with Brasero (which installed with the OS)

I haven't done the partitions properly, I've had a brief play but it keeps wanting to unmount things but can't because they're in use blah-dy-blah. I'll sort this before I get muchos-stuffos on this computer.

So insummary if you want a quick starting, briskly running computer to do all the standard officey/internety things and you have a printer that can be supported then Linux is easy to use and pretty easy to install.

However:
I think the whole partitions thing could be better explained.
If you want to edit video stick with Windows (or can I run Windows packages in Wine(?) Slackers, although this seems a bit silly and surely a drain on resources??)
Spottify doesn't come in a Linux flavour, which is annoying.

[slackline]

Printing
I have a lexmark printer, the simple rule seems to be if you run Linux don't buy lexmark.

Yeah, Lexmark's aren't very well supported.  For anyone in the market or wishing to replace a printer and use GNU/Linux distros go with HP, they're the Bee's knees and produce Linux drivers themselves

Burning CD's and DVD's has been easy with Brasero (which installed with the OS)

I haven't done the partitions properly, I've had a brief play but it keeps wanting to unmount things but can't because they're in use blah-dy-blah. I'll sort this before I get muchos-stuffos on this computer.[/url]

However:
I think the whole partitions thing could be better explained.

Partitioning your HD is indepdent of your OS, its a step you do before you install your OS, be that GNU/Linux or Windows.  Basically the idea is that you keep your OS on one partition and your data on another, so that if you have to reinstall you don't have to wipe all your data, just the partition that has the OS on (there are of course more complicated scenarios).

Above you say you want to change the partition sizes, but can't cause they're in use, which is very true.  The solution is to boot of your LiveCD and do the partition resizing from there whilst the OS is all running in memory as opposed to from your HD.

If you're still getting complaints about devices being in use, I'll hazard a guess that its a USB device and some application or other is still using it when you try to unmount it.  This is no different from M$-Windows saying the same thing when you right-click on the USB device icon in the system tray.  Make sure you shut down any programs that are using the USB device.

If you want to edit video stick with Windows (or can I run Windows packages in Wine(?) Slackers, although this seems a bit silly and surely a drain on resources??)

WINE == WINdows Emulator and yes you can get some applications to work under Linux using this.  It depends on the application though.  Check WINE Application DB to know how much of a headache it might be.

So insummary if you want a quick starting, briskly running computer to do all the standard officey/internety things and you have a printer that can be supported then Linux is easy to use and pretty easy to install.

 

[nik at work]

Yeah I know partitioning is seperate to the OS, but it just seems like a BIG THING in Linux and yet is not especially clearly explained. Anyway the HD in this laptop is pretty small anyway so I probably won't bother with messing around with the partitioning malarky, I tend to keep all my data on seperate storage anyway (a disorganised range of USB-HDD type thingummies). And ultimately I'm not that fussed if this computer and all it's contents go ka-flooey, I'll just play with it in some new and wonderful way...

Anyway back to the present, I have found some video editing software that I have managed to install and use. It's a bit basic but I have produced in a few minutes one short "movie" (an innapropriately grand name for the clip I have spawned). Anyhoo's it seems to work, the interface isn't windows-esque slick and polished and it all looks a bit homegrown but seems to have a fair number of features that (should I ever work out what they do) may yield a reasonably powerful tool. It seems like learning it will be pretty involved but it proves that (simplistic) video editing is possible by a chimp on Linux.

I'm trying to upload a copy to the interoweb but Vimeo is not playing ball right now, I'll do a linkie-lou if I ever manage to get it ON-LINE.

Oh and the software is called Open Movie Editor if anybody else cares...

P.S. Slackers cheers for your ongoing Linux based patience with the newbie.

[slackline]

P.S. Slackers cheers for your ongoing Linux based patience with the newbie.

Not a problem continue to ask if stuck

Article bigging up the heritage of GNU/Linux...UNIX (Mac OSX is based on BSD btw).

[nik at work]

Managed to upload the clip to Vimeo. Linux and the Vimeo upload page don't appear to talk to one another in a very convincing fashion but it has uploaded so here you go:



P.S. I know it's short and rubbish and has no sound. These are issues that I hope to resolve with further tinkering.

[nik at work]

Slackers is there a plug-in for firefox under linux that will let me watch the videos on Yorkshiregrit.com? I'm just hitting a brick wall with this one. I suspect I'm been a bit dense but a pointer or two would be much appreciated.

(Still in Linux Mint if that matters, but thinking of switching to Ubuntu)

[slackline]

Had a quick look and the videos seem to start playing, but then hang (e.g.).  Is this what you experience or do they not start playing at all?

I can't suss out what format the videos are in, I suspect its flash though.  On my system I have two browser plugins for multimedia, adobe-flash and Gecko Mediaplayer (which gets the Gnome MPlayer media-player working in the browser under the Gnome desktop).  I'd imagine both of these are in the Mint(/Ubuntu as Mint is based on Ubuntu you can use their package repository too) repositories and can likely be installed via Synaptics Package Manager.

[nik at work]

I get the box with the plug-in required lego brick. I then do the automatic search for plugin thing and it comes back nothing available. So then I select manual install which directs me to the quicktime page which has players for Win and Mac but not Linux. I think the Yorkshiregrit vids are Quicktime.
I've got the flash player working (I can do youtube and vimeo no problem) but this quicktime thing has got me stumped. I'll try your gecko suggestion then I guess it will be back to the head brick wall interface.

[slackline]

I get the box with the plug-in required lego brick. I then do the automatic search for plugin thing and it comes back nothing available. So then I select manual install which directs me to the quicktime page which has players for Win and Mac but not Linux. I think the Yorkshiregrit vids are Quicktime.
I've got the flash player working (I can do youtube and vimeo no problem) but this quicktime thing has got me stumped. I'll try your gecko suggestion then I guess it will be back to the head brick wall interface.

Gecko is the plugin that gets mplayer working in the browser, and in theory installing the plugin should pull in mplayer too as a dependency, but check it is being pulled in just in case, and if not explicitly install it.

I check later this afternoon on my wife's laptop which runs Xubuntu (very similar to Mint as they're heritage is from Ubunutu).

[nik at work]

My continuing adventures in Linux.

I was hesitant about changing from Mint to Ubuntu because getting the wireless to work in Mint took me a while and I didn't want to uninstall it, put Ubuntu on and have an epic trying to get the wireless again. But, on consideration, I realised that I want to do video editing on this computer and I really want to try Kdenlive which I amhaving no joy installing from source whereas Ubuntu has a package install. So I took the plunge and installed Ubuntu. But I put it on a seperate partition so I have a dual boot right now. Anyway it installed, sorted my wireless pretty much straight off, and I installed Kdenlive. Took a couple of attempts but this was only becasue I was trying to install it wjilst at the same time running a bunch of other updates which led to various conflict stuff blah blah blah. Anyway Ubuntu seems nice and Kdenlive seems to be really very promising indeed. I have done another short (Lepreux again ) but this time with sound, just a few minutes playing produced this and I'm so far impressed with the look and options of the program. Not as intuitive as some editing stuff but it seems well equiped and I guess you just get used to each one's foibles.
As a side salad of pleasingness the QT clips on Yorkshiregrit now work, yay. So I can beta crib my evenings away.
Anyway Linux and video editing (in an amateur  way) is certainly viable IMHO.

P.S. Slackers now Ubuntu is working so lovely I want to remove Mint and just use the partition it is installed on as my data partition. Do you forsee any problems in me doing this/is there anything I should watch out for? (I owe you a wad for your onging help, it will be sorted shortly)

The short clip for the interested (i.e. nobody)

[nik at work]

Oh and FD I guess I owe you some royalties...

[slackline]

P.S. Slackers now Ubuntu is working so lovely I want to remove Mint and just use the partition it is installed on as my data partition. Do you forsee any problems in me doing this/is there anything I should watch out for? (I owe you a wad for your onging help, it will be sorted shortly)

Nope, shouldn't be any problem in doing that at all.

Three options to take here though.  After wiping the partition...

• Copy all of /home to the partition and then set it up to be mounted at /home in the file /etc/fstab Exactly how to do this will depend on where its currently mounted ask if you'd like info on this
• Symboliclly link the partition to your /home/nik/data directory (or similar)
• Just use it as it is

Let me know if you'd like to do the first or second options, would need a bit more info, but happy to help.

[nik at work]

I think I have a notional idea of what you mean with options 1 and 2 but I think I'll just go for 3 for now. Simple, like me you see?

Cheers for your help.

[duncan]

The other half uses a ten year old laptop for surfing and occasional word-processing.  It's still running reasonably well on Windows 98SE (550Hz celeron processor and RAM maxed at 192Mb).  The screen and keyboard are still in good shape so it seems a shame to dump it but I'm becoming a little concerned about it's security.  No high-risk behaviour (that I know of!) but it is used for online banking.   ClamWin is the only antivirus I've found that is still supported, is compatible with Win98, and doesn't cause it to slow to a crawl.  It's manual scan only through. 

Would a variety of Linux (which?) give us increased security and work on this machine?  Japanese language support is essential.