[Paul B]

Nah, it just sucks balls - fuck the stupid penguin

  Loving your work - this made me laugh.

I'm still cosying up to the little penguin fella. Changed to Ubuntu this weekend. Its better than suse. Because of the way I partitioned my drive originally theres no lost files and changing distro is pretty straightforward.

Which Ubuntu distro do people recommend? Dobbin which was it that did all the partitioning etc. straight from the CD, ubuntu or Xubuntu?

[Drew]

Slack-line's fairly detailed info is here, which is only about 10 threads down.

[slackline]

Which Ubuntu distro do people recommend? Dobbin which was it that did all the partitioning etc. straight from the CD, ubuntu or Xubuntu?

Personally I'd recommend Xubuntu.  They're basically all the same except that they come with a different default desktop environment (once installed you could if desired install the others, e.g. install Xubuntu, then you could install KDE to use in addition to the default Xfce4).

Xubuntu == Xfce4
Kubuntu == KDE
Ubuntu  == Gnome

Gnome and Xfce4 are both based on Gimp Toolkit which is a set of libraries for rendering GUI's.  Xfce4 is more "lightweight" (basically it'll eat up less RAM and run smoother on systems with limited RAM, but also useful on systems with lots of RAM which leaves more available for your apps).  KDE and Gnome are (IMO) increasingly bloated these days.  More detail in the link Drew's posted.

Any questions just ask and I'll do my best to answer them.

slack

[Paul B]

Slack-line's fairly detailed info is here, which is only about 10 threads down.

easy tiger! I remembered the thread title and did a search to find it, hence why I missed that one. 

Personally I'd recommend....

Thanks for the recommendations and the detailed breakdown. I've learnt a hell of a lot about Ubuntu over the past few days which as been as frustrating as it has been interesting. First problem was with the live CD, ended up using the text based installer, I can't really see why people wouldn't use this as standard its got to be a lot quicker? Second was down to a reverse engineered driver from Broadcom firmware, its flaky but it now works... requires re-doing each time the computer is shutdown. Third, network manager seems to have a bug with ASCII based wep keys, changed my wireless network setting anyway now but i managed to get it working by just using Hex instead without changing any router settings.

It's far from perfect but it runs a hell of a lot faster on Ubuntu than it does on XP and the plus side is that it doesn't take a ridiculous amount of time to boot up and require re-building every so often. I'd highly recommend trying it to anyone who has a slightly older unreliable laptop kicking around.

(Thanks slack...)

[slackline]

I've learnt a hell of a lot about Ubuntu over the past few days which as been as frustrating as it has been interesting. First problem was with the live CD, ended up using the text based installer, I can't really see why people wouldn't use this as standard its got to be a lot quicker? Second was down to a reverse engineered driver from Broadcom firmware, its flaky but it now works... requires re-doing each time the computer is shutdown. Third, network manager seems to have a bug with ASCII based wep keys, changed my wireless network setting anyway now but i managed to get it working by just using Hex instead without changing any router settings.

It's far from perfect but it runs a hell of a lot faster on Ubuntu than it does on XP and the plus side is that it doesn't take a ridiculous amount of time to boot up and require re-building every so often. I'd highly recommend trying it to anyone who has a slightly older unreliable laptop kicking around.

Good work on all the trouble shooting (you certainly have the patience and research skills to see you through Linux  ).

Personally I'd recommend text-based installers over LiveCD/GUI's every time, but it can be a bit daunting if your not sure, and if it works the LiveCD's are very simple to use and get systems up and running (usually fine with newish hardware, but sometimes older hardware doesn't work so well, which may be the case here).

[rc]

From xkcd

[slackline]

 

Although it only takes 10-20 minutes to compile a kernel depending on processor and RAM.  Configuring the kernel however can take far far longer 

[RedFox]

And then the troubleshooting when you've forgotten to include some option that you needed and the computer won't start up any more...   

[slackline]

And then the troubleshooting when you've forgotten to include some option that you needed and the computer won't start up any more...   

Not that hard if you've a working config with which to work from, you copy the .config file from the old kernel source (/usr/src/linux-2.6.[whatever]/.config) to the new kernel source (which will be /usr/src/linux/.config), cd into the new directory and use make oldconfig.  You then get a nice new .config file that respects the old configuration but your asked about whether you want to include any of the new features that have been added to the new kernel version.

Its not too hard to resolve the situation you describe anyway, ideally you should have your bootloader (LILO or GRUB) set up so that you can choose which kernel version you want to boot into (at least its a very good idea when your trying a new kernel out).  Thus if your new kernel won't boot, you just drop back to the old one.

If you remove the old kernel from your boot menu its still not that hard to get round, you just boot from a LiveCD, chroot into your hard-drives installation/environment and recompile your kernel (or add the old one you were using into the boot loader so you can do as above).

[RedFox]

Alright, I'll admit it: all my problems were caused by not reading the instructions properly and forgetting to run lilo.  Tut tut,  etc.  You'd think I'd have learned after 5 years of fiddling!  Still never managed to get slackware to work properly on my laptop though...

[Paul B]

I know this topic has been dead for a while but might I suggest anybody interested in flirting with the penguin takes a look at "Mint10" . I'm running it on a persistent USB drive and I'm thoroughly impressed (after trying Ubuntu Netbook & 10.10).

[Luthor]

Currently running ubuntu 10.04 netbook on a MSI U100 netbook.  Installed + booting from a removable SD card.

Installed via live CD and usb card reader. Tried using unetbootin before to install live image to usb device, but full installation much better.

Not done much with it other than install a few packages and chrome browser, but liking the flexibility of having linux on sd card and win on hdd. And not missing the EEEPC quite so much either..

[Paul B]

I thought Ubuntu netbook sucked and made poor use of the limitied res of my netbook 

[Luthor]

I thought Ubuntu netbook sucked and made poor use of the limitied res of my netbook 

I couldn't get 10.10 to install, though could well have been flaws with usb/SD card connection... 10.04 seems fine for web browsing, which is 95% of what I use the netbook for.

Tried to rescue a broken freeview recorder today using a sata to usb cable.. unfortunately reformatting and cleaning drive failed to get the recorder to play ball. Could at least see the partitions and files with linux. Ended up removing hdd and binning the rest, oh well not like there's much on anyway..

[Paul B]

did you use the "Universeal USB Installer" or whatever to make the bootable drive?

There's even a multi-iso version so all you need is the .iso files in a folder and then Grub boots whichever image you chose although I've ended up settling for Mint10.

[Luthor]

sorry.. not checked back here for a while!

I've tried using usb bootable tools, but always ended up with a 'live' version rather than a full OS. To get this SD card install I plugged it into a desktop pc with usb adapter and installed from cd, having first I unplugged the ide ribbon to the main hdd) - the SD card was therefore detected as the only hard drive.

After install removed SD card, plugged it into network and away. I've now reset the bios to boot from SD card first and then hdd. The grub loader is on the SD card so I can still select Windows XP from there if needed (came up after installing package updates) and with the SD card removed the netbook boots straight to windows.

A bit convoluted perhaps, but after previously hard drive disasters was playing it safe.

[Paul B]

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/

make sure you enable persistence and pick the amount of space you'll have left after the .iso is on the stick. There's also a multiple boot from USB option where you just dump the ISO's into a folder and then use grub, I can't remember if this gave you the persistent option.

[sjw]

I'm due a fresh OS install on my laptop and I've been trying out Mint10 on a USB drive as an alternative to my old XP. I now understand what all the fuss is about! Before I take the big plunge, here's the thing...I've had a couple of annoying bugs with Linux, little things like it not remembering that I have a UK keyboard and a couple of random program crashes. Are these type of things common or is it just more likely that it's less stable because I'm running it on USB and it'll be rock solid on a HD?

And does anyone else find the touchpad control weird compared to Windows? I've tried messing about with the acceleration/sensitivity but can't seem to get it close to what I consider 'normal'.

Thanks Linux Boffins.

[Paul B]

If you're running it off a USB without setting up a perssistent loop (i.e. tick the correct box) then it'll effectively be a new OS each time you start up.

Using persistence or installing to HD it'll remember all of your settings (in my humble linux experience).

(...Mint10 does seem like a very nice looking, user friendly distro)

[slackline]

Paul's spot on there.

With regards to mouse, what is 'normal' for you?

Its likely using the Synaptics Touchpad, a very detailed page on configuration under Gentoo is at Gentoo Wiki.  Under Linux Mint I just found this GUI configuration tool that you could try out to get it working as you'd like.

[sjw]

I do have a persistent loop, but linux keeps reminding me that I only have 35mb odd left, so maybe that has something to do with it?  I've just had a look and I'm currently using Synaptics on XP, so that GUI looks perfect for the job, thanks for the link. I can't really explain what 'normal' is, I just can't seem to control the pointer very well at the moment. Definitely going to go 'full time' linux sometime this week, it's just dead good.

[slackline]

If you're going to go with Mint Linux you'd do well to register in their forums.

There are tons of threads on keyboard maps/layouts, I'm sure someone will have experienced your problem before, asked the same question and got an answer (one of the great aspects of Linux support, although bear in mind that its built on Debian (just as Ubuntu is) and all use the synaptic package manager (not be confused with your touchpad driver) so help on any of the forums will likely be transferable, the same is true of distributions less related, for example Gentoo has a lot of excellent documentation and knowledgeable users in forums and IRC, reading there will often throw up useful information on resolving problems too).

[sjw]

Thanks very much for the advice. I think I'll download a few different flavours first and try them out on USB to make sure I choose the right one.