spectere.net
The Chatterbox => Computing => Topic started by: Zakamiro on October 08, 2007, 05:43:52 AM
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QUESTION: I want to use a mix of UNIX and a windows-esque GUI. "freeBSD + ?" seems to be the main question. I want a GUI that I will be able to pick up very quickly from windows XP.. Perhaps GNOME, if I can get that taskbar to be on the bottom, or KDE.. Xfce seems ok... But it's hard to go off of just screenshots alone. hehe.
I looked into "Linux XP" and man, what a fucking joke. If your faq ( http://www.linux-xp.com/faq/index.php?ID=173 ) has what's below, it's hard to take seriously, especially if they are trying to sell something...
Q: I found that GNOME graphic environment was installed with Linux XP Desktop. Is KDE available for Linux XP Desktop?
A: Forget about KDE. KDE is for hackers and that is why it sucks in end-user oriented distribution.
We are not supporting it in any way. You can install it from Fedora repositories and use it on your own risk.
Q: I understand: You guys want to to became a next Microsoft and want to dominate the world!
A: Yes, you're completely right. Actually, we are Dr. Evil's private company (laughing "Ya-ha-ha-ha-ha!") :-)))
Mao Zedong said "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend". We think the same way. The field in which we work and our point of view we see Linux distribution were unemployed by other teams. We have fixed it and took this point of view. We wish good luck to any other developers. We all work together.
I mean, if you say a different GUI "is for hackers" simply because you're a GNOME fanboy, what the hell am I supposed to think? Making an unsupported (and simply stupid) claim that "KDE is for hackers" and having that your only reason not to use it "and that is why it sucks" just isn't good enough. What gives? It's like going to a car dealership and saying, "why shouldn't I buy from ----?" Then they say, "Because it's for street racers, and that is why they suck."
Not only this, but what the hell is up with their English?
"The field in which we work and our point of view we see Linux distribution were unemployed by other teams."
What? Are you trying to tell me your entire team was outdone by outdone by other teams? Yeah, really. I'll place my bet on the team with the retards. I also love how they quote an infamous communist dictator, and telling us they think the same way. (obviously in metaphors about schools and flowers.)
Not only this, but how can they badmouth an open source desktop environment, then say "We wish good luck to any other developers. We all work together." Bullshit!
Awful.
</rant>
Anyway... Yeah.
I am looking into Gentoo/FreeBSD.. This may be a good decision.
Also, I was looking into LDXE (http://lxde.sourceforge.net/) for my 366 mhz machine, but compiling together the livecd iso turned out to, well.. not work (permission errors? In MY user directory? I guess it's more likely than I think). [and wtf package would I need? GOD I HATE VAGUE AND AMBIGUOUS MANUALS) So anyway... thanks.
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I tend to use KDE based systems, and they're pretty damn easy to pick up. I mean, hell, I actually can't think of a GUI system that's "hard" to really pick up quickly... I have tried Yoper, and Debian, and I'm not exactly sure what is "running" on my current partition, since X wouldn't even run, so I had no GUI because it hates my monitor or something. But in any case, I have a little experience with linux, and found it pretty simple to switch over GUI wise, the bigger issue was the filesystem and the extended use of command line stuff, and that was only a minor issue anyway. The system runs great in linux, but all my programs are windows programs, lol, so I kinda was lost trying to figure out how to replace all my windows programs, and for different reasons I've never been able to really keep running a linux system for very long before abandoning it.
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Yeah, the entire Linux XP project is a bad joke. The fact that it exists hurts my brain.
Gentoo/FreeBSD is still a fairly new project and the support isn't really at a very good level for if you're just getting started. Using Gentoo Linux might be a better idea. Either way you're going to have to do a bit of command line work, but if you go with Linux there will be more people available to help you (including me) if you should run into a problem.
If you're concerned about stability, Linux is every bit as good as *BSD. I'm using a Linux-powered system as a NAT router/firewall at the moment and haven't run into any hangups with it. The only reason its uptime is as low as 11.5 days is because I did a kernel update 11.5 days ago. :P Linux also seems to be a bit better at keeping up with new hardware as well, more contributors and all that, and the package managers included with the distros tend to be better and more up-to-date (especially Gentoo).
As far as the entire desktop environment wars go, they're really about equal in my eyes as far as usability is concerned, though I think I prefer KDE a bit better. My perception of GNOME has changed in the past few years but I still don't think I like it enough to make it my full-time environment. You can do quite a bit with the panels on either environment. For instance, here's what my PowerSmack's installation of GNOME looks like (click to enlarge):
(http://www.spectere.net/graphics/screenshots/akuma/akuma-20071009-t.jpg) (http://www.spectere.net/graphics/screenshots/akuma/akuma-20071009.png)
You just need to play with it a bit, really.
As for your older system, the LiveCD for LDXE probably doesn't have the entire filesystem set as writable (i.e. it's trying to write to a read-only squashfs/cramfs volume). Type "mount" at the prompt and look for mount points with "rw" in the options area (inside the parenthesis) -- those are the parts of the tree that you can write to.
Another small distribution that you may want to consider is Puppy Linux (http://www.puppylinux.org/). I haven't used it myself but I heard it was good and fast. Just from looking at the main page I could definitely tell you that the maintainers keep it up-to-date (the latest version of Puppy uses kernel 2.6.21.7, which is still pretty new as far as distributions are concerned (for the record, most distributions are many versions behind -- I believe Debian is only at 2.6.18 in the unstable branch).
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I'm back trying to install Yoper... I love the system, since it's i686 optimized, it runs VERY fast, without requiring nearly as much work as gentoo. Since I don't want to start a new thread, I've got a bit of a dilemma. Yoper's install CD doesn't place Grub/Lilo in the MBR, so right now windows is booting directly, and even though I have Yoper installed, it's completely unaccessible. How do I safely install Grub or Lilo into the MBR and set it to boot XP and Yoper as an option? (When I had tried to install gentoo last time, it made a separate boot partition for grub that was separate from the gentoo partition, but I've got things down to 2 partitions, windows, and linux, but I can't seem to get the Yoper CD to place Grub or Lilo in the MBR, so I can't boot into linux..)
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Okay, here's what you've got to do. Make sure that your /boot/grub/menu.lst looks something like this:
default 0
timeout 10
title=Windows
rootnoverify (hd0,0) #replace this with the proper partition
chainloader +1
makedefault
title=Linux
root (hd0,1) #replace this with the proper partition
kernel /boot/name-of-your-kernel #
initrd /boot/your-initrd-file #Yoper more than likely uses this, being a binary distro
Now, as root, run grub in the command prompt and key in the following commands:
root (hd0,1) **change this to point to your Linux partition
setup (hd0) **since you're going to want GRUB installed to your main drive, regardless of where your Linux partition is
Type quit, reboot, and pray. :)
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So, that'll place grub in the MBR, and still let windows load? What is the chainloader for anyway? Someone on IRC said they thought it was only there fi you were trying to run windows from a different partition or something. Well, if it fails, the worst case scenario is having to install windows again.
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the worst case scenario is having to install windows again.
Something you're clearly not a stranger to.
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The person on IRC was quite wrong. Basically, chainloader tells GRUB to call the Windows boot loader rather than trying to boot the kernel directly like it can with FreeBSD, Linux, etc.
It's not hard to avoid having to install reinstall Windows. All of the data is still there (the boot loader is in the boot sector of the Windows partition, hence the reason chainloader +1 works).
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Problem: Your way of booting windows just makes grub go back to itself. I'm posting this from my FINALLY working linux setup, because I'm locked out of Windows now... Oh the irony...
Also, KDE only gives me a small list of resolutions, but there's a much larger list of modelines. I'm trying to get it to render the desktop at 1440x900 with this line:
Modeline "1440x900" 100.000 1440 1456 1464 1480 900 916 924 940 -hsync -vsync
(found it online someplace from a google search) but I dunno how to get KDE to recognize that it's supposed to set the resolution to that.
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Um...it's the method that I, and millions of other people, use to boot Windows with GRUB. Are you sure you set it to the right partition? If you didn't it will loop (since GRUB will either continually chain load itself or bugger out and reload itself).
Also, modelines aren't used a whole lot now aside from in special cases. I was able to get X working on all of my monitors -- including my laptop -- without using modelines. I only put resolution lines in the display section, like so:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "S3 Inc. ProSavage KN133 [Twister K]"
Monitor "Generic Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
# Skipping some text to improve readability
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768" <--- right here
EndSubSection
EndSection
Add the resolutions to the line that I marked, starting with the one that you want your system to default to.
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Well, my linux partition is hd0,1 and it's the second partition on the disk, the first being windows.
title Windows XP
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1Is my setting for windows, and it doesn't work. It just chainloads Grub...
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If that's the case, odds are Yoper fucked up and installed GRUB to the wrong place.
Boot from your XP CD, go into the recovery console, and use the fixboot and fixmbr commands. Make sure you can get into Windows, then install GRUB manually as I outlined above. You're going to have to boot from a LiveCD (Gentoo's will work, as will Slax, DSL, et al) and chroot into your installation to do that. If you need directions, feel free to ask.
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Thing is.. I did what you said. The installer is "supposed" to install grub in the right place automatically, but since it didn't, I had to manually install grub the way you told me, so now, apparently I have 2 copies of grub installed, correct?
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So it seems. Like I said, the most logical explanation is that Yoper screwed something up during installation. The fixmbr/fixboot utilities will restore the NT boot loader and allow you to boot back into Windows. After that you can reinstall GRUB.
Running fixboot alone will probably do the trick and not touch GRUB -- try that first.
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Puppy linux is great. It comes bundled with some crappy software.. SeaMonkey looks like netscape but with a mozilla program icon.. Wtf son. To get a really good linux boot cd you'd need to make it yourself.
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SeaMonkey is essentially a resurrection of the old Mozilla application suite (though much much faster). It's a pretty decent product, really.
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yeah, I'd dare say that it's faster than Firefox. ;D Or maybe it's because it doesnt have a wireless connection. (I doubt that makes that much of a difference)
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I haven't used it much myself but from what I've seen on my dad's computer it was pretty darn quick. :)
And let's not forget: you can make web pages and check your eeeee-mails with SeaMonkey. Oh, the wonders of the nets!
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So, I think fixmbr broke my partitions... I've formatted (I gave up on linux for now), but last time I booted up, it said ntldr was missing, so I had to install windows again just to boot up. How the hell can I install ntldr?
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fixmbr doesn't touch the partition table, only the master boot record. Same with GRUB.
ntldr is the Windows bootloader. It should be in the root of the system drive. If it's missing, dump this in there: http://www.spectere.net/ntldr.zip (http://www.spectere.net/ntldr.zip).
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Apparently, after unzipping it, I already had a copy, which was slightly smaller, as well. (228k as opposed to yours at 244k) I just hope this works, because installing windows every time you boot is a retardedly painful process.
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Mine's from XP Pro SP2 so it might be a bit different than yours if your installation CD has SPNothing or SP1.
I can't see any reason why it shouldn't work, I'm pretty sure XP's ntldr can still boot Windows 2000, so...
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SP1, and yeah, it worked. Actually, I ran fixmbr again, and it worked after that.
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For livecds, I'd very much recommend Wolvix or DSL-N. Mostly Wolvix these days. It's full of stuff, and most importantly, ltris and crack-attack for when you're gparted-iting. <3
As for modifying X, for stuff like adding resolutions it can be easier using the distro's native configuration tools. For debian, "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg", and for a bunch of others there's xorgcfg and xorgconfig. I think Ubuntu's got itself a nice GTK app for it as well.
As for desktop environments, I'd recommend GNOME first- coming from Windows, a user might be used to fugly desktops and shitty theme management, but getting into GNOME first can do wonders. It's very intuitive, very easy to use and very pretty. You can even move those panels around by just clicking and dragging. When you start realising how much GNOME holds back by refusing to do some very basic things, it might be time to move on to KDE. At this point, KDE4 might be out and it'll be the faptastic magnum opus for linux this year. <3
Also why the FreeBSD love? It's a neato OS I'm sure, but linux is the horse to bet on. Most hardware manufacturers have just started acknowledging linux's existence- FreeBSD support would likely get a lot of blank stares. D:
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I started in KDE, and I love it. I really just need to learn to work in linux better, but I don't really feel like running explicitly from a live CD, and I don't want to go through having to ultimately format my C: drive again.
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As for modifying X, for stuff like adding resolutions it can be easier using the distro's native configuration tools.
BLASPHEMER. ;)
Also why the FreeBSD love? It's a neato OS I'm sure, but linux is the horse to bet on. Most hardware manufacturers have just started acknowledging linux's existence- FreeBSD support would likely get a lot of blank stares. D:
Indeed. nVidia's drivers are quite good for it, at least. It's also nice that I can use basically the same xorg.conf between Linux and FreeBSD (with a few small changes, like /dev/input/mice -> /dev/sysmouse).
Other than that, FreeBSD isn't really mature enough for me to want to use as a daily home OS just now. Projects like Gentoo/FreeBSD are really helping things along, but Linux generally has better hardware and software support across the board.
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Indeed. nVidia's drivers are quite good for it, at least. It's also nice that I can use basically the same xorg.conf between Linux and FreeBSD (with a few small changes, like /dev/input/mice -> /dev/sysmouse).
This is why I like nVidia. They find a platform where people might use nvidia GPUs, and they port for it. Very professional and demonstrates a vigilant programming crew. Optimising for say, Windows, gives the impression that the developers aren't... quite as competent as they should be. ATi's drivers are so abominable that they'd probably be less viciously hated if they'd just not released one for anything but windows. (I figure Apple's been using ATi stuff for so long that they've probably got ATi-specific code worked into the OS by now)
The BSDs to me seem like they'd be better off in very specific, and usually headless setups. Linux may make awesome servers, but at the moment I think it's squaring in on user-interface setups. Desktops, workstations, portable devices, DVRs and the like. Sort of the reverse of windows server vs windows home, I guess. Maybe. It's 3am.
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Well, one of the biggest things about linux is that it can be hand tailored to work on nearly any architecture, and hardware setup, and made to specifically work well on it. You can optimize any linux install for your hardware setup and whatever particular task you're doing, as opposed to how hard it would be to strip down windows XP for a specific purpose.
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ATi's drivers are so abominable that they'd probably be less viciously hated if they'd just not released one for anything but windows.
At this point, it feels to me like the ATI drivers for Linux are now more stable than the ones for Windows, actually. It's very odd. D:
The BSDs to me seem like they'd be better off in very specific, and usually headless setups. Linux may make awesome servers, but at the moment I think it's squaring in on user-interface setups.
Linux is picking up in the server market, though. A lot of very very large businesses use it as well as many hosting companies (spectere.net is hosted on a Linux-powered server at the moment). FreeBSD in particular has quite a bit of market share, though. I believe Yahoo! runs on FreeBSD servers, for one (and the old spectere.net server ran FreeBSD).
Also, let's not forget about Linux's dominance in the supercomputer market, thanks to its incredibly portability and scalability. :)
Well, one of the biggest things about linux is that it can be hand tailored to work on nearly any architecture, and hardware setup, and made to specifically work well on it.
NetBSD is the same way (until Linux caught up sometime in the 21st century it supported more architectures than any other OS), yet not a whole lot of people (relatively speaking) use that.
Linux, since the late 90s, has had a lot more hype and momentum than the BSDs did in their prime. That's one major reason why they're overtaking everything else. If I had to wager a guess as to which BSD is the most popular on the home user end, I'd have to say Darwin, the underlying system of Mac OS X. Which, you mustn't forget, runs on PPC, x86 and...ARM. Every overpriced iPhone is running BSD under the hood.
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Yeah, linux always seemed to get more publicity than the BSDs did. I always heard mention of BSD, but rarely heard much more than mention, while linux has it's fanboys and such.
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BSD has fanboys also. They tend to be scarier.
Also, I don't think it's really fair to call Darwin a 'BSD'. That's like calling Frankenstein's monster any of the names of any of the people he was made from. In the end he's still abomination. D:<
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Like it or not, Darwin is a BSD. :P And just because the OS puts shininess over functionality in many cases doesn't mean that the kernel is bad.
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Well, they're obscure enough. I've never heard anything about BSD fanboys. Ever. And I've been hearing a lot about linux fanboys online for ages.
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BSD fanboy
<----
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I don't believe I've ever heard you saying anything fanboyish...
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LOL i <3 freeBSD LAWL LINUX SUKCSKS HAHAHAhahAHAHhahAhafj!#N!N!JNJ!!!JHN!HK!HKB!K1
8)
jk, but really... I just like bsd more. i can't give details, but using freeBSD on my shell has really made me appreciate it. It's powerful, versatile, and is just super spiffy. I've had to fight with linux here at home, but that freebsd is just so smoooooooth. That's all.
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With Linux it sort of depends on what distro you pick, really.
If FreeBSD's ports system tickles your fancy, Gentoo might very well be for you. Portage was heavily inspired by the ports system.
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So um, this blows. Every single time I reboot the computer, it can't find NTLDR. So, I have to put the windows CD in, and go repair my XP install (not recovery console) to get it to keep all the settings and such and boot into windows. Needless to say I'm getting VERY tired of doing this VERY quickly. I want to hurt whoever designed whatever portion of windows/my harddrive/whatever that's failing to work right. I've tried using the recovery console fixboot and such with no luck.
EDIT: ok, I found a copy of ntldr that was on my C: drive (my main is now labeled E: for some reason when I had reinstalled, and I'm too lazy to change it around) and the boot.ini that was there, I'll post an update next time I have to reboot on whether it worked or not.
So, um, Fuck. Games I was playing crashed, rebooted, hoping it would finally work, and lo and behold, it reboots. So apparently ntldr is in the right place, but I'm either missing something, or my nice little boot.ini is fucked. Why can't the microsoft guys get even the windows installer to work? When I reformat and make a clean install, I expect it to fucking WORK, not constantly complain because for some reason ntldr keeps disappearing and shit.
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Don't blame Microsoft for a fault that only seems to be happening on your computer. :/ The only time I've seen NTLDR shit itself is when there were hardware problems or bad drivers (I've been using NT for seven years and have *never* had an NTLDR issue on my computer, and that's on hardware ranging from a P2-400 to my current P4-2800). Make sure everything is completely up-to-date and, failing that, try rolling back to an older motherboard driver release.
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A) 'm running the mobo drivers that came on the CD with my mobo, because I'm lazy and didn't feel like looking for any updated ones, B) I will admit that this issue is VERY obscure, but I think it must have been something that the windows install didn't do right, because as far as I can tell, this missing ntldr issue is a product of windows not liking linux, even though I wiped this harddrive clean and performed numerous fixboot and fixmbr commands to the point that that anything that was there before I reinstalled linux should have been long gone....
The only thing I haven't done to update windows is install SP2 because last time I checked, rebooting meant "repairing" my install, which would likely fuck something in the installation process up.
It just pisses me off that neither making a completely clean install of windows, nor using the recovery console, nor using the repair option fixed this issue. It's times like these that small flaws piss me off. It wouldn't be such a headache if microsoft made dealing with ntldr and the advanced partition stuff more user friendly, instead of treating it as something nobody should ever touch.
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What makes you think that it's "Windows not liking Linux?" I have four operating systems on my computer now and I don't seem to be having any problems. In the seven years experience I've had with NT I've been using Linux on my main system for over five of them.
It's NOT a problem with Windows. Update your drivers. And no, fucking with the boot loader should NOT be a user-friendly task. Even Linux distros keep the users distanced from lilo/GRUB in a lot of cases.
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It should not be something that anyone can get access to unless they actually need to, but it should be at least a little more user friendly. I still fail to see how this could be anything near a driver issue. Albeit I'm not sure exactly where it's failing, but I think part of the missing ntldr issue was that windows assumes that C:\ is your main drive in some cases, and since my drives were switched when my 320 GB drive was screwed, and now it's my E:\ drive, I'm thinking that the install probably installed ntldr to C:\ by default and installed everything else to the E:\ drive. That's where I think it's not working right now, though I could be wrong.
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Windows NT doesn't assume anything, it can boot from any device. It doesn't matter at all where NTLDR is located, as long as Windows can see it.
And why couldn't it be a driver related issue? How do you suppose your disks are read? If there is a conflict or a bug in the driver it could corrupt data, and the boot loader is NOT immune to such things. I've seen things like that happen before; bad initialization code can lead to issues like that. Rather than trying to shoot down my advice, arguing with me, and blaming Microsoft for computer problems that only you are having, try some of my suggestions (or at least say that you have). :/
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I think I know what's happening. Windows installer is putting the boot loader on my now C:\ drive. But, the computer wants too boot off of my E:\ drive, where windows is physically located. I'm not exactly sure what I need to do to enforce it to load from my C:\ drive, but if I hit F8 when it wants me to hit DEL to enter the BIOS setup, I can select which harddrive to boo explicitly, so for now if it keeps trying to boot off E:\ (which would work if I'd known that instead of the line being multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /noexecute=optin, it's now multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /noexecute=optin.)
I just edited my boot.ini on E:\ to reflect that, so hopefully it'll work, no matter which one it wants to load...
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ok, so i put freebsd on my one compy, installed 4 different environments, and i must say...
freebsd is the shmexy shmexiest. it's sexy. really, really sexy. What do i do to get firefox?
i type: pkg_add -r -v firefox
fucking done.
what's that, apache? mysql? php? DONE DONE DONE. easy. why cant everything be like this? christ!
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freebsd is the shmexy shmexiest. it's sexy. really, really sexy. What do i do to get firefox?
I type emerge firefox-bin (or just emerge firefox if I want to let it compile).
fucking done.
what's that, apache? mysql? php? DONE DONE DONE. easy. why cant everything be like this? christ!
emerge apache mysql php
Gentoo's portage system was based on FreeBSD's ports and, as you can see, they're both equally awesome. :D