Tag Archives: Linux

The flavours of Mint

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I first installed Linux about six weeks ago.

It is really quite remarkable how easy I have taken to it.  I rarely use the Windows setup these days, and only boot into it if there is something specific I need to do, such as running Photoshop, as my Gimp skills are still not fully developed!

What has surprised me is the way I have started to experiment.  Last week for example, I scrapped my installation and did a fresh install of Linux Mint 10 Julia, which is still at the Beta stage.  It is only released with Gnome, but comes in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavours.  I decided to go for broke and install the 64 bit flavour.

The first thing that strikes me (apart from the very nice graphics) is the speed.  The developers have trown in a load of fancy gimmicks that allow your windows to dance around the screen or act like jelly, and I tried a few of them out.  The developers needn’t have bothered.  The system is so fast that I never get a chance to see the gimmick before the window closes.

Up until now I had been using KDE as my front end, but I am getting very used to Gnome at this stage.  Just for the craic, I installed KDE into Mint 10, and it works very well but does have a few minor quirks, which I would expect.  One major quirk is the inability to shut down.  It allows for Sleep, Hibernate and Log off but there is now way to shut it down without using the command prompt, or switching user (from myself to myself) and selecting Gnome.

There are a few things I really miss in Linux though.  The biggest one is probably Windows Live Writer which I used for all my blog posts.  The nearest in Linux is Blogilo which is very definitely the poor brother.  It lacks most of WLW’s features, and to my disgust, I can’t get even that to run under Gnome (and believe me, I have tried).  I have had to fall back on Scribefire which is a Firefox plugin and therefore platform independent.

If there is anyone out there who hasn’t tried Linux, I would suggest giving it a bash (hah! Linux joke!).  Like other flavours of Mint it can be installed within Windows so no partitioning, or allocation of diskspace is required.

Go on.  Give it a try.  You never know – you may become a convert?

You can download from here.

How to screw up a brand new laptop

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I suppose some will argue that it is my own fault.

My new laptop screwed up on me during the week.

I suppose the easiest way is to chart the history that led to its downfall?

When I got the laptop home, I found that it had three primary partitions. The first was a small system partition that seemed to contain boot records. The next was the restore partition and the third was the main partition containing the OS and all the data.

I have always had a habit of separating my data from my OS, and many’s the time that has saved my bacon. I therefore split the main partition in two. So far, so good.

Then came my experiments in Linux.

I tried reducing the size of my data partition to make room for the Linux install. That was fine, and I ended up with about 40Gb of free space. However, Linux refused categorically to see it. This is when I learned that apparently one can only have four primary partitions.

Undeterred, I set about installing Linux within Windows itself. I didn’t want to use a VMC as that imposes too many restrictions. Linux Mint has the perfect solution – to create a file and use that as a virtual hard disk.

I liked Linux. It has come a long way since I first started messing with it in the early days when a UI was virtually unheard of. I liked it so much I decided to revisit the idea of installing it in its own partition.

Because of the four partition limit, I had to combine two of mine. There was a considerable amount of shunting around involved, but eventually I shifted all my data onto the OS partition, including my Mint installation, just in case anything went wrong. I deleted the old data partition and set about installing Linux Mint. It worked perfectly. I now had a duel boot windows 7/Linux machine.

As the old installation of Mint was no longer needed, I deleted it of my data disk. I also used a utility to delete the record from the boot record. That is where my problem started. The machine categorically refused to boot into Windows. It just went blank leaving me staring at a black screen. I couldn’t even access the factory restore partition.

I had previously made a set of DVD restore disks, so I stuck the first one in. I hoped it would have some hind of error checking but it didn’t. I found an old copy of Ultimate Boot Disk which had saved my bacon in the past, and that had a utility to edit the MBR. I edited it, to point to the correct partition but that just screwed thing up completely. Now I couldn’t get into Linux either!

I found a torrent for a Windows 7 restore disk on the Web. I burned it to CD and tried that. It immediately It told me that there were problems with my boot-up and claimed to fix them but it made no difference. Stuck again.

I decided the time had come to forget about my Windows data. I had most of it backed up anyway, though I didn’t fancy installing all my programmes again. I did a complete factory restore off the DVDs. It took ages, but eventually it announced that my machine was back to its original state. It wasn’t. Apparently the restore doesn’t touch the MBR which struck me as crazy!

I searched the Web again [luckily I had a spare machine!] and found one reference to restoring a Windows 7 MBR using DOS. I tried that and it worked. At last I was getting somewhere.

I now had a machine with Windows 7 but no programmes or data, and an installation with everything in it, but that I couldn’t access. I decided to reinstall Mint and suffer my loss of data.

During the Mint install, there was some confusion as to where I was installing it. It wanted to use a spare 3Gb of empty space, which was worse than useless. I eventually persuaded it to use the existing Linux partitions, and just for the hell of it, I told it not to bother formatting the main partition. It installed perfectly so now I was back in business, with just a case of installing all my programmes again.

I was wrong.

I booted into Linux and there was everything just as I had left it – all my programmes and all my data.

The more I see of Linux, the more I like it.

That full restore just about clinched it!

The Linux adventure continues

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I have always considered Linux to be a bit of a geeky system.

I had hoped that with time, the front end would make things simpler, in the same way that Windows more or less made DOS obsolete. That isn’t the case.

The more I have used it, the more I like it. It is extremely fast, solid and also versatile. It is now my default operating system, so all I have to do is switch on the laptop and leave it to boot up. I only have to hover over the keyboard if I want to go into Windows.

In my last post, I mentioned how I was having problems with reinstalling Linux in a virtual file. I still haven’t solved that problem (despite having put an appeal out on the forums), but am developing a couple of theories. One is that apparently a hard disk can only handle four primary partitions? I had never heard this before but it could be the reason for my problem. My hard disk came with three partitions already set up. There is one small one that has an uncertain function. There is another that contains the factory restore code and then there is the main one which is around 320 Gb in size. My first job was to split that into and OS partition and a Data partition, not realising that I had now used up all my four partitions. Some day, I may restore to the factory default and then leave Windows in one partition and Linux in another.

Because I wasn’t able to reinstall, I had to get by by restoring my Linuxmint directory, and that is what I’m working off at the moment. I was also stuck with the size I had originally specified, which was 19Gb. This filled up pretty rapidly leaving me with a setup that lacked flexibility. I hunted the Internet and came up with a solution. Apparently, Linux is able to increase a file size without recreating it. I did say that Linux was flexible?

I tried it out last night and it worked. Or at least it partly worked. This is what I did.

My NTFS Data partition is the one that hold my Linux install. Linux is mounted in a folder called “linuxmint”, in two main files – “root.disk” and “swap.disk”. I can access these files directly from Linux using the path /host/linuxmint/disks/.

Using Terminal as Root I used the following –

cd /host/linuxmint/disks
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=10240 >> root.disk
e2fsck -f root.disk
resize2fs root.disk

The second line is the one that does the main work. It takes a very long time to run, and it is set to increase the size of root.disk by 10Gb. This can be varied by changing the value of “count”.

My problem now is that “root.disk” is 29Gb in size which is exactly what I intended, but when I examine the properties of any directory in Linux, it tells me that the disk size is still only 19Gb. Somehow i have to work out a solution to this little conundrum.

I will say one more thing in favour of Linux –

It certainly keeps an old man’s brain active!

Disasters and setbacks

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Having successfully worked with Linux for a while and having grown to like a lot of its features, I decided to take the next step.

Up until now, I had been running Mint in a Virtual File within Windows. I decided it was time to give it its own partition and to do a proper install.

I started off last night by resizing and moving my NTFS partitions. This went without a hitch and I ended up with a nice fat 60Gb of free space on the hard disk.

This morning, I ran another full backup and then started work. The first job was to install Linux in the new partition.

Everything came unstuck.

Linux recognised the drive of course, but failed to see the free space. It insisted I had a 350Gb partition and that my only option was to format it. It completely failed to see the two existing NTFS partitions.

I tried several times, but ran into the same problems, no matter what way I tried to do the install.

I decided to cut my losses. I resized one of the NTFS partitions to fill the vacant space and then went to install Mint in a virtual file again, only this time I would make the file 60Gb instead of the 20Gb I had been using.

Again all went well, and it asked me to reboot to finish the installation.

Immediately I got an error – “No primary partition found”.

Once more I went into the install/uninstall routine, trying out varios settings, all to no avail. This was particularly tedious as the uninstal;l had to be run each time, otherwise I would just have added a new entry each time to the boot-loader.

In the end, I gave up. I didn’t bother with the uninstall, so I was left with the virtual file and the boot loader. Using Windows, I then restored my backup of the LinuxMint folder that I had made earlier.

I’m delighted to say that this worked. I still had to restore a lot of files within Linux, but it is now 99% up and running.

So I have wasted about eight hours and am more or less back to where I was yesterday. Some minor things still aren’t working, but I can live with that.

My only fear now is that my re-partitioning of the hard drive went amok somewhere, causing faulty volume labels or something.

One of these days, I am going to have to do a total manufacturer’s system restore.

*sigh*

Problems and solutions in Linux

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

The move to Linux continues.

I have reached the stage now where Linux is my main operating system.  I now only log into Window for a couple of minutes a day, and the rest of the time I am in Mint.

To my disappointment, there are still a couple of applications that still have no real equivalent in Mint.  One is Windows Live Writer, which is unrivaled  when it comes to writing posts on blogs.  I am currently using ScribeFire, which does the job, but lacks some basic essentials, such as the ability to save a draft post locally.  The other package I tried (and will probably return to) is Blogilo.  This has a lot more features but is not quite as convenient as ScribeFire.  I suppose you can’t win ’em all?

The other application I have been having problems with is Open Office.  I have a couple of spreadsheets created in Excel.  These spreadsheets contain a few complex graphs.  Open Office opens the files perfectly and displays the full content, but is apparently incapable of saving the spreadsheets without losing the graphs.  I could recreate the graphs in Open Office, but they are complex, and frankly, it’s simpler just to boot into Windows.

Apart from all that, I have expanded my setup to include my master PC which sits in my office.  It now has Mint running happily in a dedicated partition, and I use KRDC to control it.  The latter is a lot less problematic than UltraVNC which I had been using in Windows.

One aspect of mounting a Linux system within a virtual file is the ability to backup that file.  I haven’t tried this out yet, but technically, if I have to wipe my hard disk, it should just be a matter of reinstalling Mint in a virtual file (to set up the boot loader), and then just overwriting that file with the backup.  In theory, that should restore the entire Linux setup, including all documents, settings, software and preferences.

Needless to say, I haven’t tested the theory out in anger yet.

It should be interesting, should the day come?