Finally re-installed Debian 4.0 “etch” on the Toshiba Satellite Pro M10. It’s a dual-boot installation with Windows XP. I installed from a CD (I only used CD 1, .iso image available on the Debian website here. Using Jigdo to download is highly recommended. Find out more here).

One thing to note when burning an .iso image to a CD: Don’t burn the file you downloaded like any other file. It would be just a CD with the .iso file on it, not a proper bootable CD. For more instructions visit http://www.debian.org/CD/faq/#record-windows.

Installation went fine and was a breeze. One thing I did was to select a primary mirror instead of a local mirror (they were only secondary mirrors). I don’t know if this helped in the package downloading and installation. It should be possible to add more repositories / mirrors later, but it seems I have problems doing that.

Most hardware was auto-detected, with the following exceptions:

• wireless was not detected (although it was switched on during the installation), probably cos the LAN cable was plugged in as well.
• Also, the display goes crazy when the lid is closed and the screen switches off (something to do with nVidia graphics card?).
• The Fn button isn’t working on the laptop but was fixed by searching for the package ‘fnfxd’ and installing it (will do a separate writeup on that later).
• Finally, the touchpad doesn’t respond to movements to click the mouse; i have to use the buttons for that.

A nice touch is the selection of environments (by tasksel): After selecting a “Desktop environment”, the GUI is automatically installed and configured to startup upon booting the comp.

A niggling problem has to do with control of the fan (it doesn’t seem to be working)..have installed some packages to deal with it but it still doesn’t seem to be working.
Also, a worrying trend is that CPU usage frequently hits 100%, lagging the comp quite seriously..this usually occurs when a new window is opened in GNOME and while surfing the net (with Iceweasel). After opening the root terminal and checking out top, it seemed that most CPU usage was taken up by Xorg (to do with the X window system). Coupled with the fact that the display goes crazy when the lid is closed, this probably has something to do with the nVidia graphics card. Will be on the lookout for a fix.

Brief todo list (things to clear up):

• power / fan
• mouse
• wireless
• cpu usage / nvidia?

…It’s more like my own failures, not the distro in particular ><

Anyway, here’s a quick recap: I’d installed Debian 3.1 ’sarge’ on my Toshiba Satellite Pro M10. It left me with a working Linux system but no GUI installed. I tried (unsuccessfully) to use tasksel to install the relevant packages for a desktop environment, but it seems there were problems with dependencies etc. because the package wasn’t available on the mirror I chose (Moral of story: When choosing mirrors, geographical location isn’t the most important; use primary mirrors instead of secondary mirrors. See the list of mirrors at http://www.debian.org/mirror/list).

In the end, I messed up big time and still couldn’t make GNOME start up. Feeling frustrated and giving up on my chances of success with Linux, I booted into Windows and deleted the partition with Linux on it.

Bad idea.

The GRUB loader (the one that selects which OS to start up) was linked to the Linux partition (sorry, I know it’s more complex, but I dont know how it really works), and it refused to work. Now I couldn’t even boot into Windows at all.

Strategies tried: Apparently one solution is to create a windows rescue disk, boot up the system from that disk and use the rescue terminal to fix it (using “fixmbr”). (will post the link later).

That didn’t work for me, however–I kept getting this error about some cable. I’m still not sure what was wrong with it.

I tried re-installing windows with the CDs that came with the laptop (not the windows installation disc), but i still couldn’t boot into windows after it was installed. I tried installing Ubuntu again, but the silly problem with power management was still there (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DanielHahler/Bug59695 for a starting point and list of further links). So I was kinda stuck at a dead end.

A couple of things:
The laptop has been rotting away at home; the most recent thing I did to it was to increase the countdown time before the default OS was booted up. What I did was to login to Debian as root, navigate to the folder where GRUB was installed (/boot/grub), and open various interesting looking files until I got something that looked like a config file, and simply edited the value of the startup time. Um. I shall write something more specific in the near future, shall I?

Update:
While logged in as root, the config file I edited was:

/boot/grub/menu.lst

which was the default configuration file in grub. I scrolled to something that looked like this:

# Boot automatically after 30 secs.
     timeout 30

Then I just changed the number.

In other news, I have also discovered Cygwin, which is (according to their website) a linux-like environment for Windows. It’s really cool as an introduction to UNIX-based systems, and it’d be great to see how working in a UNIX-based environment is like, for those thinking of making the switch. I found a series of interesting articles on Lifehacker: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3; they’re nice, gentle introductions to what Cygwin can do.

Actually I haven’t been putting Cygwin to much use. All I’ve done is just to play around with the calculator, upload some files, and play tetris. The documentation is rather incomprehensible to me (or rather I haven’t been making the effort to understand it). So. Conclusion: Maybe one would need to be less of a noob to fully utilize Cygwin.

My first concern was to successfully get a desktop environment up and running (thinking of trying out alternative desktop environments other than GNOME and KDE). I believe the files for gnome and kde have been installed by ‘tasksel’ but I can’t for the life of me figure out how to actually start a session, heh. I’ll check the manuals later.

Anyway, the first thing I was curious about was to check out what exactly was installed. I also wanted to check out some guides on the Debian documentation page. There were quite few things I wanted to do, but I’d forgotten most of the shell commands. It was fun re-learning them, and I would like to suggest a few important commands noobs should have on hand so it is more efficient to get things done. I guess this has been done many many times and so I suppose this will be a negligible addition and so it is ok.

I think the most important commands to remember are:

• apropos: use this to search for other commands.
• man: type “man commandname” to find out more about what a command does.
• For a simple listing of the syntax of a particular command, type “command –help”
• use “pwd” to find out which directory you currently are in.

Using these commands, I believe one should be able to search for other commands and learn how to use them in order to perform basic tasks.

Next, some useful ones are:

• Basic web browser: “w3m [url]” –so you can check out useful things like documentation in times of need.
• To display text files (eg. foo.txt) use “<foo.txt pager “, remember to type the path for the file if your current working directory is not in the same directory as the file
• One can also make use of this concept to scroll through output from a command that stretches for several screens: ” commandname | pager”
• If output in the shell stretches for several screens long, one can also use Shift+PgUp and Shift+PgDn to scroll through screens, and Esc to go back to the prompt.
• Finally “ps” gives a nice list of running processes and “df” gives a brief review of what your harddisk usage is like.

Will talk more on dir/ls later.

Finally, having a brief knowledge of how to use a basic text editor (eg. vi, emacs) is quite fun. I learned how to use vi through the cool program Vim for Windows. Go give it a try!

Yey, so I managed to get back my old Toshiba laptop (the one where the Ubuntu fiasco occurred) and install Debian on it. It has the advantage of not being used so if anything goes wrong I can just wipe the entire system and install Windows over it (sadly it is a rather reassuring thought).

Here is what I have done in preparation: Download a .iso file of the Debian 3.1 ’sarge’ installation disc. I believe it contains only the basic system. I also have a copy of the printout from Windows Device manager. I did not bother backing up my files cos there aren’t any. In hindsight, I should really have read up more on partitioning and actually bothered to find out more information about my hardware (at least enough to satisfy the list stated in the previous post). Perhaps I should have defragmented the disc too.

Everything went smoothly initially (selecting language, country etc.) and the installer has useful information for noobs like me when I’m supposed to make a decision (eg. “If you are unsure you should choose this choice. You can always change it later in this file.” But then I was too lazy to copy down the filenames).

Choosing the hostname for the system was pretty easy. The domainname was more confusing. Does it actually matter what domain name I choose? Since I am on a cable connection, my IP will change every time I connect..I am not too sure on what to do. Anyway, just in case, I just used the name suggested (which is probably part of the hostnames of computers on my ISP).

The biggest problem was with partitioning, actually. The original partition was: the harddrive was split into two, one was the Windows files (primary partition) and the other was data files (logical partition). If I wanted to use a partition, I should have selected the area of the disc labelled ‘free space’ and not anything else. However, that specific area was only 8MB large. I was rather stumped at what to do and so I made use of the data partition to install Debian on. Perhaps defragmenting the disc should have helped? I’m not too sure about what to do to create a partition on an existing partition without wiping it out. Cos there’s no free space to work with.

Feeling insecure, I aborted the installation and booted into Windows to check it out on the Debian Installation Manual. The system seemed okay, despite the warning that aborting the installation would leave the system in an unstable state.

Anyway I took about 256Mb for my swap partition, and the rest of the partition was split into half each for the root and home directories.

The rest of the installation went fine, and it was really exciting seeing all the words scroll by….
I have to admit, having prior experience (however little and however much hand-holding there was) is a definite advantage in understanding what was going on, but I guess a complete noob should still be able to do it based on the notes given in the installer. Most of the stuff was automatically done, after all (thank goodness!).

After choosing the repository I wanted, the files were downloaded and installed to beef up the system abit more. However, I noticed that some files were unable to be downloaded–I don’t actually know what happens next, does the program just skip those files, or get them from someplace else?

Then this screen appeared asking me to choose what the system would be used for–desktop environment, mail server/ftp server etc. After selecting ‘desktop environment’, the program proceeded to download the relevant files and install them. However, it seems I goofed up and selected ‘mail server’ instead and configured it weirdly, so now it seems I can send mail to myself internally. Or something. I distinctly remember choosing ‘desktop environment’ though… now I must find out how to remove those files.

Anyway I found out that one can run the program ‘tasksel’ to perform the actions described above. Just type ‘tasksel’ at the bash shell and the nice screen will appear. The files for ‘desktop environment’ are so many, I gave up waiting for them to download over my sucky connection (I gave up at transfer no. 428), and left it to run overnight.

When I got back in the morning, there were more interesting decisions to make (which I still do not understand but the notes given were quite reassuring), and there was this thing regarding xfree86.

I regret not finding out more about my system cos I was rather at a loss at which refresh rate to choose. The warnings about destroying your display were rather scary. Or did they just apply to CRT displays? Anyway I chose the highest rate from among the lot, 75Hz.

When everything was finished and the dust cleared, I logged in and saw my first shell prompt on the black screen and was terribly at a loss for what to do next.

Ok this post is getting too long so I will write about my experiences in the shell in the next post.

Got the itch to install Linux again. Let’s hope this time it works better than the previous unhappy experience.
This time, I chose to install Debian–though it’s relatively more technical than Ubuntu: eg. you have to install and configure the graphics thingy yourself (X windows system and GNOME/KDE–otherwise no nice graphical desktop and windows). Not exactly sure in what other ways it is more technical. But anyway that’s what “they” generally say. “They” also say that Debian is a very well-established, secure and stable distribution, and that sounds very nice, especially the ’stable’ part. Anyway, I guess my Toshiba is pretty much rotting at home now, so why not give it a try? But one thing is true, Ubuntu is more appealing to me as a noob, partly due to their marketing, as someone commented on a blog post on Linuxhelp, mentioned again further down.

Here’s a couple of links to distro-choosers (if anything, they’re a fun way to waste time)
zegenie Studio’s Linux Distribution Chooser
:^tuxs.org’s chooser

Anyway, in preparation for installing Debian, I bookmarked their installation guide for Debian 3.1 ’sarge’, which is their current stable release (2005). I have already downloaded and burned the .iso file; took me about a night on my sucky cable connection.

The guide was full of useful interesting information that raised more doubts than I had started out with, but I guess it’s good to be prepared in case anything goes wrong.

One page that I found particularly useful was a list of things to take note about your hardware configuration, which was really nice because I still can’t make head or tail of the printout from Windows Device Manager (”Do I really need to know what all these ports/numbers mean? What should I really be looking at? Why the heck are there so many pages?”)

Just for interest’s sake, I intend to do a dual-boot installation (windows is still nice to fall back on, just in case anything goes wrong). I still have yet to solve the problem of one OS being unable to access/write files on the other OS’s partition. Eg. I have a directory of music files in my windows partition, but I can’t listen to these files directly using a music player in linux..or maybe it’s possible but I’m too much of a noob. Or, I save a document on my linux partition but I can’t even access files on that partition from windows, so I have to switch back to linux to work on my document.

Dunno when the next release of Debian will be. The author of Linuxhelp.blogspot.com has written an interesting review of Debian ‘Etch’ beta 3. Anyway the comments are rather informative as well, and provide several viewpoints as usual.

I will incorporate these links into the links onto the blog when I am feeling less lazy, heh. But for now, however, I am afraid this will have to suffice:

My del.icio.us bookmarks list of linux links

Sorry!

p.s. Thanks for the comments guys–it really encourages me to know the stuff I’ve posted here has been helpful =)

p.p.s. On why you should learn how to use the shell in linux: when your friend’s lecturer asks her to make a webpage to present her research results and upload it to the school server and some commands need to be entered into the shell client. Of course, the job could have been done with the graphical client, but it’s cooler this way, heh.

Ubuntu has been hanging/locking up lately. It reports CPU usage as 100% and then refuses to respond after that. It is also not task-specific; it has happened while using Firefox, playing a game, and using Dia to draw a diagram. Other users have commented on this problem and offered solutions on the Ubuntu support forums.

Edit: See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DanielHahler/Bug59695 for a description (i don’t understand it completely) and list of useful links.

Seems like there’s different variants to the problem as some solutions work while some don’t. Anyway, one thing I learnt from it is that Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is a good shortcut to use when lockups happen. Don’t follow my example of switching off the power (I didn’t know what else to do, how brilliant). Doing this screwed things up a little, to put it mildly. On the first time, an fsck was carried out and everything was fine. On the second and third times, however, things got worse until my entire home directory disappeared and Ubuntu has problems starting up.

So, for the meantime, it’s back to Windows for me. I still don’t know what caused all those problems. I’ll try my hand at Ubuntu again, once the semester is over.

Am considering installing Debian instead. At least its installer auto-detects hardware–noob-friendly!

Here is a useful link explaining how to install packages, in plain English!

Sometimes there are packages I cannot find in the repositories I have enabled in Synaptic Package Manager, so I download the .deb file from the author’s website. However I do not know how to proceed from there. This link tells you what to do, and also gives information on apt-get commands (Synaptic Package Manager is a frontend for apt-get, from what I understand; please correct me if I am wrong!)

Well, so it’s been at least a month after I’ve installed Ubuntu and began working with it to do my work, and unfortunately I must admit that whatever I am doing in Ubuntu now, I can do it as well in Windows, and perhaps the converse is true (with the exception of a few codecs that I have not installed and some inconveniences). So I haven’t really reached the point where I have experienced the power of Linux.

Some issues: I am still rather unfamiliar with the command line, and reading man pages are rather intimidating as well. Most of the time I don’t know what’s going on and skim past paragraphs that are hopefully unimportant in my situation. Some examples of basic usage have been rather helpful.

I do miss the hand-holding that MS Windows takes their users through; although it does allow users to slack off and not get to know their computer better. However I guess I’m still quite far from getting to know my computer better, so perhaps that argument doesn’t really stand.

Also, having to run fsck after an unclean shutdown can be a really sobering experience.

But, overall, using Ubuntu is fun. And makes me feel geeky. Heh.

Anyway, just to clarify what I do on my laptop: I do most of my work in OpenOffice, I surf the net, and I chat on Gaim. Pretty mundane things, really, where Linux is concerned.