Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[shikitohno]

For bumpage, sgreger1, since we haven't seen this thread shoot up to the top again, is it safe to say all is going well with your system for the time being? Or just not playing around with it, since it's a weekday and all? Anyway, when you've got time to play with it again, feel free to bump this thread up with your questions, and I'll do my best to answer them.

[shikitohno]

No, that's just the column names. You see the asterisk under Boot by /dev/sda1? That indicates that /dev/sda1 is the only partition marked as bootable. I don't fully understand the boot process, but I'd imagine GRUB puts something in there so that when the computer boots, there's a file that says "Hey, look at this /boot partition over here!" and hands things off to GRUB. And I don't know why you would have to use sudo. Just plain ol' fdisk -l works fine here.

[sgreger1]

So I ran sudo f-disk (the error before was that I didn't start it with 'sudo") and this is what I get. Based on this, does it not appear that the partitions are on sda, but the boot is on sdb?

[samizdat@localhost ~]$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x05cd9cda

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2          206848  2741876735  1370834944    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3      2741878782  2906247167    82184193    5  Extended
Partition 3 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda4      2906247168  2930274303    12013568    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda5      2742382592  2758004735     7811072   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6      2758006784  2759030783      512000   83  Linux
/dev/sda7      2759032832  2850971647    45969408   83  Linux
/dev/sda8      2850973696  2861361151     5193728   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda9      2861363200  2906247167    22441984   83  Linux

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


Disk /dev/sdb: 3000.6 GB, 3000592982016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders, total 5860533168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x20075f75

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            2048  4294963199  2147480576    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

I'm just curious why it says:

 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System 
/dev/sdb1            2048  4294963199  2147480576    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Does this mean the device is booting from sdb?

And is it normal that there appear to be 2 swap partitions? Is one of them perhaps used by windows or something?

[shikitohno]

fdisk -l

Looks like you're missing that space. Fdisk -l works perfectly fine on my install of Fedora over here, and nothing in what I'm updating at the moment would change that. By the way, it's important to keep your system up to date for security and stuff, so I'll teach you how to do that in case you haven't already. I'd say at least once every day or so, you should run either

sudo yum update

or

sudo yum -y update

The -y answers yes to all questions automatically, instead of yum giving you the list of updates and then prompting you to hit y or n to either continue or abort the upgrade. Generally speaking, by the time things leave the testing repos, they're pretty well tested on Fedora and aren't likely to break your system, but you can check here for any news beforehand if you'd like. You could also subscribe to the Fedora announcements mailing list and you'll get announcements of changes and events in your email. Note that the -y flag will work for any yum operation, but I personally only use it for updates and installing packages. Using it for removing a program can bite you in the ass if the package you're removing is a dependency for something important. I managed to accidentally uninstall my entire GUI like this once and had to fix it from a tty. I can't imagine you're looking forward to that, so I'd advise against using -y when you use erase or remove.

I forgot, and lx reminded me, but I did want to mention man pages. Generally, most packages will have some sort of documentation explaining how they're used and the various options for them. These are called man pages, and you can read them by typing

man foo

with foo being replaced with whatever the program is you want to learn about. Not all packages have a man page, but most of them that I've needed one for do.

Man, this turned into a massive post...

Edit2: And while I'm thinking of it, I forgot to mention tab completion. When you're in the terminal, you can hit the tab key to auto-complete command or file names once you've typed enough of the name for the computer to be completely sure of what command or file name you intend to use. For example, you can type fdi and hit tab, and it'll fill it out as fdisk for you. However, in cases where there's ambiguity (you have .Xresources and .Xdefaults in your ~/ and you hit tab after entering .X), hitting tab once will do nothing.

Also, if you come across any instructions for something you're looking to do that tell you to edit a file or enter a directory with . in front of them, like that .Xresources file, the . means it's a hidden file or directory. In Nautilus, the default Gnome file manager, you need to enable the "show hidden files and folders" option in one of the menus. In the terminal, type

ls -a

to see a list of all files and folders in your current directory. To keep you well stocked on reading material, have a tutorial on how to get around in the terminal. I quickly looked through it, and that looks like it'll teach you most of the basic commands for how to navigate and interact with your machine from the terminal. Also worth reading for a good number of people, the article "Linux is NOT Windows." And finally, have this little gem. It'll basically teach you how to ask questions or try and get help with a problem in a way that'll work out best for both you and the people helping you out. It's not something I'm blaming you for, but it takes some time to get used to posing your questions and request for help in an effective manner. The way you posted your problem over at Fedora Forums probably had something to do with why you didn't get any responses at all, despite there obviously being people active on that board. In that post, it doesn't look like you did any of the things in the "Before You Ask" section of that article. It also doesn't really meet the "Be precise and informative about your problem" section's criteria. In the future, if you ask questions on the forum in the manner laid out in this article, you'll make it a lot easier for people to help you, and in turn more likely that they'll take the time to actually do it.

Finally, I was going to tell you this when I woke up this morning, but you'd already managed to install Fedora on your own, so it was a bit late. 10GB of swap space is pretty much overkill. The general rule of thumb used to be make swap the same as your RAM, but it doesn't really hold true any more. 2GB of swap is likely more than sufficient, and 4GB is pretty much safe as you can be. If you're doing something and you get 4GB into swap, you've got some issues to fix with your machine, or you really need to upgrade your RAM if you actually need that much.

And by the way, if you still use torrents at all, I'll recommend rtorrent as a pretty good client. You can do quite a bit to automate things with its config file.

[lxskllr]

Try sudo fdisk -l That should be a standard command in any GNU/Linux.

Edit:
You might find this page useful. It gives the usage of various commands. You can look them up, and it'll show you the man page. You can do the same thing from the terminal though, in this case

man fdisk

gives the usage for the command fdisk

http://www.linuxmanpages.com/

[sgreger1]

If it had taken over the whole partition, than none of those things would still be on the drive. If you install ntfs-3g you'll also be able to write to that partition from linux. I don't believe fdisk will be able to help you, since I'm pretty sure a UEFI boot requires a GUID Partition Table, and you posted something a while ago that fdisk doesn't support GPT. There should be a disk utility or something similar in your applications menu. It was under System Tools back when I was still using gnome, but I haven't used it in some time now. That should let you look at your partition layout, though. If not, we can find something that'll work. I think rather than reinstalling and redoing everything you've done so far, it might be easier to just create a partition table on your second disk and image your partitions. That way you can copy everything over, with the images, and just have your ~/home partition expanded to whatever size you want on that disk, and you don't have to do all the setup over again. I'd have to look into doing that and see how it would work to be sure, though.

Yah if I can image the partitions ond sda over to sdb that would be great but I have no clue how to do that quite yet. fdisk works on sda, but on sdb it can't read it because it's in GUID format. Another thing is that fdisk-l doesn't do anything in fedora it seems, I tried it but it just returns a new command line.

[shikitohno]

If it had taken over the whole partition, than none of those things would still be on the drive. If you install ntfs-3g you'll also be able to write to that partition from linux. I don't believe fdisk will be able to help you, since I'm pretty sure a UEFI boot requires a GUID Partition Table, and you posted something a while ago that fdisk doesn't support GPT. There should be a disk utility or something similar in your applications menu. It was under System Tools back when I was still using gnome, but I haven't used it in some time now. That should let you look at your partition layout, though. If not, we can find something that'll work. I think rather than reinstalling and redoing everything you've done so far, it might be easier to just create a partition table on your second disk and image your partitions. That way you can copy everything over, with the images, and just have your ~/home partition expanded to whatever size you want on that disk, and you don't have to do all the setup over again. I'd have to look into doing that and see how it would work to be sure, though.

[sgreger1]

Sweet, I will have to check all of those programs out. One thing that strikes me as weird is that I can mount my regular C: and X: drives from my windows partition while in Fedora and access all of the pictures and other documents as though I was accessing them through windows. Is this normal or have I mashed the partitions together somehow? If it won't mess anything up than that is really cool that I can see all my pics/videos while in Fedora and even listen to my music. If I write stuff to the C: or X: drives is it going to mess anything up?

I may try and re-install onto the larger hard drive since I already moved everything off of it. When I installed it on my regular sda drive it gave me the option to replace and take over the partitions I had set up for Ubuntu but I am still not sure if it kept the partitions or if it merged it all into one. I am assuming it kept the setup I had and just overwrote Ubuntu. Fdisk can help me identify this right?

[shikitohno]

No problem, I was kidding anyway. That damn "Are you sure you want to stay?" dialogue came up and I didn't notice it, and a key I hit took me off the page and it wiped this mammoth post out. Well, now to type it again.

First, screen is a pretty awesome program, and it'll save you from have lot's of unnecessary windows/tab open if you use the terminal often. I've got irssi (irc), rtorrent (torrents, duh), mutt (email), htop (system monitor), ncmpcpp (MPD front-end, plays music), vifm (file manager) and calcurse (calender/appointments) all running within one screen session. Screen is controlled pretty much entirely by the keyboard. You hit ctrl+a, let go of them and hit another button to do stuff.
ctrl+a c: opens up another terminal within screen
ctrl+a n: goes to the next terminal
ctrl+a p: goes one back
ctrl+a ": shows a list of everything you have open. Initially, they'll all just show up as "bash," so it's helpful to name each terminal/window.
ctrl+a A: names the current window. You can delete bash and name it whatever you want. Hit enter to confirm it. Must hold shift when you hit that A.
ctrl+a d: detaches the screen session, and everything in it runs in the background. You can close all your programs, log out, log back in, and type screen -r into a terminal, and you'll see them all running there, still. Can also use this if you want to connect remotely (say you want to ssh into your box and play music on your home computer while at work).

In short, screen is an awesome program if you use the terminal often. For my next plug, MPD. There's a great page on it on the ArchWiki that you can use for most of the configuration. However, you cannot use they're instructions for making MPD run as a daemon (which is something you probably want to do if you use it), because Arch handles all that differently from Fedora. They use a *BSD-style init, and Fedora uses systemd, which are two ways of handling the same task. On a tangent, I like their style better, but that's a separate issue. Anyway, MPD has some pretty awesome features. It uses next to no processing power or memory, except when you're updating the database. If you pause a song and shutdown, it'll remember where you were in the song, and you can start playing exactly where you left of when you start up again. If you run it as a daemon, you can leave it playing while you're rebooting, and it'll start playing the song from where it left off when your computer comes back up, before you even hit the login screen.

And finally, considering how much data you have and how you've been backing things up, rsync+cron could very well be your new best friend. The first time you run rsync, it'll make a copy of everything in the directories you tell it to back up in your backup location. Every time after that, it'll only copy the files that have been added or changed since the previous backup. You can also use it to do remote backups, like to back up the stuff you've got on another computer over the network. And with cron, you can set it up to run at regular intervals, so as long as your computer is on and running linux, it'll back up automatically every so often, and you won't have to do anything.

[sgreger1]

Who knows. For now, don't go encouraging sgreger to install unnecessary things. I've only got 4.5 hours of weekend left now.

Lolol. Sorry man but thanks for your help! I'm staying the **** away from compiz for the moment. Ive blown 3 days trying to get to where I am now so I'm going to count it as a victory and move on.

[shikitohno]

Yeah, therein lies both one of the greatest strengths and weaknesses of linux. It's great because the system doesn't pester you with "Hey, are you sure about this?" every time you try to do something, even when you know you're doing something that'll work perfectly fine. It can come back and bite you in the ass though, because as long as you've got the right privileges, linux won't stop you, even if you're doing something really dumb. And to get this out of the way, never run these two if someone suggests you to. They're either kidding, or they're assholes.

sudo rm -rf /* 
or
:(){ :|: & };:

That said, I do rather like that fork bomb. It's kind of awesome and beautiful in its simplicity, but damn would I be pissed I ever saw someone run it on my machine.

[lxskllr]

:^D

True enough. sgreger, when you're changing things around, don't do too much at one time before checking your progress. That can make it harder to find the true culprit when things go wrong. Also, as you've seen, there's little protection for the system, and the protections in place are trivial to circumvent. You have full control of your computer, and you can do things that are harmful to its operation. Just be careful when you're making changes, and consider what the possible ramifications are if what you're doing doesn't work according to expectations.

[shikitohno]

Who knows. For now, don't go encouraging sgreger to install unnecessary things. I've only got 4.5 hours of weekend left now.

[lxskllr]

Compiz might work with the free drivers. It does with the Intel drivers on my netbook.

[shikitohno]

Alright, so since ATI doesn't have an official driver for your device yet, you won't be able to use compiz or any of the fancy 3D eye candy. For what it's worth, in the future if you buy a computer and you're thinking of putting linux or one of the BSDs on it, I'd say go with nVidia over ATI. They have a better record of getting their own drivers out the door, and not making things as difficult for the guys trying to write open source drivers. They've been asses with the same stuff in the past, but in my experience they've improved over the last few years, while ATI are still bastards. Also, you got rid of that catalyst package or whatever the proprietary driver was that you installed? If it's still on your system, it won't be doing any damage, but for the sake of keeping things clean, I would suggest getting rid of it.