Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[sgreger1]

Do you have any comment on autoplus or easylife? It is supposed to make it easier to install all of the necessry things. Is this necessarery or will following the tutorial you linked to handle most of the basic stuff I will require (codecs etc).


Also, is there any keyboard shortcut to paste into the Terminal window? I have been doing it by right clicking but I wish I could CTRL+V like on windows, I am sure there is ashortcut somewhere.


This filesystem is kind of confusing, it tells me to go to "Add the following to a file called google.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/

But i went into that folder the there was no file called google.repo there.


It also appears (based on this tutorial) that my ATI graphics card is not supported, but rather only Nvidia ones are

* Installing ATi driver

Please note that Gnome Shell doesn't work with fglrx.

[shikitohno]

Yeah, though wouldn't have worked. And you weren't installing yum, that's the process to install the RPMfusion repository of packages. Yum checks repositories for pre-compiled binaries when you do a 'yum search foo' and you need to have the appropriate repos installed in order for a package to show up. RPMFusion and Google will likely be the only non-standard repos you'll need. Also, although it will install, if you're looking for something like LibreOffice, they have rpms you could install from on their site, but it's best to install from yum instead. So unless you have a really good reason to install from an RPM (99% of times you don't), use the yum instead so that it'll keep track of everything nicely for you. Also, in the terminal, ctrl+c will kill the currently running process if it can, for future reference.

[sgreger1]

Well, here is a pretty decent guide for some basic setup that you probably wouldn't know how to do on your on sgreger. I gave it a quick glance and all seems correct with it, but this will get sudo work for you, install "restricted" codecs and media format support (ie, you can read mp3s and DVDs on it), and get you java and flash. For java, you can just follow his steps to install the OpenJDK, unless you're doing some sort of Java work that absolutely requires the Oracle package. For music players, I was partial to quodlibet, though I now run mpd with ncmpcpp. MPD is potentially a lot more configuration, but the default /etc/mpd.conf will probably work well enough for you, as long as you change the location of your library. It does require you be quite a bit more organized about your music than many people are though, as it'll only check one directory for music. So if you tell it to look in ~/Music, it'll check all the subdirectories of that folder, but you won't be able to add some other directory outside of it. You can get it to look elsewhere with soft links though. Also, "sudo yum install ntfs-3g" will let you read and write from your windows partition while you're in Linux. So if you want to look at pictures or something on the windows partitions, you don't need to reboot. Also, the video drivers section should work for you if you've got an Nvidia card. If you have an ATI card, it'll be similar, but slightly different. Nvidia's proprietary drivers will almost certainly provide some extra bang for your buck in terms of graphics card performance over the nouveau drivers on so new a card.

Finally, as an alternative to Gnome3, I quite liked WindowMaker. It was a dead project for a while, but according to the Arch mailing lists, they've just started updating it again, and it worked pretty well for me. WindowMaker allowed you to minimize/maximize anything by right clicking on the title bar of that program. And changing from Gnome3 to e17 of WindowMaker or something is pretty easy. I can try and come up with a list of any particularly useful programs I like, if you need something. Keep me posted on how things go and if you need any help. Also, lol at liking Ubuntu better. You never even really got to use it or deal with it.

It's like saying you like a car because you drove a go cart once that was modelled after it. LiveCD and the actual experience are miles apart. The liveCD environment is great for seeing if certain major things like the UI are to your taste, but you need to get it installed and see if the fine details are to your liking as well.

Yah I was actuallyjus tin the process of doing that tutorial but am kind of confused after the first step.

So they guy has me installing yum by entering this:

yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/...ble.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfr...ble.noarch.rpm

It looked like it was installing for a while, then in my terminal windows it looked like people were having a conversation like in achat room or something, then it looked like it was just listing the contents of a webpage. Then it spent 10 minutes saying bash command could not be found (with a random conversation between two people stitched into all of it) and then finally says "Follow me on faceboook, twitterm goo+" etc etc.

Is this normal?



Edit; Okay I closed the terminal, killed the proces and tried again. It seems to have worked this time.

[shikitohno]

Well, here is a pretty decent guide for some basic setup that you probably wouldn't know how to do on your on sgreger. I gave it a quick glance and all seems correct with it, but this will get sudo work for you, install "restricted" codecs and media format support (ie, you can read mp3s and DVDs on it), and get you java and flash. For java, you can just follow his steps to install the OpenJDK, unless you're doing some sort of Java work that absolutely requires the Oracle package. For music players, I was partial to quodlibet, though I now run mpd with ncmpcpp. MPD is potentially a lot more configuration, but the default /etc/mpd.conf will probably work well enough for you, as long as you change the location of your library. It does require you be quite a bit more organized about your music than many people are though, as it'll only check one directory for music. So if you tell it to look in ~/Music, it'll check all the subdirectories of that folder, but you won't be able to add some other directory outside of it. You can get it to look elsewhere with soft links though. Also, "sudo yum install ntfs-3g" will let you read and write from your windows partition while you're in Linux. So if you want to look at pictures or something on the windows partitions, you don't need to reboot. Also, the video drivers section should work for you if you've got an Nvidia card. If you have an ATI card, it'll be similar, but slightly different. Nvidia's proprietary drivers will almost certainly provide some extra bang for your buck in terms of graphics card performance over the nouveau drivers on so new a card.

Finally, as an alternative to Gnome3, I quite liked WindowMaker. It was a dead project for a while, but according to the Arch mailing lists, they've just started updating it again, and it worked pretty well for me. WindowMaker allowed you to minimize/maximize anything by right clicking on the title bar of that program. And changing from Gnome3 to e17 of WindowMaker or something is pretty easy. I can try and come up with a list of any particularly useful programs I like, if you need something. Keep me posted on how things go and if you need any help. Also, lol at liking Ubuntu better. You never even really got to use it or deal with it.

It's like saying you like a car because you drove a go cart once that was modelled after it. LiveCD and the actual experience are miles apart. The liveCD environment is great for seeing if certain major things like the UI are to your taste, but you need to get it installed and see if the fine details are to your liking as well.

[lxskllr]

Edit 2: Is it just me, or is there no minimize/maximize options in Fedora? I can't maximize a window or anything, I have to manually change it's size. Wtf?

Welcome to Gnome3, where everything's been simplified to the point of retarded. :^D

There's a Gnome tweak tool, but I don't know what all it does. I think the best way of fixing it is installing Xfce.

Edit:
My smartassery aside, give Gnome3 a try, and do some reading on it. Some people love it, though I'm not one of them. Keep in mind there's differences between the different GNU/Linux disros. While Linux is Linux, they all have a bit of a different spin, and if you're reading a guide for one distro, it may require some tweaking to work for you.

Remember the niches I was talking about before? fedora's niche is it's a test bed for RedHat. New ideas get tried out, and they stay on the leading edge of development. That means new packages/technologies will generally hit fedora before many distros. Get involved in their community forums, and read up. There may be a free n00b book on fedora out there. I have one for Ubuntu. That'll give you an idea of how things are done, as opposed o Windows, or OSX.

Edit:
Here's a book on fedora14. It won't exactly match what you're using, but it's close enough for the general concepts.
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/...uide-en-US.pdf

[sgreger1]

Hah! Checked out Fedora 16. Burnt the liveCD, plopped it in, it immediately deleted Ubuntu and installed itself, no problems. Using Fedora 16 now, took 10 minutes, GPT not a problemo. Dualbooting like a boss. Loving it.


Edit: For the record I kind of liked Ubuntu better (only because I used to use a mac so it looks more familiar) but Fedora is awesome too. I'll take it considering it took me literally 10 minutes to install. I'll learn more about Linux and then switch if necessary later on. Thanks for the help all both fo you!

Edit 2: Is it just me, or is there no minimize/maximize options in Fedora? I can't maximize a window or anything, I have to manually change it's size. Wtf?

[sgreger1]

Ah, well I was hoping it was free if only for a couple things. One, if it doesn't give me the option to make custom partitions, I'd have to bail out immediately because I wouldn't be able to tell the installer to just use /dev/sda5-9, rather than formatting the whole disk and giving you a 1.2TB /home. And secondly, if somehow the partitions were made as they should be on /dev/sdb and something happened to cause issues with them (say they somehow got corrupted at the end of the install), if it was installing to /dev/sdb then you'd still have your Windows install perfectly intact, rather than rebooting to find you have no OS at all. They aren't things that I would consider serious risks, but I'd prefer to err on the side of caution if I could help it, especially when dealing with someone else's machine.

Also, lx, it seems the common thread in our problems today is Debian linux or its descendants.

Anyway, off to bed, I'll post in here again when I wake up tomorrow.

K so I will transfer the contents of my 3TB drive to my primary one and then we ill do everything on the 3TB drive so nothing gets messed up or lost. I'll do that tonight but as it takes a few hours given that there's like 500GB of shit on there we will pick this up in the afternoon tomorrow whenever you come around. Thank you again for your help! Hopefully I can get my router issue figured out by then too, I cannot believe comcast charges $40 to reset your password, absolute ****ing nonsense. This is what happens when you allow monopolies.

[sgreger1]

God damnit. My router won't let me log in and I called tech support but xfinity charges $40 per call to answer any tech support questions now. Absolute bullshit in every way, they literally asked me to pay $40 to reset my password. Give me another minute to figure this out.

[lxskllr]

Also, lx, it seems the common thread in our problems today is Debian linux or its descendants.

Anyway, off to bed, I'll post in here again when I wake up tomorrow.

:^D

Goodnight :^)

[shikitohno]

Ah, well I was hoping it was free if only for a couple things. One, if it doesn't give me the option to make custom partitions, I'd have to bail out immediately because I wouldn't be able to tell the installer to just use /dev/sda5-9, rather than formatting the whole disk and giving you a 1.2TB /home. And secondly, if somehow the partitions were made as they should be on /dev/sdb and something happened to cause issues with them (say they somehow got corrupted at the end of the install), if it was installing to /dev/sdb then you'd still have your Windows install perfectly intact, rather than rebooting to find you have no OS at all. They aren't things that I would consider serious risks, but I'd prefer to err on the side of caution if I could help it, especially when dealing with someone else's machine.

Also, lx, it seems the common thread in our problems today is Debian linux or its descendants.

Anyway, off to bed, I'll post in here again when I wake up tomorrow.

[sgreger1]

I wouldn't be opposed to trying it. You would have to forward port 22 on that computer so that I could access it remotely. You can just do this by logging in to your router (usually typing 192.168.1.1 in a browser will bring you to it's control panel) and choose to forward port 22 for the computer we'd be installing on. You can usually find pretty exact instructions on how to forward ports by googling "port forwarding router-model guide" or something similar. You'd have to do the first two commands here. After that running dhclient eth0, yum install openssh and /etc/init.d/sshd start, one after another and in that order should be enough to get us started, and we'd be able to make an attemp. And for that second command in the guide /usr/bin/anaconda -liveinst -method=... should work fine. You don't need to have as much space in between things as it shows in that guide, and I doubt it would work if there was more than one space in between the separate bits.

Do you have anything on the 3TB hard drive? If not, I'd try to install to that just to minimize any potential damage just in case something goes wrong. And not that I think you'd try and screw me over, but just to cover my ass, I'll warn you that as with any installation of an OS, there's always the potential that something could just go mind-bogglingly wrong. I don't foresee any issues, but if we go with this, you're taking the risk onto yourself that something might go bad and you just wind up with a computer even more broken than before. While I would say the chances of this are very slim, I can't be held responsible for any damage resulting from this, and unless you find a computer vendor that takes payments in snuff, I doubt any sort of legal action would really fix the issue for you. With asses covered, I believe that this is something well within my abilities, and if at any point I feel like some element of it was beyond my ability to safely pull off, I'll abort the install and tell you so. That said, let me know if you still want to go ahead with this, and if so I'll try my best to get things working for you. If you've got a spare computer and you want to talk about it or just be able to get feedback from me while in the process, feel free to drop into ##snus on irc.freenode.net and we can discuss to your heart's content.

Edit: Unrelated, but since you're in here lx, I figure you'll see this relatively quickly. All night tonight, I'll go to hit 'Submit Post' and the forum acts as if I'm clicking off to another page before submitting my post, popping up the "Are you sure you want to leave?" bit while submitting my post anyway. Anyone else getting this tonight, or just me?

First of all:

1) I am having the same issue re: it asks me "are you sure you want to leave the page?"
2) Snuson is running slow as shit, it's the only website that takes me forever to load today
3) Every post by Lx is duplicated.

I am going to forward my port to you now, just gotta log into my router real quick.

1) My X: drive (3TB) actually has my most important information on it. Most but not all of it is backed up currently. Let's try to reduce **** ups.
2) I understand **** ups happen and will not hold you legally or in any other way responsible for damaging anything if something goes wrong. This statement is admissible in court

Give me two seconds and I will be right back.

[lxskllr]

No idea. That would take an admin, or maybe someone at the datacenter to see where the problem is. In general, I think we get a lot of buggy behavior due to the database, but that's me not really knowing much. Just inferring it, and comparing it to other sites with problems of known causes. The server we're on is Debian btw.

[shikitohno]

Any idea what's bogging it down, or is it just a classic case of assy server?

Edit:: Actually, sgreger, I'm about to call it a night. 11:20PM here, and I've been up since 5PM yesterday. I'll be back tomorrow, though, so let me know if you're still interested.

[lxskllr]

I keep double posting, and have to delete one. The server's running like ass :^S

Edit:
and yea, I get that stupid script asking about leaving. I hate that, and get it a lot due to my crappy internet. The internets good tonight, but the server appears not to be.

[shikitohno]

Looks like it might not just be myself experiencing some buggy posting tonight. Server seems kind of sluggish here too.