Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[lxskllr]

Wow that is incredible. Shit like this is why i want to give linux a try.

It's a positive, and a negative. With Windows, everything gets packaged into a single installer, and you end up with larger file sizes, and duplicate files throughout your drive, but it sure is easy if you don't have net access. Linux keeps the file sizes down, and doesn't have the duplication, but if your working without the net, you end up running back and forth a hundred times cause it'll error out when you try to do the install wanting extra packages. Get those packages, and it wants more, and more, and more... :^D

Overall I prefer the Linux method. It's tidier, and generally less problematic, but god help you if you need to install something without a network...

[shikitohno]

Man that would be outstanding if you could at least help me make any amount of progress on this. You can take over the whole computer if you want and do whatever. I can watch and learn from the experience. I at least know how to make partitions so hopefully we can fill in the gaps if it boots you out!

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?

[sgreger1]

It's not prepackaged, Your downloading them, but you do it from the command line in one string, and it'll take care of any dependencies those packages may have. If a guide says you need packages x y and z, those packages may have dependencies of a b and c, which in turn have dependencies of l m and n so on, and so on... Trying to sneakernet something like that can be a real nightmare. I've had to do that before. If you have a net connection though, it all gets taken care of for you.

You'd type sudo apt-get x y z It'll tell you all the other packages needed, and after you give it the ok, it downloads, and installs them.

Wow that is incredible. Shit like this is why i want to give linux a try.

[lxskllr]

Oh okay I didn't realize it came pre-packaged. I thought I would have to go track them down and figure out how to open them from within ubuntu.

It's not prepackaged, Your downloading them, but you do it from the command line in one string, and it'll take care of any dependencies those packages may have. If a guide says you need packages x y and z, those packages may have dependencies of a b and c, which in turn have dependencies of l m and n so on, and so on... Trying to sneakernet something like that can be a real nightmare. I've had to do that before. If you have a net connection though, it all gets taken care of for you.

You'd type sudo apt-get x y z It'll tell you all the other packages needed, and after you give it the ok, it downloads, and installs them.

[sgreger1]

It's fairly easy to do by copy/pasting in the command line. It's not like you have to go to a website, and download them one at a time.

Oh okay I didn't realize it came pre-packaged. I thought I would have to go track them down and figure out how to open them from within ubuntu.

[sgreger1]

It's certainly possible to pull off an UEFI boot on Ubuntu, and from what I've read a few minutes ago, the x86_64 installer should take care of things automatically at the moment as far as detecting UEFI boots and installing the appropriate form of GRUB2. The issue lies in sgreger's GUID Partition Table, from what I can figure. I'm simply pushing Fedora at the moment because with all things considered, sgreger either finds out it's just as badly mangled there, or it'll work out of the box and everyone's happy. Based on what I've read trying to figure out these problems he's had, I think it should all go fairly nicely, and he should even be able to install to that 3TB drive with it if he wants.

Also, I'm half tempted to just see if there's a way to install Ubuntu or Fedora over ssh.
I'm fairly confident I could pull off either properly if it were feasible, and I'd be happy to walk him through forwarding port 22 and starting up sshd if it were possible, as I'd like to just get all this worked out for him so he can start learning the new system, rather than getting pissed off at it because he can't even get it running. Overall, this seems like it's at risk of turning into a fairly negative first experience for him if we can't get this sorted, and it'd be a shame if that were to happen.

Edit2: Some google-fu reveals that it would be possible to for me to do the heavy lifting for sgreger if he wanted to try and cheat some. The only thing I don't like about it is that the page that explains it says you may not be able to do custom partitions, in which case I'd have to bail out. Still, if sgreger's down, I'd be game to give it a try and see if I couldn't do some magic and get him a functional install with minimal effort and tearing of hair on his part.

Man that would be outstanding if you could at least help me make any amount of progress on this. You can take over the whole computer if you want and do whatever. I can watch and learn from the experience. I at least know how to make partitions so hopefully we can fill in the gaps if it boots you out!

[shikitohno]

What do you make of this shikitohno?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting

It's certainly possible to pull off an UEFI boot on Ubuntu, and from what I've read a few minutes ago, the x86_64 installer should take care of things automatically at the moment as far as detecting UEFI boots and installing the appropriate form of GRUB2. The issue lies in sgreger's GUID Partition Table, from what I can figure. I'm simply pushing Fedora at the moment because with all things considered, sgreger either finds out it's just as badly mangled there, or it'll work out of the box and everyone's happy. Based on what I've read trying to figure out these problems he's had, I think it should all go fairly nicely, and he should even be able to install to that 3TB drive with it if he wants.

Also, I'm half tempted to just see if there's a way to install Ubuntu or Fedora over ssh.
I'm fairly confident I could pull off either properly if it were feasible, and I'd be happy to walk him through forwarding port 22 and starting up sshd if it were possible, as I'd like to just get all this worked out for him so he can start learning the new system, rather than getting pissed off at it because he can't even get it running. Overall, this seems like it's at risk of turning into a fairly negative first experience for him if we can't get this sorted, and it'd be a shame if that were to happen.

Edit2: Some google-fu reveals that it would be possible to for me to do the heavy lifting for sgreger if he wanted to try and cheat some. The only thing I don't like about it is that the page that explains it says you may not be able to do custom partitions, in which case I'd have to bail out. Still, if sgreger's down, I'd be game to give it a try and see if I couldn't do some magic and get him a functional install with minimal effort and tearing of hair on his part.

[lxskllr]

Good g, you have to have all of these programs downloaded just to unpack/build GRUB2?

It's fairly easy to do by copy/pasting in the command line. It's not like you have to go to a website, and download them one at a time.

[sgreger1]

What do you make of this shikitohno?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting

Good g, you have to have all of these programs downloaded just to unpack/build GRUB2?

bison autoconf automake flex autogen python (2.x series) (for autogen.sh if building from bzr repo) texinfo help2man gettext (NLS support) device-mapper freetype2 (libs)

[lxskllr]

What do you make of this shikitohno?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting

[sgreger1]

No, those commands would be entered exactly as written, however, in light of fdisk complaining about GPT, I think it's pretty safe to say that this particular install of Ubuntu is absolutely not going to work. For sh¡ts and giggles, why don't you try downloading a fedora iso? If the problem really is what I suspect it to be, then it's rather likely that a fedora install with be something that you can pull off with significantly less legwork.

Ok, I guess Ubuntu just isn't compatible with any computers made this year? That totally sucks I will go get Fedora and see if I can get that to work better. Let me go download it and figure it out real quick and i'll be back. Edit: So do I need to go in and delete all of my partitions I made and uninstall ubuntu?

[shikitohno]

No, those commands would be entered exactly as written, however, in light of fdisk complaining about GPT, I think it's pretty safe to say that this particular install of Ubuntu is absolutely not going to work. For sh¡ts and giggles, why don't you try downloading a fedora iso? If the problem really is what I suspect it to be, then it's rather likely that a fedora install with be something that you can pull off with significantly less legwork.

[sgreger1]

sgreger, I hate to harp on this and sound like an old record, but those links to the section about chroot and GRUB2 on the archwiki are likely the easiest way to do this. I haven't touched Ubuntu in years, so I've got no clue what the installer is like. Is there any stage where you can choose extra packages to install? If there is, you can probably look and find the grub2-uefi package as an option. If that's the case, install that and if possible, untick whatever other versions of grub it'll try and install. Then at the end of the install, before you reboot, hit ctrl+alt+F3, and login as root. Then install a GRUB2 boot record with the grub2-uefi. Once everything else is done, you should be able to safely skip any installation of grub built into the installer/ignore error messages, and reboot. If you can't do it from within the installation, chroot is your friend. Like I said before, I know it might seem rather overwhelming, but it may be the easiest, or even only, way to get this working. And chroot is also a great tool to have at your command, because if you bork your system later on when it's actually installed and running, 10-20 minutes in chroot can save you 30-45 minutes reinstalling again.

I'm reading it now and trying to make sense of it. When it says uname -m for example I am not sure if that means username -m or if I should actually enter uname. It says to mount to partition but I don't know which to mount since they all have the same disk size somehow.

[shikitohno]

sgreger, I hate to harp on this and sound like an old record, but those links to the section about chroot and GRUB2 on the archwiki are likely the easiest way to do this. I haven't touched Ubuntu in years, so I've got no clue what the installer is like. Is there any stage where you can choose extra packages to install? If there is, you can probably look and find the grub2-uefi package as an option. If that's the case, install that and if possible, untick whatever other versions of grub it'll try and install. Then at the end of the install, before you reboot, hit ctrl+alt+F3, and login as root. Then install a GRUB2 boot record with the grub2-uefi. Once everything else is done, you should be able to safely skip any installation of grub built into the installer/ignore error messages, and reboot. If you can't do it from within the installation, chroot is your friend. Like I said before, I know it might seem rather overwhelming, but it may be the easiest, or even only, way to get this working. And chroot is also a great tool to have at your command, because if you bork your system later on when it's actually installed and running, 10-20 minutes in chroot can save you 30-45 minutes reinstalling again.

Well, I don't know what to make of that. Something isn't right there. Perhaps the partitioning didn't go off as well as you thought. Actually, I lied. If you somehow managed to create GPT disks (which your fdisk output implies) Ubuntu just flat out will not work for this. Not without some heavy duty linux-fu that I think we can agree might be a bit beyond you. Feel like compiling a custom kernel sgreger1?

[sgreger1]

Okay, ran df -h /dev/sdaX on each partition. All of them say 4.9 GB so that can't be right.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df -h /dev/sda5
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 4.9G 4.0K 4.9G 1% /dev
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df -h /dev/sda6
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 4.9G 4.0K 4.9G 1% /dev
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df -h /dev/sda7
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 4.9G 4.0K 4.9G 1% /dev
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df -h /dev/sda8
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 4.9G 4.0K 4.9G 1% /dev
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df -h /dev/sda9
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 4.9G 4.0K 4.9G 1% /dev