Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[shikitohno]

Edit: I have an ATI AMD Radeo MD 6800 series graphics card which, according to this, is not supported by Linux. Google didn't help resolve which drivers were necessary since they claim AMD didn't release any linux drivers yet for the 6800 series.

Ah, given that information remove all your kmod packages and the proprietary ati drivers you said you installed. Reboot, and see how things are working. Yeah, get rid of catalyst. Since ati hasn't put out linux drivers for your card (ATI generally sucks at this), you'll have to use the default drivers you were on before you installed that. Getting rid of catalyst should remove all those kmods as dependencies, and I think with a reboot, you'll be back on the normal ones.

Edit: Of course it said no such file, you ran a different command from what I told you.

cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log ~/.Xorg.0.txt && fpaste ~/Xorg.0.txt

You put .txt on the end of the first one, when you needed to leave it be.

[sgreger1]

In the screenshot I accidentally chose .txt instead of .log. When I corrected it it said uploading 67kib, then it says error name or service not known.

[shikitohno]

Yeah, that would be the limited networking abilities I was talking about. I think it may be panicking because you've got it using the wrong drivers. You'll need to remove the catalyst drivers and kmod stuff, so that it reverts back to using the default, open source ati drivers. You also won't be able to use anything like Compiz.

[sgreger1]

Ah, given that information remove all your kmod packages and the proprietary ati drivers you said you installed. Reboot, and see how things are working. Yeah, get rid of catalyst. Since ati hasn't put out linux drivers for your card (ATI generally sucks at this), you'll have to use the default drivers you were on before you installed that. Getting rid of catalyst should remove all those kmods as dependencies, and I think with a reboot, you'll be back on the normal ones.

Edit: Of course it said no such file, you ran a different command from what I told you.

cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log ~/.Xorg.0.txt && fpaste ~/Xorg.0.txt

You put .txt on the end of the first one, when you needed to leave it be.

YYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSS!

Removing the KMOD packages fixed it! Everything works normal again!

Wow this has been a great exercise though, I am remembering the commands by memory now and have gained a better understanding of how things work under the hood. At least as far as identifying packages and then telling yum to uninstall them and their dependencies.

Thank you so much for all of your help Shiki! I owe you some snus man you have really gone out of your way to help me here and I am so happy that I am back up and running.

[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.

[lxskllr]

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

[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]

:^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]

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.

[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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[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/