Progress with Linux....

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Gudday,

I have been making progress with linux lately:

1. Installed the latest Debian on a dual boot PC...all went okay for a week or so until I went to restart at work after the weekend. For some reason none of my passwords work, feels like a reinstall coming along at some stage -not urgent though as...

2. Installed SUSE 10.0 on a ACER Travelmate 280 laptop, works a treat, it installed easily, repartitioning the HD to retain Windows 2000 for dual boot, then a choice selection of Open Office, KDE, programming stuff [c++, python], tools and network utiltiies etc [opera, evolution, mysql] to about 2.8Gb.

The Suse installer installed the video and sound correctly, the Cd's and USB keys mount and remove as easy/good as a M$ offering, the package and dependency management is superb, and SUSE 10 does not get obtuse or assume any prior linux skills/g33kdom either during installation or use.

Only spent a day on it and really impressed with what I have seen, best Linux desktop OS I have seen so far in terms of being user friendly and easy to install.

Looking forward to getting some development use out of the SUSE laptop over the next few months...

supa

 

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Thats good to hear supag33k, it's posts like yours that give others the courage to give Linux a crack. I haven't yet seen SUSE as still playing with Simply Mepis which is easy to install too IMHO.

Que Freddy...

 

Hey Supa,

You're going to blow my image of you.... How in the world did you screw up a Debian install.... That's hard to do...

There's no reason to reinstall. Burn yourself a copy of Knoppix and you can change the root password pretty easily.

1. Boot to Knoppix.

2. sudo mount -o rw /dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 (If hda1 is the correct partition for your / partition. Adjust accordingly if not)

3. sudo chroot /mnt/hda1 passwd

4. Follow the instructions that pop up.

5. Reboot and log into your Debian install as root and change the rest of your passwords.

 

Any idea what might have caused all the passwords to not work Freddy, something unstable in the OS mayhap?

 

Yeah. Some instability in the Windows OS he was booted into for that week he didn't work with the good OS....

 

Touche

 

ROFL...

nope, as someother things where borked as well, plus missing some stuff - so I shrugged and re-installed again and indexed all my CD's during the install this time.....

It is all just like Windows when I first start mucking around/learning with it years back, only this time it was only the ONE re-install to get everything I wanted to work right [evil grin]

Real happy with the Debian install this time round....

BTW - The SUSE install is real solid and getting value from it already

 

One thing I have found with Debian--even using ext3 or Reiser file systems(both are journaled file systems)--is that it is very susceptible to corruption if you shut down the power before the OS has done its thing. I've seen 3 corrupted installs so far and all have been caused by having the power killed before the OS has completely shut down the system. So far that is the only weakness I have found. Luckily all I have had to do to repair the system was to save the files needed from the home directories and recreate the home directories and everything was OK.

Why Debian is so susceptible to a premature power down I haven't yet figured out.

 

Bingo...one of the things wrong with the first install was that Power Management was autoconfigured and I could not unlock it after 15 minutes or even hold the button in to shut it down.
- I had to pulll the plug..and I know that that is never a good idea,,,

The latest Debian install looks to be working past this point concerning the screen saver or locking the console....touch wood.

 

Dang. Sometimes I'm so good I even scare myself.

BTW, is this a laptop? I've heard of some problems with the Linux kernel and hibernation on some distro's. Don't know if this bug affects Debian or not, but it's possibility. What version of the kernel are you running? You might try installing something like the 2.6.12, or above, kernel-image from unstable. To do that you can either just download the kernel-image from the Debian site and install it using dpkg, or you can add unstable to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and run apt-get update. Then run apt-cache policy kernel-image and see what version number comes up. (It's possible that unless you use apt-pinning that won't show you the kernel-image from unstable. I just can't remember for sure off the top of my head. I know it does when you use apt-pinning.)

You can also go to the Debian site and search the packages for unstable and the latest kernel image for your cpu and architecture. It will speed up your machine to have the optimized kernel.

 

LOL...the Debian is on a desktop - the laptop is the one running SUSE 10.

I'll get to the customised Kernels at a later stage....

 

Talking of power options the hibernation or re-start doesn't work on my Tosh when using Ubuntu.
Hey, who's worried? Not me, because it is great in every other respect