Stop Microsoft
Operating Systems => Linux and UNIX => Topic started by: worker201 on 4 April 2010, 21:26
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In a fit of crazy, I wiped Windows from my ThinkPad and installed the KDE spin of Fedora 12. It's been a long time since I've used Linux on a regular basis, and this is my first time using KDE in over 10 years. So things should be interesting. My first goal is to get all my development stuff installed, so we'll see how that goes. First impression - Konqueror is not very pretty.
I'll be making more posts to this thread as I discover fun in Linux.
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What spec' is the ThinkPad?
I had one in the early 90s, it was a 486 with 8MB RAM. I got it second hand ans the battery was fucked. I've not owned a laptop for years, the last was a P166 with 32MB of RAM and a 800x600 display which could only do 16-bit high colour. I still have it but the battery is now fucked and there's a couple of lines missing from the display.
I like Fedora, much better than Red Hat 9.
I've not tried KDE recently, I've always gone with XFCE.
I still have an install on my hard drive when I was using an old machine with 256MB RAM so KDE wasn't really an option. Now I have 1GB, maybe when I upgrade to x64 Fedora I'll give KDE ago.
I'll do that after I've installed the new Raptor hard drive which I'm waiting to get a SATA cable for.
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Specs on the Thinkpad:
1.66 GHz Core Duo Yonah T5500
2 GB RAM
Intel 945GM (chosen specifically for Linux compatibility when I first bought the computer years ago)
2 GB 7200 rpm HD
no battery available
The last Fedore I installed was 8, back when I was working at the university. So far, it's been interesting. I'm finding that KDE is very different than Gnome. But it does look nice. Package installation has been smooth so far - which is good because there's a lot of work to do. I've got PostgreSQL, PHP, Pear, PostGIS and Firefox installed so far. Still a long ways to go.
We've talked a lot about how Linux includes a lot of stuff out of the box, which Windows doesn't have. I'm finding that's just not the case anymore. If you install Linux from a live CD, it's pretty sparse. Takes a good afternoon with the package program just to get things moving. However, the fact that you can get pretty much anything, including a whole new GUI, from the package program is pretty useful. With Windows, you have to sit there with your CDs and product keys, and obviously this way is much simpler.
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Hows the overall responsiveness of the system?
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Very slow. KDE seems to have a lot of graphical overhead. At any given time, I only have a couple hundred MB RAM available. Perhaps the memory usage needs to be modified?
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2 GB 7200 rpm HD
Don't you mean 200GB?
I think it must be KDE. I've run Fedora 11 with 256MB of RAM and it wasn't that bad.
I've heard that it's normal for Linux to swallow as much free memory as possible to use for things such as disk buffers, if more memory is required, the buffer size is reduced.
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Sorry, 200GB hard drive.
If one wanted to adjust the amount of memory used, how would one do that? Anybody?
I'm viewing this right now in KDE Firefox, and it is nice looking. I guess this computer is driving the graphics a little harder than I normally do on my Mac - everything is smaller and clearer.
But I have to use a mouse with this computer - the trackpad sucks. Or, rather, the trackpad on the Mac is the best ever, and nobody else can come close.
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The trackpad on my friends MacBook Pro drove me insane. Hated it. Actually most trackpads drive me insane, terrible things. Give me a good mouse any day.
Does Fedora let you install multiple window managers? Would be interesting to compare Gnome and KDE performance back to back.
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you dont need to run a benchmark to know gnome runs much smoother than kde. kde does drive things harder on the graphics end and is more modern.
btw, gnome 2.3 is coming out in 6 or so months, its got a pretty interesting new shell. it'll be interesting to see if the footprint gets bigger, as thats always been a priority for them ( i dont mean the footprint in their logo!)
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No, I don't know how to alter the memory location settings.
Yes, Fedora easily allows installing multiple WMs, just use yum.
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Got Flash and Adobe Reader running. Irks me to no end that they can't figure out some way to add those to the package manager.
One thing that is kinda driving me crazy - the internet is too slow. It's a wired connection, running off the same router and DSL modem as the Mac, but the performance is just crawling. Once it gets a page, it renders it pretty quick, but it seems like there is some sort of irritating delay while it thinks about your clicks. The absolute worst is trying to use some sort of Ajax interface, like Mafia Wars or Facebook or Google Maps - takes for-fucking-ever. Any thoughts?
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Is that with Firefox or Konq?
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Firefox. I didn't like Konqueror at all. Firefox version is 3.5.9.
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Disabling IPv6 in Firefox seems to have fixed my internet speed issues. Supposedly there's a way to do it at the OS level to fix it for Konqueror as well, but I haven't found that yet.
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One of the fun things about Linux is that if you don't know what you're doing, you can really fuck things up. I managed to accidentally disembowel KDE last night. I was setting up PostgreSQL, and created the user postgres. Somehow, this user came with a password, which I didn't know, so I couldn't switch to that user or authenticate its tasks. I somehow decided that the best thing to do would be to delete the user and add it again, this time by passing the arguments to set the password myself. And since that user owned all the pgsql processes, I decided to remove all its packages and just start over with a fresh install. For some reason, though, the package manager decided to also uninstall all the dependencies for those packages - including a bunch of KDE system files. The package manager itself was even damaged during this episode. And konsole was gone, so there was no hope of rebuilding. I had to break out the install CD and start from scratch.
Well, that was fun. Fortunately, I didn't have any critical data on there at all.
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I had to break out the install CD and start from scratch.
Well, that was fun. Fortunately, I didn't have any critical data on there at all.
Actually, you didn't need to do this, you never do with Linux. What you needed to do is force all those KDE related packages into reinstalling. yum is just a clone of apt-get, I suggest next time you type 'man yum'
the command in english would look like this...
"Yum, my dear pal, please FORCE the base package of KDE and all its dependencies to reinstall"
"Yes good sir."
from memory rpm -f /path/to/rpms/on/media/*.rpm will force a reinstall of everything if you do it from single user mode (init 1) after it you should be able to 'init 5' and have your shit back together without even rebooting.
You can also force remove packages so it doesn't take out their dependencies. For example, you might decide to build it from source to take part in a beta or whatever, same with Firefail (Firefox), if you want to get in on that community spirit thing.
With reinstalls however, and switching distros, because all the apps are virtually identical you should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS keep /home separate. That way, you can go "fuck it, I want debian" and install debian, tell its paritioner where home is and mark the "dont fucking format" button. This button being there goes all the way back to the damn early naugties and is always there except in Ubuntu's moron mode. Cheers not using that disaster!
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The main reason I didn't do at least some of ^that is I couldn't figure out how to get there. I couldn't launch a terminal window to execute commands, and I had no idea how to drop the runlevel without a terminal. I can see now that I could have just logged out and gotten a console login. Oddly, the easiest thing to do was the one I wasn't familiar with. Lesson learned.
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This SELinux stuff can be kinda fun. LAMP/LAPP stuff is disabled by default. To get my development environment set up, I had to run:
setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect_db on
I found out about this because the SELinux adviser pops up to tell you how to fix it. There's a button on the adviser window to "Update Policy", which I figured caused the proposed change to be propagated. Actually, it turns out that button causes yum to open and attempt to download the latest SELinux policy. However, yum tries to do this on port 7822 - which causes another SELinux exception, because 7822 isn't approved for yum usage. Also, the denial of the port causes python to crash, which in turn causes the SELinux adviser to crash. Good times. I was able to approve port 7822 for yum usage with:
semanage port -a -t http_port_t -p tcp 7822
Back in days of yore, when I was using FCx (x <= 6), I immediately ripped out all SELinux features, because it made configuration so difficult (and troubleshooting impossible). But these days, it's important to play with policies and configuration, so I'm working with it instead of around it. It's not like this machine is doing mission critical work, so I feel comfortable fucking around with things.
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(http://www.triple-bypass.net/download/forumposts/linuxsysinfo.jpg)
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Looks nifty, hows it handling the Intel graphics? I've heard of some issues with various flavors of *nix and Intel chipsets.
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I specifically chose this graphics card (and every other part of this computer) because it was 100% supported by Linux. At the time that I bought it, it was necessary to download drivers for it, but nowdays, it's supported out of the box.
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Oh boy, wireless networking. I didn't have a wireless network at home, so i never had to worry about configuration. But now that I'm on the road, I have to figure out how to get this going. Fedora recognizes my card, which is an Intel Pro 3945ABG. The package that adds the firmware into the kernel seems to be pre-installed, but there must be some sort of configuration step. I've tried Googling for this info, but I keep getting results that are relevant to Fedora 7 or 8, from before the driver code was merged into the kernel source.
Here's the output from iwconfig, if it means anything to you.
lo no wireless extensions
eth0 no wireless extensions
irda0 no wireless extensions
wmaster0 no wireless extensions
wlan0 IEEE 802.11abg ESSID:" "
Mode: Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Tx-Power=off
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality:0 Signal Level:0 Noise Level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc: 0 Missed beacon:0
Assistance much appreciated. This isn't a priority issue - it is my second computer, after all.
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Well, NetworkManager should do the hard work for you but barring that, here is the hard way.
Configure /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf so it looks a bit like this...
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
ssid="Acropolis"
scan_ssid=1
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk="XXXXXXXX"
}
And run it like this
# wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
the -B switch runs it as a daemon in the background, to get your IP for the interface....
# dhclient wlan0