PCs & Mobiles Forum - RE: Freespire( Linux or any other versions being used out there) - Page 3

Oops, I just proved "too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing"

Actually maybe just a bit too much self confidence rather than actual knowledge

So XUbuntu was kind of playing DVDs and wmv files after using Automatix, but playback was slow, jerky, and I had fiddled a bit and still wasn't convinced performance was an improvemnt. It shouldn't take 3 minutes to copy a 250Mb file from one HD to another should it?

so I gave the DSl boot cd a go. just browsing the pc, and internet seemed better, so i thought I'd install it. Couldn't test wmv or DVD playabck, but since I'm not happy with XUbuntu, I thought I could replace it.

Now I knew Xubuntu had installed the GRUB boot loader, and I looked at that, and thought I could make default boot device Win2k. Well I did that.

so I installed DSL from the boot disc, onto the hard drive. That then asked me if I wanted to ijnstall GRUB or LILO boot manager. That's good i though, It will just overwire the existing GRUB with a new one, and so when I restart I get the choice of DSl or Win2k.

I don't, GRUB moans at me. I guess the DSL one didn't overwrite the proper boot record thing.

So, I'm going to watch TV for an hour or so, have a cup of tea. Then either try and fix the boot loader, or just trash the Win2k OS partition and put DSl there.

Strange, if I had to do this at work, I'd be moaning, cos it's at home, and it doesn't really matter I'm quite happy tinkering

That's unusual. As you say, it should have just made a new GRUB record and Bob's yer uncle. I dunno why that shouldn't be the case. Why not try again, but select LILO this time? They're practically the same thing anyway. I'll have a look around the forums, and if I see anything relevant I'll post it up.

EDIT: Which program are/where you using to play DVD's? Apparently Totem is your best bet, with the Xine backend (whatever that means!)

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"We gotta go to the crappy planet where I'M the hero"!

This item was edited on Saturday, 2nd June 2007, 17:08

Hi,

fun and games
Totem was what played wmv and DVDs, as I say it was jerky, but at least it didn't restart it.

I've had several goes at LILO and GRUB, I've got Ultimate Boot CD also, which I used and I got back into Win2k, which i want to do so i can start from scratch, well nto scratch, but where I was last week. maybe it would just be easier to wipe the partition with 2k on it.

Cheers

Al

I wouldn't wipe it if it's useful to you. You can always rewrite your MBR if you have to, no harm done. What exactly is GRUB complaining of? I'll have a more detailed look around.

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"We gotta go to the crappy planet where I'M the hero"!

GRUB said
GRUB GRUB GRUB GRUB

etc etc, like it got stuck in a loop somewhere

so I used the Win2K CD reapir option which luckily fixed its MBR.

so tomorrow I can spend the day getting DSL installed.

I have a horrible feeling after all this I'll just do a fresh install of Win2k, and admit I'm flogging a dead horse. I did come to the conclusion, when as it was installing DSL it moaned "the max core temperature of 70 had been reached, shutting down!"

so I went into BIOS and turned auto shutdown off. Not normally the best course of action, but it has been known to beep widely when playing a divx! I've sometimes run it with side of case off and a small desk fan pointing inside! giving it a good clean out doesn't help, so I think one of the thermometers is knackered/covered in so much grime it doesn't give an accurate reading. I got the PC Jan 99 so I can't complain too much

Thanks for all your help and suggestions, I'm not giving up yet

Al

Gave Ubuntu wireless another go last night with a clearer head than the last attempt (amazing what a difference a night's rest makes). I used fwcutter instead of the ndiswrapper and it was much easier. Got it all up and running now, done a few updates and am just having a play around with the OS. Still very complicated for most users when compared to Windows.

I like the separate workspaces thing though. My Windows desktop is always cluttered and it would be nice to have a separate workspace to switch to from time to time. Think I'll give it a go for a while to see how I get on with it before making a decision to change permanently and reformatting my bigger hard drive.

So I'm not the only spending his weekend playing with Linux then

Took ages of messing around with grub and lilo to get DSl installed, I don't think it liked being on a different hard drive, glad I've got 2 hard drives, both with several partitions so I can move things around and change if they're NTFS or not

I've been using Puppy Linux this afternoon. That's what I'm on right now.
It's quite nice, nicer than DSL, plays divx and wmv "out of the box" and wasn't a pain to install on hd, but then I didn't try to install it on 2nd hd, just on 4th partition on my primary.

wmv is slow as is divx, so maybe I am flogging a dead horse

I'm downloading slackware at the mo, and I've got Debian now so I may give them a go! From some of the reading I've been doing, it may be better to install a Linux which is meant to be installed, rather than a bootcd you can install.

I think my earlier problems with divx etc may be graphics driver related. Cos several of the distros have had occasional video corruption. with puppy I choose xvesa rather than xorg and it hasn't happened. So maybe I should have been more patient and tried more settings, puppy mentioned that on starting up so I gave it a go, and it worked better, maybe cos the card is old and not very common. I did think about putting in my nvidia tnt, but it seems happy now.

Cheers

Al

At the risk of talking to myself, it's time for the
"what linux did you play with this week"

So

Puppy - that was ok, nice to use, did everything I wanted it to quick and painlessly. More or less, didn't get an edonkey client working, but didn't try too hard since I wasn't happy with wmv playback I knew I wouldn't be sticking with it.

used Transmission Bittorrent on it. It came with puppy, v simple to use, opened the prog, dragged and dropped the .torrent into it, and it got the file, really fast, v impressed by how fast, but then who knows if that was linux being better than windows, or what

got firefox and seamonkey working ok, no probs there.

so Saturday, installed Slackware

that's like a "proper" old fashioned Linux i.e. you can't test it off the cd, but I was happy to just format the drive I out puppy on, and install it. It does assume you know a bit about Linux, it asks you to make sure you've got a partition for swap file etc. The install wizard isn't v friendly, and when you've got it installed, and run it, you log into a console, so then google how to start xwindows startx so I put that in my ~/.login file, which I had to create. also when you exit, you go to the console, so had to look up how to shut down the pc. d'oh forgot it was shutdown or halt!

it did ask whcih windows manager I wanted to install which was good, sinc edifferent ones use up more sys requirements than others. I chose fvwm2, as I used to use that at Uni on Sun Sparcs

so once into XWindows you more or less have to set a lot of things up. Actually some things it does better than the other distros. e.g. on install, it asked if I wanted to mount my NTFS windows partitions it had found, and where I wanted to put them. so rather than having to go /mnt/hda1/ I could just go to /windows1

I got lazy though and couldn't be bothered with setting it all up properly. This PC is a 2nd machine, I just want it to work better than it does now wouldn't play divx or wmv out of the box, and couldn't be bothered to sort it out.

In the future I may be tempted to try this one on a new machine, as it would eb a good way of forcing you to learn linux properly . But then maybe if I had used one of the newer fancier windows managers I wouldn't have had to.

but, it did point me to Vector Linux, which is based on slackware, but is a bit more friendly. You still have to manually set up a partition for swap space etc, but it does most things for you, and is lean and mean, like slackware. (you can get live cd or proper cd, i gave livecd a quick go then used proper cd install)

Also, it suggests a size for the swap space, and your home directories. Slackware just told you you had to do it.

Seems good so far, Firefox and Seamonkey installed automatically, and both work fine. Has a nice little utility for mounting hard drives so you don't need to do it on cmd line each time*

plays wmv out of the box, again jerkily.

so in conclusion I don't think Linux will be the magical saviour I thought it would. internet is great and most things, but I guess wmv is being done via an unoffical wrapper, so you need a good pc to do it right. I suppose I could just convert the wmv to mpeg, but that's a bit of a waste of time.

So, Linux has def improved since the last time I looked at it a few years ago. My biggest suggestion for anyone interested in trying, is make an extended partition on your primary hard drive. That way you can install things as you want (most of the distros I played with
let you do it through a menu, rather than downloading and using tar -xvf on a zip file) and run it like you run MS Windows

also that way you get proper speed. Don't get me wrong, the livecds are great for getting a feel for the xwindows interface etc, good for an absolute beginner, but if you're really serious about giving it a go, then install it.

I had troubles earlier with GRUB and LILO, but I think that was me trying to be too clever, I had no problems installing onto same physical primary hd (different partition) as windows. I think they all told me I had windows installed, and set up nice menus for which I wanted to boot into.

So, I'll prob just stick to Win2k on this PC, BUT, I am more tempted now to put Linux on my main PC. Vector may be the way to go, as it seems a 1/2 way house between Slackware, and Ubuntu. You have all the flexability of a "proper" Linux edittign menus config files etc as you want, but it goes straight into a gui etc.


Al

*Actually that was a funny thing about Puppy. It told you how to do it, and told you how to write a script to mount and unmount for you but didn't do it itself. I suppose security wise it's better not to do it all for you.

This item was edited on Sunday, 10th June 2007, 19:57

i've tried ubuntu & Freespire, + SuSe & even had a play with mac osX they all had merits, & in the case of linx varients, where free, but none of them did "everything" i needed them to do, no matter how shiney they where.....

think i'll try that XP thingy maybe that will do everything

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