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Linux Distro Noob thread of Linux noobs

V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Honestly I'd just install centos as a separate partition and learn from that. Fedora is just this weird middle ground between wanting to be a staging area for RHEL and wanting to be a regular desktop OS like Ubuntu or Mint.
 
L

LaneDS

Member
After an evening of (what I considered) wasting time just getting functionality like desktop icons & right clicking on the desktop enabled (or adding "launch terminal" to the context menu), I am certainly no believer in Fedora (at least, stock, freshly installed Fedora). Just didn't want to get away from the commands I'm continuing to learn about at work, so I stayed clear of Debian.

All that said, tonight after work I'll try a CentOS install to see how that compares. Need to find some basic tasks that I can try to accomplish via bash scripting too, since my scripting knowledge is still minimal and I'd like to get better.
 
M

Massa

Member
LaneDS said:
After an evening of (what I considered) wasting time just getting functionality like desktop icons & right clicking on the desktop enabled (or adding "launch terminal" to the context menu), I am certainly no believer in Fedora (at least, stock, freshly installed Fedora). Just didn't want to get away from the commands I'm continuing to learn about at work, so I stayed clear of Debian.

All that said, tonight after work I'll try a CentOS install to see how that compares. Need to find some basic tasks that I can try to accomplish via bash scripting too, since my scripting knowledge is still minimal and I'd like to get better.
Click to expand...

The next RHEL7 will be based on Fedora 18 so you're probably good starting from that. It will use a classic desktop though (found as an option in Fedora 19) instead of the new, modern interface. If you want to check that out you can do it with a Fedora 19 live cd, the official release is next Tuesday.

I'd also recommend playing with CentOS in a virtual machine from your current Fedora install.
 
L

LaneDS

Member
Massa said:
The next RHEL7 will be based on Fedora 18 so you're probably good starting from that. It will use a classic desktop though (found as an option in Fedora 19) instead of the new, modern interface. If you want to check that out you can do it with a Fedora 19 live cd, the official release is next Tuesday.

I'd also recommend playing with CentOS in a virtual machine from your current Fedora install.
Click to expand...

Ah, great. All of that sounds good. Basically looking to expand my NIX-based horizons as much as possible, both in and out of work, so literally any experience seems like good experience. Maybe I'll even setup a dual boot setup on my desktop, since I feel very attached to Win7 for my gaming/Steam needs (was bummed to see Steam on Linux meant Steam on Debian Linux last night).
 
M

Massa

Member
You can install Steam on Fedora easily, just follow the instructions here. Then you'd probably want to look at installing the proprietary drivers via rpmfusion. Fedora comes with the open source drivers which are good quality but lag behind in gaming performance.
 
V

Vic

Please help me with my bad english
I'm repeating myself, but installing ArchLinux with the scripts is much faster and easier than using the old ncurses UI.

Also, fuck GRUB2. I'm using syslinux now and it's much simpler to configure.
 
Z

zoku88

Member
Huh, I found GRUB2 pretty easy to configure.

Although, the only thing I really do is call grub-mkconfig

I really only needed to worry about manual stuff with Xen.
 
V

Vic

Please help me with my bad english
zoku88 said:
Huh, I found GRUB2 pretty easy to configure.

Although, the only thing I really do is call grub-mkconfig

I really only needed to worry about manual stuff with Xen.
Click to expand...
grub-mkconfig never worked for me, so I had to try to configure it manually. What a pain.
 
Z

zoku88

Member
Vic said:
grub-mkconfig never worked for me, so I had to try to configure it manually. What a pain.
Click to expand...

Didn't work?

Why? What happened? All it does is detect kernels and apply the helper scripts in /etc/grub.d/

As far as I know.

What distro were you using? Maybe the default helper scripts that the distro installed were bad. (though, I imagine they didn't make them themselves.)
 
Q

qizah

Unconfirmed Member
Is there an easy way to learn SQL in Ubuntu? I've taken classes on it before but it was all taught in Windows. I'd like to avoid going into my Windows partition if possible, but wasn't sure if there's a way to learn in Linux.
 
F

flowsnake

Member
Haziq said:
Is there an easy way to learn SQL in Ubuntu? I've taken classes on it before but it was all taught in Windows. I'd like to avoid going into my Windows partition if possible, but wasn't sure if there's a way to learn in Linux.
Click to expand...

What database or learning application did you use in Windows? I'm not sure about learning, per se, but there should be a way to type in SQL statements into any RDBMS and get results out.

Assuming you already know SQL fairly well from your previous classes, it'll mostly be a case of learning how the new database is different to the one you used before, as the "SQL" language is slightly different for each database. Most things will be the same, though.
 
V

Vic

Please help me with my bad english
zoku88 said:
Didn't work?

Why? What happened? All it does is detect kernels and apply the helper scripts in /etc/grub.d/

As far as I know.

What distro were you using? Maybe the default helper scripts that the distro installed were bad. (though, I imagine they didn't make them themselves.)
Click to expand...
I'm using Arch. Did a major update and it broke GRUB. I tried everything I could to fix it, but the config files are so complicated that I gave up and went with syslinux.
 
V

Vic

Please help me with my bad english
I've just fixed some major font issues I've always had with GTK. Texts now looks awesome in Firefox, especially here at NeoGAF which always looked bad and required me to zoom in.
 
Kevitivity

Kevitivity

Member
Haziq said:
Is there an easy way to learn SQL in Ubuntu? I've taken classes on it before but it was all taught in Windows. I'd like to avoid going into my Windows partition if possible, but wasn't sure if there's a way to learn in Linux.
Click to expand...

On Ubuntu (or any Linux distro for that matter) we have MySQL, which has been used for years or the completely open source http://www.postgresql.org/
 
M

Massa

Member
jvm said:
I don't get it. What is accomplished by rebuilding the desktop again? What does this solve that isn't addressed by (e.g.) X and GNOME?
Click to expand...

The problem is with Canonical's culture. Whenever they see a deficiency in open source software in whatever their goal of the month is (laptops, TV's, tablets, phones) they decide to hire outside people to do their own thing from scratch instead of engaging and improving the work people are already doing.

Meanwhile the Kubuntu guys have already announced that they will not use Mir or XMir:
"Here at Kubuntu we still want to work as part of the community development, taking the fine software from KDE and other upstreams and putting it on computers worldwide. So when Ubuntu Desktop gets switched to Mir we won't be following. We'll be staying with X on the images for our 13.10 release now in development and the 14.04LTS release next year. After that we hope to switch to Wayland which is what KDE and every other Linux distro hopes to do."
 
Z

zoku88

Member
Vic said:
I'm using Arch. Did a major update and it broke GRUB. I tried everything I could to fix it, but the config files are so complicated that I gave up and went with syslinux.
Click to expand...

Hmm, that's weird. For most installs, you don't even touch the config files.

You literally just do

grub-mkconfig -o > /boot/grub/grub.cfg

and it should pretty much just work.
 
S

systemfehler

Member
Is anyone else using Linux Mint 15 and experiencing a lot of problems? This has to be the worst distribution release I have ever tried. Logging off, restarting, shutting down is a gamble - it hangs in 4 out of 5 cases. The nVIDIA driver only works for a couple of minutes and then takes a reboot so the powermizer works again. The applet bar is messed up if I switch/add to many things at once.

I am really disappointed because previous releases worked a lot better. I thought I could finally use it as a productive system but this is really annoying me. Especially because 15 is not a LTS release - I doubt that all problems will be fixed until the next version. So I would have to upgrade again.
 
S

systemfehler

Member
NotBacon said:
I've been using Mint 15 since release and have yet to experience a hiccup
Click to expand...

Well a lot of problems are gone if I stop using the proprietary driver from the "Driver Menu" - but I need 3D acceleration and Powermizer to work both which are not as good in the Nouveau driver.

I tried manually installing the 319. driver which is not yet in the repos but I lack the time to thoroughly test everything right now. I will report back if that changes anyhting.
 
L

lmpaler

Member
Distro hopped over to Crunch. So far I'm really digging the overall simple look and functionality of it.

Any tips for a newcomer(also still new to Linux) on do's and dont's with this distro?
 
Z

zoku88

Member
I have this bad tendency to switch between Gentoo and Arch.

This time, it was for a pretty stupid reason.

Just because I wanted to use pantheon-greeter.

I blame it all on Canonical and their Ubuntu specific patches for lightdm :-/
 
T

Treechopper

Member
lmpaler said:
Distro hopped over to Crunch. So far I'm really digging the overall simple look and functionality of it.

Any tips for a newcomer(also still new to Linux) on do's and dont's with this distro?
Click to expand...

Crunch is really tame (at least in my experience). Turn Conky into something useful, set your keyboard shortcuts and go. Because it rides on Debian it's going to be pretty stable so you shouldn't have any unexpected problems.

I did get rid of Iceweasel though. Why won't you just let me use Firefox? Now I'm stuck using Chrome.
 
T

Treechopper

Member
Yeah but if I remember correctly the only solution was to install from some foreign repository and force English. They made handy little right-click installs for all the other popular browsers, why not let us install Firefox just as easily?
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
No I just added the old repos made for Ubuntu back in the day when people didn't want to wait for the new version to be pushed.
 
S

systemfehler

Member
Am I wrong:

I placed a script (that works when I manually start it) in /etc/cron.daily/scriptname (including chmod 0755). cron.daily runs at 6:25 according to crontab but since my system is rarely online at that time I thought that the script would just run the next time the system booted.

Somehow this isn't the case in my Debian installation. ps aux | grep crond says crond returns crond.
 
L

lmpaler

Member
The Treechopper said:
Crunch is really tame (at least in my experience). Turn Conky into something useful, set your keyboard shortcuts and go. Because it rides on Debian it's going to be pretty stable so you shouldn't have any unexpected problems.

I did get rid of Iceweasel though. Why won't you just let me use Firefox? Now I'm stuck using Chrome.
Click to expand...

What's the difference? I figured it was essentially the same browser just made for Debian essentially (I scanned a wiki article about it because I'd never heard of it before)
 
T

Treechopper

Member
lmpaler said:
What's the difference? I figured it was essentially the same browser just made for Debian essentially (I scanned a wiki article about it because I'd never heard of it before)
Click to expand...

Iceweasel was notably slower than other browsers when it didn't freeze my computer. About every other time I booted it up it would crash so I got rid of it. This was before Wheezy became the stable release (Crunchbang runs off Wheezy and I have the 64-bit distro) so it might be better but it left a really sour taste.
 
Z

zoku88

Member
systemfehler said:
Am I wrong:

I placed a script (that works when I manually start it) in /etc/cron.daily/scriptname (including chmod 0755). cron.daily runs at 6:25 according to crontab but since my system is rarely online at that time I thought that the script would just run the next time the system booted.

Somehow this isn't the case in my Debian installation. ps aux | grep crond says crond returns crond.
Click to expand...

It depends on what cron program you're running. Not sure what the Debian default is.

I think cronie and/or anacron would have the behavior you want.
 
S

systemfehler

Member
zoku88 said:
It depends on what cron program you're running. Not sure what the Debian default is.

I think cronie and/or anacron would have the behavior you want.
Click to expand...

I installed anacron and hopefully that sorts out any remaining problems. Otherwise I don't know where else I could look. Somehow I never thought that cron.daily/weekly/etc are there but anacron is not installed.

PS: AAAAAAAAND its working :)
 
L

LaneDS

Member
Anyone have a good resource on authentication? I'm getting myself confused trying to figure out whether a machine is using NIS or Kerberos (via pam_tally I think?) for authentication purposes and would like to read up on different ways this can be implemented on different UNIX operating systems (I know this can vary wildly depending on the OS, so apologies for such a generally phrased question).
 
G

GameplayWhore

Member
LaneDS said:
Anyone have a good resource on authentication? I'm getting myself confused trying to figure out whether a machine is using NIS or Kerberos (via pam_tally I think?) for authentication purposes and would like to read up on different ways this can be implemented on different UNIX operating systems (I know this can vary wildly depending on the OS, so apologies for such a generally phrased question).
Click to expand...

Perhaps there is a better way, but I generally look at "/etc/nsswitch.conf" for that information. I don't have a decent online reference for you, but this should certainly be a good route to find out what a system is set up to use.
 
L

LaneDS

Member
GameplayWhore said:
Perhaps there is a better way, but I generally look at "/etc/nsswitch.conf" for that information. I don't have a decent online reference for you, but this should certainly be a good route to find out what a system is set up to use.
Click to expand...

Since posting that earlier I actually found myself with a better understanding of how files in /etc/pam.d/ work (figured out that if you have an auth entry using pam_unix.so, that is essentially saying PAM is using local logins for authentication I think), but nsswitch.conf is definitely helpful too so thank you.
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
So Valve has pushed another big batch of Source games as stable for Linux. HL2 + all the episodes as well as L4D2 which is currently 75% off to celebrate.
 
T

ThatObviousUser

ὁ αἴσχιστος παῖς εἶ
EWmof.gif
AU7Amsc.gif
p0QHO.gif
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Turok_TTZ said:
just waiting for them to port CS:GO and Dota 2 and then finally I can kiss windows goodbye.
Click to expand...

DOTA2 would be big IMO.

HoN has a Linux client, but nobody plays HoN. LoL just got it's Mac client out, and I don't expect a Linux client ever. DOTA2 would be a big boon though IMO.
 
J

jvm

Gamasutra.
Brettison said:
So Valve has pushed another big batch of Source games as stable for Linux. HL2 + all the episodes as well as L4D2 which is currently 75% off to celebrate.
Click to expand...
Sorry, but I wasn't seeing HL2 anything as Linux compatible. Can you show me where this is? I feel like a moron.
 
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