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Linux Distro Noob thread of Linux noobs
- Thread starter Flying_Phoenix
- Start date
close to the edge
Member
Thanks. I'll try that tomorrow since I'm too frustrated today.. I've tried Xubuntu 14.04 Beta 2 and Archbang in pretty much all possible start options, none have worked. (It shows the boot screen, but then the screen goes black. Neither Ctrl+Alt+F1-F7 nor Ctrl-Alt-Del do anything)
Vanillalite
Ask me about the GAF Notebook
http://m.neogaf.com/showthread.php?t=802452
Any of you tried this new live streaming Linux tool called Castawesome? It is suppose to work with Twitch as well as Hitbox.
Any of you tried this new live streaming Linux tool called Castawesome? It is suppose to work with Twitch as well as Hitbox.
Treechopper
Member
The menu is just executing actions from your rc.xml file if I remember correctly. The Openbox menu itself is controlled through a file called menu.xml. You can find them in either ~/.config/openbox/ or /etc/xdg/openbox. If you look up Openbox commands online they have a super helpful guide to help you script it how you want.
Not a graphical interface but it's easy to understand and you can pretty much do whatever you want once you get the hang of it.
Vanillalite
Ask me about the GAF Notebook
FYI Ubuntu 14.04 hits in a day so I'm not sure how fine tuned you want to go with your settings seeing as 14.04 could change things for you!
They still haven't fixed LibreOffice keyboard navigation, have they? I'm subscribed to that bug and I haven't seen a resolution, but perhaps I missed it.
Until they fix that, they aren't serious about anyone in productivity using their distribution, in my humble opinion.
Edit: Ho ho ho. Perhaps I'm wrong.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/739184
Good job, if fixed. However, three years is far too long to let such a thing fester. (Original open date for that bug is March 2011...)
In large part because of this, I moved to Fedora.
close to the edge
Member
Okay, so I've gotten Xubuntu running now. Wasn't easy though. First, I had to append "nomodeset" to the boot options so it would boot at all (not just go to a black screen and do nothing). Then, the installer ran fine until it failed to install grub. I then had to chroot into the already-installed Xubuntu environment, where I tried doing grub-install, which didn't work (complained about not finding some .sh file). I tried doing it without chroot, didn't work either. What worked was to completely remove grub and all associated packages (apt-get purge grub grub2 grub2-common grub-common), run grub-install again with -directory set to the directory where I mounted my Xubuntu partition.
Treechopper
Member
Nopes. For manuscripts (submitted to journals), I use LaTeX. For class documents, memos, etc. I use LibreOffice.
There is a nasty bug with LibreOffice on Windows 8 that really messes up mathematical typesetting. Now I'd like someone to fix that one, for my colleagues on Windows 8 who want to use something other than MS Office.
Treechopper
Member
Yes, I'm subscribed to that bug report too, although it looks like it was marked a duplicate of something that I'm not positive is the same issue. Someone needs to get that stuff fixed, though.
Anyway, LaTeX is used almost universally amongst mathematicians. So there you go.
Nostremitus
Member
So my OEM Desktop mobo doesn't allow boot from USB so I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 to 12.10 so that I could eventually upgrade to 14.04. Now that it's finished, it just boots to terminal. There's no GUI at all. I'm sure I could theoretically install everything from prompt, but I'm not quite sure how to do that... When I try to go to root, it says root is not installed. I'm dual booting Ubuntu and Win 7, so I'm not sure how to reinstall Ubuntu. The last time i tried on another PC, I ended up with two versions of Ubuntu to choose from on start-up instead of it overwriting the old one.
Treechopper
Member
Is sudo installed? Couldn't you install some form of Ubuntu metapackage?
Nostremitus
Member
I hope so, how does one do this?
Treechopper
Member
Ubuntu's help page. Looks like you want Ubuntu standard and whatever other desktop environment. So:
Code:
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-xxxx
sudo apt-get install xxxxNostremitus
Member
Ok, I have no idea what I'm doing, hopefully someone here has seen this before. Windows still boots fine, so I know my hardware is still working properly.
Here's what I get.
I had posted from work and failed to mention that I can only get to the shell when booting into recovery mode. If I try to boot normally, it just stalls on a black screen after bios. The HDD and all fans except the PSU's stop spinning.
Edit: I ran "exec runlevel." It brought up a menu. I selected to check file systems. It said my last boot attempt was in the future so it corrected the clocks. I selected resume boot and it tried to soft reset four times, then gave up.
This is what I get when trying to run in fail safe graphic mode.
I tried
but there's no such file or directory.
Here's what I get.
I had posted from work and failed to mention that I can only get to the shell when booting into recovery mode. If I try to boot normally, it just stalls on a black screen after bios. The HDD and all fans except the PSU's stop spinning.
Edit: I ran "exec runlevel." It brought up a menu. I selected to check file systems. It said my last boot attempt was in the future so it corrected the clocks. I selected resume boot and it tried to soft reset four times, then gave up.
This is what I get when trying to run in fail safe graphic mode.
I tried
Code:
find xorg.failsafe.logTreechopper
Member
There's no "xorg.failsafe.log" but there is an "Xorg.failsafe.log" file. I don't know what you're dealing with so the rest of this post is conjuncture.
Looks like a kernel driver/firmware issue. You say Windows 7 works fine but initramfs is having trouble with your hard drive in addition to having two entries for your keyboard and mouse (might be normal). initramfs helps the kernel configure hardware if I remember correctly so it could have a bug or the kernel could be failing to initialize hardware on its end. Also, Xorg can't find your monitor and Xorg doesn't actually configure the hardware; it just interfaces with its device file through library calls.
Hopefully that helps point you in a right direction.
The Arch one got me. Where did you find those?
Looks like a kernel driver/firmware issue. You say Windows 7 works fine but initramfs is having trouble with your hard drive in addition to having two entries for your keyboard and mouse (might be normal). initramfs helps the kernel configure hardware if I remember correctly so it could have a bug or the kernel could be failing to initialize hardware on its end. Also, Xorg can't find your monitor and Xorg doesn't actually configure the hardware; it just interfaces with its device file through library calls.
Hopefully that helps point you in a right direction.
phoenixyz said:
The Arch one got me. Where did you find those?
Nostremitus
Member
Thanks everyone. I'm going to go through the process of completely wiping fglrx and reinstalling.
And it looks like that fixed my problem... I had to hard restart instead of rebooting since I couldn't access root, but once I turned it back on It booted to a desktop environment.
I installed root, Then installed the AMD utility suite. After that, I completely wiped the fglrx and fglrx amdcccle and did a fresh fglrx install.
Edit: and now onward to 13.10, lol I know what to do if it happens again.
And it looks like that fixed my problem... I had to hard restart instead of rebooting since I couldn't access root, but once I turned it back on It booted to a desktop environment.
I installed root, Then installed the AMD utility suite. After that, I completely wiped the fglrx and fglrx amdcccle and did a fresh fglrx install.
Edit: and now onward to 13.10, lol I know what to do if it happens again.
The Arch and Crunchbang ones are my favourites, too. I stumbled over a link somewhere with an abload.de gallery with those six wallpapers.
Young Magus
Junior Member
Vanillalite
Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Nice desktop! Like the way you have the transparent bar.
Treechopper
Member
So this Ubuntu release is surprisingly good. I remember previous incarnations having random bugs that were really annoying but I haven't run into anything. For an install and go distrobution I'm actually enjoying it.
I like my Arch install for any real work or software testing, but Ubuntu has been great for just surfing the web and doing light work stuff. Any recommended software or tweaks?
Unity's not even that bad. Works pretty good on my mobile Ivybridge i3 and HD4000.
I like my Arch install for any real work or software testing, but Ubuntu has been great for just surfing the web and doing light work stuff. Any recommended software or tweaks?
Vanillalite
Ask me about the GAF Notebook
To be fair this is an LTS release so that's sort of the point. Plus 13.10 wasn't exactly a big new release. They've really just been bug fixing for over a year now IMO.
Seems to have paid off as I've heard quite a few people who aren't exactly Ubuntu lovers say this release has been solid for them.
Install xfce
I've been googling around and haven't found a real answer to this, but:
Is there a way for me to install crunchbang onto an SSD partition but in a way where I can easily delete it if necessary without it affecting my machine? Basically I have Windows 8.1 installed on it, but if it's possible to install #! onto say a 16GB partition while maintaining the ability to remove it on whim without it fucking up my MBR it would be ideal. Last time I turfed my Ubuntu partition I couldn't boot into Windows because my boot manager had been replaced with GRUB.
edit: or would I be better served running the OS using virtualbox?
Is there a way for me to install crunchbang onto an SSD partition but in a way where I can easily delete it if necessary without it affecting my machine? Basically I have Windows 8.1 installed on it, but if it's possible to install #! onto say a 16GB partition while maintaining the ability to remove it on whim without it fucking up my MBR it would be ideal. Last time I turfed my Ubuntu partition I couldn't boot into Windows because my boot manager had been replaced with GRUB.
edit: or would I be better served running the OS using virtualbox?
Treechopper
Member
Install xfce
I feel a little left out because I don't really get what's so great about xfce :/
I believe in a dual-boot Windows/Linux system GRUB has to trigger the Windows bootloader because Windows finds its kernel and runs without checking anything else. You would have to remove GRUB and alter the MBR before you deleted your Crunchbang partition in order for Windows to work correctly.
Why don't you use UEFI? If I understand it correctly you could just delete Crunchbang and the firmware wouldn't flip out since it reads the hardware partitions first. When it couldn't find the Linux files it would just select Windows and go.
Well, it's more lightweight and follows the classical desktop metaphor.
Any of you Linux guys test for the Red Hat Certified System Administrator cert? My Red Hat class has a free try at it and I'm going up for it next week. I have most of the stuff down, just haven't practiced scripting much. Love the command line stuff, seems much more powerful than Windows lets you be.
By chance I checked out Geary again and noticed that it has made some great strides in usability since the last time. It looks and functions much more as a substitute for web mail now, I might keep using it even though there are some bugs. Spam example:
http://blogs.gnome.org/jnelson/2014/03/17/announcing-geary-0-6-0/
I'm also curious to see what comes out of the calendar they (that is, Yorba) are developing, California. Judging by the time Geary has taken to reach this stage it's probably three or more years away from being good, but I can wait for a non-Evolution (which I think is too bloated) Gnome-native client to finally arrive.
http://blogs.gnome.org/jnelson/2014/03/21/introducing-california-a-new-gnome-3-calendar/
Apparently 0.6.0 released last month.
http://blogs.gnome.org/jnelson/2014/03/17/announcing-geary-0-6-0/
I'm also curious to see what comes out of the calendar they (that is, Yorba) are developing, California. Judging by the time Geary has taken to reach this stage it's probably three or more years away from being good, but I can wait for a non-Evolution (which I think is too bloated) Gnome-native client to finally arrive.
http://blogs.gnome.org/jnelson/2014/03/21/introducing-california-a-new-gnome-3-calendar/
SteveWinwood
Member
Finally got it all working. I am a dual boot master.
Just got some goofy irritations to fix. There are some driver issues in ubuntu for me right now (the mouse and stuff is acting all goofy), and for some reason in grub I can't go up, only down, so if I miss what I want to boot I have to restart. Really odd.
Just got some goofy irritations to fix. There are some driver issues in ubuntu for me right now (the mouse and stuff is acting all goofy), and for some reason in grub I can't go up, only down, so if I miss what I want to boot I have to restart. Really odd.
Treechopper
Member
Just out of curiosity, what makes Geary or Evolution better than Thunderbird (besides Exchange support)?
Depends on what you mean by better. I've given both Thunderbird and Evolution repeated tries over the last eight years but never gotten around what I think are terribly outdated interfaces. I only need a select few features for my mail, all of which are covered by Geary's very simple UI.
In particular I like that it's been designed very much around Gmail and makes a clear distinction between Archive and Trash actions, I remember being somewhat confused and worried about this not working perfectly in other clients. It's also integrated into Gnome Shell both looks and functionality-wise and I like that it feels more actively developed (it's not "stable" yet so that's of course natural) than the Evolution behemoth.
Basically it does what I need, nothing more, and looks spiffy. If you need the extra functionality of Thunderbird with themes and extensions and whatnot, or the Evolution package of five-things-in-a-box, it won't hold up.
Treechopper
Member
I'll have to give it a try. I enjoy Thunderbird but, as you said, I only use two or three features within it. Does it feel stable enough for daily use right now?
Guys I want to talk about Mir.
I know it's a highly opinionated subject, I don't have to much knowledge with it as I've never worked with guis before. Honestly I can't wrap my what exactly a Windowing System is and what a Windows Manager is, and why you need a Windows Client to locally run and so on. I've only been more confused by how this all relates to remote sessions.
X Windows is ubiquitous. As such it will be pulling teeth to move away from it. But to me it sounds like Mir is a very much needed paradigm shift in the linux community. Maybe I'm wrong in thinking this, but what Canonical is trying to do with it is one of the most interesting developments I see under the Ubuntu Umbrella. It's sort of the Catch 22 where in trying to provide a better replacement standard you only further fragment things. But looking down the road 10 years it seems that Mir would be highly choice going forward.
Linux is beautiful underneath. But it's always suffered in it's abstracted user view. I've always hated the environments compared to what has been done with Windows and Mac. Partly because they are backed by huge corporations and their graphical systems are integrated deep in their hybrid kernels.
I know Mir has since been delayed, and many people seemed to breath a sigh of relief. But to me it sounds like it's a growing pain that that is a long time coming. Tell me if I'm wrong. But android and Weyland have sought out to really retool things. Mir seems like it will really push a new paradigm. Can't wait to see Ubuntu Phone and what can be done in the next 5 years.
I know it's a highly opinionated subject, I don't have to much knowledge with it as I've never worked with guis before. Honestly I can't wrap my what exactly a Windowing System is and what a Windows Manager is, and why you need a Windows Client to locally run and so on. I've only been more confused by how this all relates to remote sessions.
X Windows is ubiquitous. As such it will be pulling teeth to move away from it. But to me it sounds like Mir is a very much needed paradigm shift in the linux community. Maybe I'm wrong in thinking this, but what Canonical is trying to do with it is one of the most interesting developments I see under the Ubuntu Umbrella. It's sort of the Catch 22 where in trying to provide a better replacement standard you only further fragment things. But looking down the road 10 years it seems that Mir would be highly choice going forward.
Linux is beautiful underneath. But it's always suffered in it's abstracted user view. I've always hated the environments compared to what has been done with Windows and Mac. Partly because they are backed by huge corporations and their graphical systems are integrated deep in their hybrid kernels.
I know Mir has since been delayed, and many people seemed to breath a sigh of relief. But to me it sounds like it's a growing pain that that is a long time coming. Tell me if I'm wrong. But android and Weyland have sought out to really retool things. Mir seems like it will really push a new paradigm. Can't wait to see Ubuntu Phone and what can be done in the next 5 years.
I've actually only used it for a few days so far, but it's been stable to me. No crashes, no problems loading mail or searching, just a very pleasant experience overall.
Treechopper
Member
This is not a good start.
The problem is that Mir isn't being developed by anybody but Canonical, and Wayland already existed as X.org's replacement. Intel pulled support last year and even derivative distros (Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, and so on) are deciding what to do for the future. Wayland is the community's effort to fix things. Mir is Canonical's effort to fix things.
Mir is pretty much an example of NIH syndrome...
Canonical had pretty much all the time in the world to address their concerns about Wayland before it hit 1.0 ... and not all of their concerns were valid anyway, they just misunderstood.
Can you even use Mir right now? I know you can use Weston or some subset of GNOME stuff for Wayland...
Canonical had pretty much all the time in the world to address their concerns about Wayland before it hit 1.0 ... and not all of their concerns were valid anyway, they just misunderstood.
Can you even use Mir right now? I know you can use Weston or some subset of GNOME stuff for Wayland...
Recently upgrade to Lubuntu 14 and the oddest thing happens now. My flash works, but it is like...sped up. That is the best way I could describe it. Youtube videos and Pandora work solid, but they just speed through what they are showing so I get no sound or anything. Kind of hilarious to watch on videos, but I am at a loss how to fix it.
I tried sudo apt-get update , upgrade, autoclean, clean, -install flashplugin, --reinstall flashplugin, used Synaptic to delete old or obsolete packages etc.
Aside from a fresh install I am at a loss.
Before I bomb this bad boy, any ideas?
I tried sudo apt-get update , upgrade, autoclean, clean, -install flashplugin, --reinstall flashplugin, used Synaptic to delete old or obsolete packages etc.
Aside from a fresh install I am at a loss.
Before I bomb this bad boy, any ideas?
Treechopper
Member
The guy's affiliated with Canonical. Don't know about the population at large though. (I understand the irony of posting a screenshot from Ubuntu.)
Are you using an AMD graphics card? If no, try this.
I hold out hope that they will be different enough that it will result in good ideas cross-pollinating but they'll be similar enough that it's not a whole bunch of work migrating between them.
The best time for that was before Wayland hit 1.0 (where future versions are required to be backwards compatible with older versions.)
Canonical should have really stated their concerns before then. This will just result in a whole bunch of duplicated effort, which takes time away from creating good ideas...
That's my opinion, anyway.
Elfforkusu
Member
I don't trust Canonical to have the technical knowhow to put such an integral system piece (Mir) together without effing it up. The project already got off to a godawful start since it started when they secretly forked the work of the jolla (former Nokia) guys and pawned it off as their own. It's not clear they have any core competency, apart from taking credit for things. Can't keep a stable kernel together, why would I trust these clowns to rewrite X?
In summary, I'm going to be off of (x)ubuntu the moment they switch to Mir. Not out of moral obligation, but because I'm confident it'll be broken as shit.
Hopefully Wayland is coming along by then.
In summary, I'm going to be off of (x)ubuntu the moment they switch to Mir. Not out of moral obligation, but because I'm confident it'll be broken as shit.
Hopefully Wayland is coming along by then.
I originally had been quite annoyed by Mir, but eventually I realized that I didn't trust them. I'm glad they're not directly working on the design of Wayland. Only their best work will make it across, unless they do such an astounding job that they beat out Wayland.
Their help on back-end work required to make Wayland work would have been nice, but it wasn't absolutely required.
Sadly yes lol. I'll look into a few other options, but if not, I have a fresh install ready
Treechopper
Member
Don't fresh install! That's actually a good thing because it's a common problem. Go to your sound settings and try "Analog Stereo" or whatever else you have. Let me know what that does.
Blast, just saw this. I got to work this morning and had it sitting here and had some downtime so I wiped it. Sorry I could not be of more bug related help sir.
Treechopper
Member
Aw, darn. Last year (so, maybe two pages back) I messed up my Crunchbang install pretty bad but was still able to fix it with the help of another member here. Blew me away how recoverable Linux is.
If you run into it again then search around for answers. I've run into it before and was able to fix it.