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Linux Distro Noob thread of Linux noobs

zoku88

Member
Kad5 said:
So who decides if an OS is UNIX?
You don't say it IS UNIX. You say it's Unix-like.

Anything that follows the Unix specification would be unix-like. It's not like there's some central authority or anything, AFAIK.

You find a lot of programs that were originally written for unix on linux systems, like the X Windows System and vim, etc.


If you're curious, the people who made unix, Bell Labs, also made other important things in computing history. Like MOSFETS. I think they were also technically the first people to make multitouch screens many many moons ago. They're pretty irrelevant now, I think. Owned by Alcatel Lucent now, they're mainly focused on marketable research.
 

Kad5

Member
zoku88 said:
You don't say it IS UNIX. You say it's Unix-like.

Anything that follows the Unix specification would be unix-like. It's not like there's some central authority or anything, AFAIK.

You find a lot of programs that were originally written for unix on linux systems, like the X Windows System and vim, etc.


If you're curious, the people who made unix, Bell Labs, also made other important things in computing history. Like MOSFETS. I think they were also technically the first people to make multitouch screens many many moons ago. They're pretty irrelevant now, I think. Owned by Alcatel Lucent now, they're mainly focused on marketable research.

Well I was asking because apparently Mac OS X and AIX are Unix OS's while Linux is Unix-like.

From what I can tell it seems Unix and Unix-like OS's are a lot better than Windows in some respects. Correct me if i'm wrong.
 

zoku88

Member
Kad5 said:
Well I was asking because apparently Mac OS X and AIX are Unix OS's while Linux is Unix-like.

From what I can tell it seems Unix and Unix-like OS's are a lot better than Windows in some respects. Correct me if i'm wrong.
I think the only difference between being in the Unix family and being Unix-like is the amount of licensed Unix code you have.. or something.

So, it's not like an organization decides if something is Unix-like, it's more like an organization decides if something is classified as Unix. Which is AT&T, since they hold the Unix license.

http://www.opengroup.org/certification/idx/unix.html

Sorry, apparently the Open Group holds the trademark now.
 

Solaros

Member
Kad5 said:
Well I was asking because apparently Mac OS X and AIX are Unix OS's while Linux is Unix-like.

From what I can tell it seems Unix and Unix-like OS's are a lot better than Windows in some respects. Correct me if i'm wrong.
Unix-like operating systems have undergone the scrutiny of the open source community.

Microsoft pays programmers lots of money to be a part of their community.

Take from that you will.
 
Flying_Phoenix said:
What's a distro that is simply like Ubuntu but is much much more reliable and power hungry?

Would Arch really be too complicated for me to get it?
IMO reliability and power hungriness, persay, are more symptoms of the desktop environment than the distro itself. You could always scale back to something that lags behind with the intent for stability (RHEL/CentOS is a good example on the server side, not that I'd necessarily recommend going that route for a desktop...), but using a 2 year old OS just because it's better tested is not really what most of us want.

Ubuntu => GNOME
Kubuntu => KDE

I've never liked either. Been on the Xubuntu (XFCE) bandwagon for a few years now.


wrt Unix/Unix-like:

Unix/Unix-like/POSIX are often used interchangeably, but the gist is: Unix refers to something very specific, the original Unix OS and the code that still exists today. Unix-like describes all the Unix-style OSs, eg BSD, Linux, etc, whether or not they rewrote the code from the ground up (Linux) or not. They follow the original Unix principles (which became the POSIX standard) for how an OS behaves and what functionalities it should provide.

Microsoft, OTOH, did their own thing with Windows, and are only recently shoehorning in some things (a proper "root" access control, for one) that Unix had from the start. But their success in the past was in large part because they took their own path. Putting graphics stuff down in the kernel is one example of something that was helpful before (speed), but seems like only a bad thing now.
 

cntr

Banned
Yeah, the Open Group (among other things) manages the Single UNIX Specification and licenses the UNIX name. However, they charge a hefty fee for certification, so Unix-likes like Linux and FreeBSD haven't applied and can't use the UNIX name proper.
 

itxaka

Defeatist
ari said:
how can i use my 4 gen ipod touch on ubuntu?


Any media player should be able to use it with no problems.

If not, just "sudo apt-get install libimobiledevice" should make it work with them
 

itxaka

Defeatist
panda21 said:
anyone using the natty alpha? i'm kind of tempted


dont :D

Unity is fucked up. Is too unstable compared with other alphas. Before they introduced unity the alpha was really stable but after that...it sucks.

Only do it if you don't mind reinstalling the alpha over and over almost every day.
 

Sew

Member
ari said:
how can i use my 4 gen ipod touch on ubuntu?
This might be of use:

As you probably already know, libgpod has included support for Apple’s iOS 2.x hash for a while now. With their new devices, Apple changed the hash again, but for some reason the change only applies to new devices – old devices running iOS 4.x still work. However, if you have a new device (iPad, iPhone 4, or iPod touch 4G), music sync does not work.

If your device is not jailbroken, you’ll have to wait until the new hash is reverse engineered. However, if your device is jailbroken, you’re in luck. As it turns out, the old DBVersion trick once again works to convince those devices to use the previous hash method.
http://marcansoft.com/blog/2011/01/syncing-music-in-new-idevices-with-linux/

I stupidly bought a 6th gen Nano (the new square one) and can't sync it in Ubuntu yet. So I'm running iTunes in XP in Virtualbox. It hurts.
 

panda21

Member
how annoying. i really want to use natty but not if it breaks all the time

i'm still not sure if installing ubuntu on a work machine that needs to stay up for weeks is a good idea fullstop... it seems ok on my home machine but it freaks out every now and then
 

Tworak

Member
itxaka said:
That's cheating, base tools are pretty stable :p

Any improvements on the server side?
I haven't really noticed much difference, but I haven't really done much digging either. it's a transparent squid / dnsmasq cache server so as long as it's up I don't really do much with it. :p
 

panda21

Member
reading their forums it does sounds like natty would be a really bad idea right now.. they are making major changes to the X11 version it uses or something so everything is breaking
 

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
On a side note...

XFCE 4.8 has released. It dropped a few weeks ago actually, and plans on being the default desktop for Xubuntu in 11.04.

The development here is 10.10 just got the upgrade in the form of a PPA. OMGUbuntu has an article and the PPA links.

Anyways I to really am curious about Natty, but the stability problems have kept me away. I'd also like to do a trial run of stock Gnome 3 as well, but have heard similar things.
 

Hylian7

Member
Alright, I feel like an idiot for not figuring out the solution, even after countless Googling for it. Perhaps it's my lack of knowledge of bash escape characters (which I have tried all of) and quotes. Here is my problem:

I have Arch Linux installed on my laptop and am using netcfg to connect to wi-fi networks. The problem is that the network at my girlfriend's apartment has a space and an apostrophe in it. The apostrophe isn't a problem, but the space is causing all the trouble. I've tried everything under the sun to single quotes, double quotes, and escape characters, and still cannot get it to connect without error. If I put it in double quotes with no escape characters, this is the output I get on my attempt to connect to it.

Code:
iwconfig: unknown command "Castle"
                                                                                                                       [FAIL]

The SSID here is "Peach's Castle", and for some reason it's reading the second word in the string as another command. An obvious solution would be to change her SSID, but that would require changing the SSID on the rest of the devices that use that network in her apartment, which is a pain in the ass I would rather not go through.

I should also mention the SSID is hidden, but I know how to connect to hidden SSIDs without spaces in them just fine.

Any ideas GAF?
 

Vic

Please help me with my bad english
Hylian7 said:
Alright, I feel like an idiot for not figuring out the solution, even after countless Googling for it. Perhaps it's my lack of knowledge of bash escape characters (which I have tried all of) and quotes. Here is my problem:

I have Arch Linux installed on my laptop and am using netcfg to connect to wi-fi networks. The problem is that the network at my girlfriend's apartment has a space and an apostrophe in it. The apostrophe isn't a problem, but the space is causing all the trouble. I've tried everything under the sun to single quotes, double quotes, and escape characters, and still cannot get it to connect without error. If I put it in double quotes with no escape characters, this is the output I get on my attempt to connect to it.

Code:
iwconfig: unknown command "Castle"
                                                                                                                       [FAIL]

The SSID here is "Peach's Castle", and for some reason it's reading the second word in the string as another command. An obvious solution would be to change her SSID, but that would require changing the SSID on the rest of the devices that use that network in her apartment, which is a pain in the ass I would rather not go through.

I should also mention the SSID is hidden, but I know how to connect to hidden SSIDs without spaces in them just fine.

Any ideas GAF?
You can always use the access point (AP) address instead of the ESSID to connect to the wireless router.

Do:

Code:
sudo iwlist wlan0 scan

in order to find the available networks and their info.

then try to connect to the network using this method:

Code:
sudo iwconfig wlan0 ap "enter the AP address within the apostrophes" key "same here for the security key"

Then try to connect with:

Code:
sudo dhcpcd wlan0

Try it out and tell me if it works.
 

Hylian7

Member
Vic said:
You can always use the access point (AP) address instead of the ESSID to connect to the wireless router.

Do:

Code:
sudo iwlist wlan0 scan

in order to find the available networks and their info.

then try to connect to the network using this method:

Code:
sudo iwconfig wlan0 ap "enter the AP address within the apostrophes" key "same here for the security key"

Then try to connect with:

Code:
sudo dhcpcd wlan0

Try it out and tell me if it works.
Actually I was doing that before I installed netcfg just fine, I know it works. It's just that it doesn't connect automatically, which is a pain in the ass sometimes, hence why I'm using netcfg.
 

angelfly

Member
Elfforkusu said:
Connecting to a network from the command line makes me a sad panda. Wicd, dudes. Use it!
I use to use wicd on my laptop and still love it more than networkmanager which I currently use but lack of vpn support made it a hassle to use while at my university.
 
angelfly said:
I use to use wicd on my laptop and still love it more than networkmanager which I currently use but lack of vpn support made it a hassle to use while at my university.
Oddly enough, I don't mind using the terminal for vpn... probably because I use vpn only sparingly. I could see it being a hassle not having it built in if you use it all the time.

I wonder, are there any good standalone vpn guis for linux?
 

itxaka

Defeatist
Elfforkusu said:
Connecting to a network from the command line makes me a sad panda. Wicd, dudes. Use it!


wicd failed miserably to me the other day. It would just refuse to connect claiming that the passowrd for my wpa wifi was wrong and it wasn't.

Had to delete it. Sorry, but I can't find anything on it better than netwrokmanger.

The gui is nice and the wicd-ncurses is godly for beginners but apart from that? networkmanager uses vpn, ppoe, ppoa and mobile broadband. And IINM it doesn't even support 2 interfaces at the same time!


Anyway, on other news, Gnome-shell live cd is available -> http://blog.crozat.net/2011/01/gnome-3-live-cd-usb-test-image.html

And it's looking good.

5201349215_12c240ffc5.jpg
 

zoku88

Member
I was actually gnome-shell from a git repository before. It seemed nice, albeit, it was a little slow (I think it's Mutter's fault, maybe.)

Hopefully, they make mutter into less of a memory hog.
 

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
I wasn't sold on early pics of Gnome Shell, but I saw that pic earlier today and yeah. Gnome Shell looks waaaayyy more palatable than I previously thought, and I want to try that.

Contrast that with the latest pics of Unity from the alpha and I'm sort of meh not interested right now.
 

zoku88

Member
I also agree that I find using GNOME shell more pleasurable than Unity.

Although, the last time I used Unity was in a Natty alpha, so that's not very fair XD
 

Toby

Member
Just a quick question. Could someone do an example of piping two variables to be summed into bc or dc and assigning it to another variable?
I can't seem to figure it out
 

peakish

Member
Brettison said:
I wasn't sold on early pics of Gnome Shell, but I saw that pic earlier today and yeah. Gnome Shell looks waaaayyy more palatable than I previously thought, and I want to try that.

Contrast that with the latest pics of Unity from the alpha and I'm sort of meh not interested right now.
It'll be very interesting to test. The really good news is that if Gnome Shell could make more interesting than it looked before maybe Unity can as well.

Does anyone know if 11.04's "classic" desktop will use Gnome 2.xx or upgrade to 3.0, btw?
 

itxaka

Defeatist
peakish said:
It'll be very interesting to test. The really good news is that if Gnome Shell could make more interesting than it looked before maybe Unity can as well.

Does anyone know if 11.04's "classic" desktop will use Gnome 2.xx or upgrade to 3.0, btw?


It should use 2.26 as it will be the latest stable version of gnome released on time. And it will be the best version as it will finally support Exchange 2007/MAPI Connector on evolution!

Gnome 3 will be released on April, too close and too new to be integrated with ubuntu without any issues. But I'm pretty sure it willl be available shortly after release.

What we could end up is with gtk3, which is almost complete and only has a couple of things to do and some patches to integrate. And I believe it is faster and more stable and compatible with gnome 2.x so we could end up with the best from both world. Classic desktop + gtk 3 :D
 

peakish

Member
I guess it'd be a bit much to get both Unity and Gnome 3 stable for one release, especially considering that Canonical probably wants people to use Unity :p
 
itxaka said:
wicd failed miserably to me the other day. It would just refuse to connect claiming that the passowrd for my wpa wifi was wrong and it wasn't.

Had to delete it. Sorry, but I can't find anything on it better than netwrokmanger.

The gui is nice and the wicd-ncurses is godly for beginners but apart from that? networkmanager uses vpn, ppoe, ppoa and mobile broadband. And IINM it doesn't even support 2 interfaces at the same time!
The "wrong password" error is a bit odd. That's the one it gives me when it actually means "your connection is stale, reset your router noob". Not sure why, haven't cracked open the code.

What it does better than network manager is it actually tells you the truth most of the time, not "hey you're connected (oh btw you're not connected)". But yes, it's lacking features X, Y, and Z, which is probably why that other dysfunctional POS is included by default.

Functionality >>>> Features. That the mindset I'm coming from. If something only works 95% of the time, it doesn't count as implemented.

Anyway, if network manager is working for you (or anyone), by all means keep using it. But if something should go consistently wrong, just keep in mind that it sucks!
 

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
peakish said:
Huh. The more you know.

It's an extremely common misconception that's easy to make because when people think of Gnome they think UI and not the full deal that it encompasses.
 

itxaka

Defeatist
Elfforkusu said:
The "wrong password" error is a bit odd. That's the one it gives me when it actually means "your connection is stale, reset your router noob". Not sure why, haven't cracked open the code.

What it does better than network manager is it actually tells you the truth most of the time, not "hey you're connected (oh btw you're not connected)". But yes, it's lacking features X, Y, and Z, which is probably why that other dysfunctional POS is included by default.

Functionality >>>> Features. That the mindset I'm coming from. If something only works 95% of the time, it doesn't count as implemented.

Anyway, if network manager is working for you (or anyone), by all means keep using it. But if something should go consistently wrong, just keep in mind that it sucks!


I don't really know if that is a point in favor or against wicd xD

And no, the router reset didn't work as I resetted it a hundred times. It plainly didn't work for whatever reason it wanted and kept spamming "NOT CONNECTED" with not even a decent error.

I don't understand thought, did nw failed on you? I never ever had a problem with it and it never "lied" to me about my connection status. Never failed to work with a variety of hardware and distros, including the business distro(red hat).
And I also don't get the functionality one. What is better than networkmanager? The only ting I found is that is visually attractive, nothing else.

To be fair Unity IS based on Gnome 3 it just doesn't have Gnome Shell!

gah, so we are gonna end up with the usual ubuntu bugs and regressions + unity bugs + gnome 3 bugs (releases the same month of natty)?
I better start reporting bugs ASAP! :p
 
I installed ubuntu this last weekend for my c++ programming class since we only program in it. All I have to say is WOW. I think unix (or linux, whatever) is my favorite os now. So flexible and light weight. Hell the sudo apt-get install line makes it worth it on its own. Love it!! I'm definitely going to be using it for more than just classes now. So uncluttered.

edit: any tips, websites, or programs I should download for it? I've been getting most of the major ones but I would like to know smaller ones or programming ones.
 

zoku88

Member
DUFFMCWALIN said:
I installed ubuntu this last weekend for my c++ programming class since we only program in it. All I have to say is WOW. I think unix (or linux, whatever) is my favorite os now. So flexible and light weight. Hell the sudo apt-get install line makes it worth it on its own. Love it!! I'm definitely going to be using it for more than just classes now. So uncluttered.

edit: any tips, websites, or programs I should download for it? I've been getting most of the major ones but I would like to know smaller ones or programming ones.
Get vim if Ubuntu doesn't have that by default, and then do all of your programming in it ;)
 

itxaka

Defeatist
DUFFMCWALIN said:
I installed ubuntu this last weekend for my c++ programming class since we only program in it. All I have to say is WOW. I think unix (or linux, whatever) is my favorite os now. So flexible and light weight. Hell the sudo apt-get install line makes it worth it on its own. Love it!! I'm definitely going to be using it for more than just classes now. So uncluttered.

edit: any tips, websites, or programs I should download for it? I've been getting most of the major ones but I would like to know smaller ones or programming ones.


OMGUbuntu.co.uk has a lot of tips, news and programs and it's updated daily. Great resource.


Get vim if Ubuntu doesn't have that by default, and then do all of your programming in it ;)

Another zealot of the Cult of vi? :p


On other news...evolution with exchange web services will be released on may. Fucking finally!
ews_cal.jpg
 

angelfly

Member
zoku88 said:
Get vim if Ubuntu doesn't have that by default, and then do all of your programming in it ;)
How dare you advocate the usage of vim! Emacs is the one stop shop for anything you need.
 

zoku88

Member
angelfly said:
How dare you advocate the usage of vim! Emacs is the one stop shop for anything you need.
Sorry, I think I may have misheard you. It almost sounds like you said that you use emacs... ;)

itxaka said:
Another zealot of the Cult of vi? :p
hehe I'm sorry, I couldn't resist XD
 

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
zoku88 said:
Sorry, I think I may have misheard you. It almost sounds like you said that you use emacs... ;)


hehe I'm sorry, I couldn't resist XD
That is because Angelfly is a genius so obviously they use Emacs! All smart people do! :p
 

angelfly

Member
Just like Firefox made me expect more from browsers Emacs made me expect more from text editors. Listensing to podcasts while writing code and reading email is not something I can do from vi or any of its clones.
Brettison said:
That is because Angelfly is a genius so obviously they use Emacs! All smart people do! :p
Of course :)
 

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
LOL LOL LOL

LOL@Verizon

So I made a separate thread, but I got a Cr-48 from google yesterday and this afternoon decided I'd try out the 3g which is 100 megs free per month for 2 years through this google/verizon deal. Now you had to sign up and activate service with a credit card just for validation. That all worked fine, but then it kicked me back to the sign up page again despite getting a confirmation e-mail on my phone. The e-mail had a tech support number.


So I called and did the prompts. Eventually got a chick on the phone to actually help me.

She wanted me to use the shortcut keys which gets you into the chrome os terminal. I was like oh shit real deal fixing here nix style. LOL@the girl on the phone. So she tells me to type modem status and read the Gobi # which I do. Then she has me type this long as thing to try and manually activate. Well back up 1st we did a battery reset as that sometimes fixes things.

Anyways she was dumb because she said type modem status which worked, and I tried typing in just modem and it gave me terminal commands for modem. The big line though which I found out later was instructions from google she said they had to follow which keyed me in she was clueless was a cluster fuck. 1st time failed, but I told her hey no biggie it's over the phone and I could have miss typed or miss heard. We went back over it and tried another command to reset. None of that all worked.

I noticed something after she had a conference with her manager while they put me on hold. Her long string started Modem which I caught during the hold. She made me type modem status before, but not she wants me to type Modem. So finally I was like yo chicka linux systems rely heavily on upper and lower case. It had kept giving me a "modem unknown command" or something. This was when she said she had to follow the instructions. I was like yo it's ALWAYS gonna fail cause the command modem and the commands I can use when I type modem are always lower case. The file structure has to be typed right for upper and lower case but this has to be lower.

I was like yo give me the whole line again, but I'll use my own judgement thanks on the upper and lower. 1st it was weird, but then we rebooted and tried to factory reset with the lower case. I was like hey no error code that time doing it my way. Still didn't work but I figured hey maybe the manual activation string will work now. Tried that, and boom no error! Did a reboot, and bam it activated.

Hope she either corrected her sheet or told her boss yo whoever type or wrote this shit down for us = failboat. LOL She was cool though obviously frustrated cause my call was a long one. I apologized for it being such a hassle and she was cool. Still my nix sensibilities came into real world use again today!

Go go Linux GAF!!!
 
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