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Linux Distro Noob thread of Linux noobs

O

opticalmace

Member
barnone said:
In my bash terminal, is there a way to create a shortened variable for a path like this:

https://blablabla.bla.bla/blabla/~bla

so that I don't have to type it out everytime? Something maybe like how $HOME or $PATH stores stuff. Thanks !
Click to expand...
sure, just put it in a variable.

e.g. v=/home/user/somedir
echo $v
cd $v

just put the definition in your .bashrc.

alternatively you could make aliases for commands, such as

alias cdm='cd /home/user/somedir'
then in the terminal if you type cdm it will execute that command.
 
P

Pctx

Banned
zoku88 said:
I actually had to look up where Jones Farm was. Thought the only Oregon place was in Hillsboro.

Nah, no legacy stuff here. But I'm at a different site, anyway. Maybe it will change when my current project ends.
Click to expand...

well technically it is in Hillsboro but you might be thinking of the Fabs (D1D, D1C Ronler Arces, etc) :)
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Does IBM do custom kernels for there things like Watson or is it basically the stock linux kernel (of the time anyways) so the main choice is the stuff layered on top depending upon on the distribution chosen?
 
T

Tworak

Member
Brettison said:
Does IBM do custom kernels for there things like Watson or is it basically the stock linux kernel (of the time anyways) so the main choice is the stuff layered on top depending upon on the distribution chosen?
Click to expand...
don't think so. all I think they've said is they use Apache's Hadoop file system and SLES.

IBM is heavily invested in the Linux kernel development anyway.
 
B

barnone

Member
opticalmace said:
sure, just put it in a variable.

e.g. v=/home/user/somedir
echo $v
cd $v

just put the definition in your .bashrc.

alternatively you could make aliases for commands, such as

alias cdm='cd /home/user/somedir'
then in the terminal if you type cdm it will execute that command.
Click to expand...

zoku88 said:
you mean like:

>BLAH=https://blablabla.bla.bla/blabla/~bla
>echo $BLAH
https://blablabla.bla.bla/blabla/~bla

?

That should work if you're using bash or some shell that's bash-ish

If it's like tcsh or something, then you have to use setenv like:

setenv BLAH https://blablabla.bla.bla/blabla/~bla
Click to expand...

PetriP-TNT said:
Put the command into a bashscript and do it that way?
Click to expand...

Thanks! My class will do bashscripts pretty soon, and the variable setting is exactly what I was looking for. I should've expected it to be as simple as it is. The alias command is very slick.
 
G

GameplayWhore

Member
Sorry, late to the party, I was hanging out with First Fandom this weekend.


Regarding opensuse, we use it here at work, as well. The few times we've allowed Ubuntu on our workstations have been an utter nightmare. Ubuntu is on one of the servers and seems okay there. Tried CentOS on a server and it nearly broke me (somehow, every single install disc we burned, be it netinstall, dvd, cd, etc, had some different bizarre problem partway through the install despite the md5s matching up, and then it seemed to actively fight against my attempts to get it to join our NIS domain).

Opensuse's pretty logically laid out and has rather unmatched front ends for administration when you don't want to vim or joe everything. The package manager is powerful and comparably intuitive on the command line (doesn't use separate apps for installing and searching, for one thing). In truth, opensuse's only real problem is that it's not popular, so it doesn't get as many packages as the competition. It doesn't have a *small* number of packages, but sometimes it's a bit annoying when you want to bleed your edge.


I use arch at home. yaourt (pacman but with a FreeBSD-esque compile-from-source installer that has a yillion extra packages) rocks it pretty hard. I have, however, been forced to do things to fix problems whose solutions are not listed anywhere in the archwiki (my printer explicitly does not work with their stock cups, so I have to install an alternate version of cups and then play around with modprobe; also, that Catalyst driver seems to detonate at the drop of a hat).
 
T

Tworak

Member
GameplayWhore said:
Opensuse's pretty logically laid out and has rather unmatched front ends for administration when you don't want to vim or joe everything. The package manager is powerful and comparably intuitive on the command line (doesn't use separate apps for installing and searching, for one thing). In truth, opensuse's only real problem is that it's not popular, so it doesn't get as many packages as the competition. It doesn't have a *small* number of packages, but sometimes it's a bit annoying when you want to bleed your edge.
Click to expand...
oh I prefer /ports/, portage, apt or even yum ahead of yast/zypper on servers. but then again yast got them all beat on the desktop. :p
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
itxaka said:
Not just for that for for everything!

alias ls = 'ls -la'
alias install = 'sudo apt-get install'
alias update ='sudo apt-get update'
alias publicip ='curl http://automation.whatismyip.com/n09230945.asp > ip.txt'

etc...


Alias it's awesome for things between manually and totally automated or that needs supervision.w
Click to expand...

How long does that stay in effect? Until you reboot? Is it saved some where? How many things can you alias at one time?
 
Q

qizah

Unconfirmed Member
Just installed Ubuntu 11.10 again, since school is winding down. I like the new additions and the overall smoothness of the UI, though I'm still waiting for some great Open Source word processing software. Microsoft Word is actually amazing for creating documents and formatting, so I really hope that there's a great Open Source alternative somewhere down the line.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice aren't bad by any means, but Word is just great for formatting.
 
T

thcsquad

Member
I did a few things starting this week:

1. Switched to Crunchbang Linux from Ubuntu. 11.10 took a minute and a half to boot on my laptop. Crunchbang? 20 seconds.

2. A friend at work turned me onto xmonad so I'm trying it. It's a tiling window manager, so you don't have to bother with moving around windows any longer. Tiling algorithms take care of that for you. The concept of a tiling window manager is awesome, but I need to figure out some specifics if it's going to be my default. Stuff like auto-spawning trayer so I can connect to wireless and have xmonad ignore the space it's in, keyboard shortcuts, etc

3. Repartitioned my drive when installing Crunchbang, so now there's two 20GB partitions for operating systems (will put a rotating cast of alternate and special purpose distros in the currently unused one), and one 210GB mount for pretty much everything in /home, but not /home itself as I have found sharing dotfiles between different OSes is an accident waiting to happen. Rather, I created a bunch of symlinks to the main directories on the mount.

ln -s ~/documents /mnt/media/documents
ln -s ~/music /mnt/media/music

and so on. The plan is to have a script ready to go, likely stored on the mount, to add that mount to fstab and create the symlinks. Something like:

sudo echo "/dev/sda3\t/mnt/media\tauto\tdefaults\t0\t1" >> /etc/fstab
 
O

opticalmace

Member
zoku88 said:
What do you mean?

It's just a storage device.

Or, maybe, you were looking for paritition advice (if you have an SSD and a HDD)?
Click to expand...

I think I read somewhere that you should adjust some OS behaviours to minimize writing to the SSD, for the sake of longevity. I guess I could always be less lazy and google, but was just curious if anyone had some first-hand experience.
 
A

angelfly

Member
thcsquad said:
2. A friend at work turned me onto xmonad so I'm trying it. It's a tiling window manager, so you don't have to bother with moving around windows any longer. Tiling algorithms take care of that for you. The concept of a tiling window manager is awesome, but I need to figure out some specifics if it's going to be my default. Stuff like auto-spawning trayer so I can connect to wireless and have xmonad ignore the space it's in, keyboard shortcuts, etc
Click to expand...

Once you get used to a tiling window manager it's hard to go back. I myself use awesome. If I ever switch it'll be to another titling window manager.
 
T

Tworak

Member
opticalmace said:
Is there anything I need to know about running Ubuntu on an SSD? Thanks.
Click to expand...
TRIM support in the kernel is... sketchy. at least for ext4+journalling. I think hdparm has a/some clean-up scripts that work better, and won't need Ubuntu 10.10 =>.

don't shoot me
if hdparm accidentally
all your SSD
fo srsly
 
P

Pctx

Banned
Tworak said:
TRIM support in the kernel is... sketchy. at least for ext4+journalling. I think hdparm has a/some clean-up scripts that work better, and won't need Ubuntu 10.10 =>.

don't shoot me
if hdparm accidentally
all your SSD
fo srsly
Click to expand...
Pretty much this. I looked into going SSD with Linux and it becomes a giant headache of figuring out what kernel version of which distro of which bla bla bla bla.... you get the idea. I still find it funny that even Windows can't really get SSD stuff right and Mac is the closest to out of the box automatic pilot as SSD's get in terms of configuring them correctly.
 
O

opticalmace

Member
Pctx said:
Pretty much this. I looked into going SSD with Linux and it becomes a giant headache of figuring out what kernel version of which distro of which bla bla bla bla.... you get the idea. I still find it funny that even Windows can't really get SSD stuff right and Mac is the closest to out of the box automatic pilot as SSD's get in terms of configuring them correctly.
Click to expand...

Hmm, I dual boot Ubuntu and Win7 and have a 120GB SSD and a 640GB WD black (as well as a 2TB slow storage drive).

I wanted to put both OSes on the SSD and use the 640 for installing stuff/data. Would you instead recommend putting Win on the SSD and Ubuntu on the HDD? Or do I just need to do some careful research?

Just don't want to mess up my SSD. :p
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
So speaking of Crunchbang the new updated version hit, and they are dropping XFCE all together as well as switching around a few other things. IDK I never really liked the other interface OpenBox, but maybe that's just because it was so foreign to me.

On a side note I noticed the next version of XFCE got bumped from early January to March. Either way 4.10 (did I ever rant on how I have numbering schemes?) should be out by time the next round of Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mint all drop. XFCE needs to do a monthly status update or ever other month on how the new version is coming though on their website.

PS: I still think I'm even more convinced Canonical needs to switch up their thinking and push the LTS to the public at large.
 
tfur

tfur

Member
opticalmace said:
I think I read somewhere that you should adjust some OS behaviours to minimize writing to the SSD, for the sake of longevity. I guess I could always be less lazy and google, but was just curious if anyone had some first-hand experience.
Click to expand...

If your kernel is at 2.6.33 or better, just add "discard" to the mount options with ext4. I have yet to implement this in production.

I have a few hundred servers with INTEL ssd's with mostly ext3 /, with few problems with 2+ years of run hours. Although, we keep all i/o intensive work on standard hdds.

I have a few old OCZ ssd cards that we put a ton of i/o on, and they survived until retirement. These were software mirrored ext3.
 
P

Pctx

Banned
opticalmace said:
Hmm, I dual boot Ubuntu and Win7 and have a 120GB SSD and a 640GB WD black (as well as a 2TB slow storage drive).

I wanted to put both OSes on the SSD and use the 640 for installing stuff/data. Would you instead recommend putting Win on the SSD and Ubuntu on the HDD? Or do I just need to do some careful research?

Just don't want to mess up my SSD. :p
Click to expand...

Honestly support for SSD's on Linux right now is sketch. You might have one of the higher up *Nix guru's tell you otherwise but from a "human interfacing" perspective, Windows 7 at least does most of the work for you. Right now, Ubuntu and other distro's are limited only by kernel versions and support of which you could spend minutes or hours depending on how careful you want to be.

Case in point... do you really want to mess with aligning "virtual" cylinder heads on a linux distro of which you may dual-boot less than 20% of the time? I still am an advocate for using VMplayer or Virtualbox within a windows environment for SSD use.
 
O

opticalmace

Member
Pctx said:
Honestly support for SSD's on Linux right now is sketch. You might have one of the higher up *Nix guru's tell you otherwise but from a "human interfacing" perspective, Windows 7 at least does most of the work for you. Right now, Ubuntu and other distro's are limited only by kernel versions and support of which you could spend minutes or hours depending on how careful you want to be.

Case in point... do you really want to mess with aligning "virtual" cylinder heads on a linux distro of which you may dual-boot less than 20% of the time? I still am an advocate for using VMplayer or Virtualbox within a windows environment for SSD use.
Click to expand...

Good point, but about the bolded bit, I use Ubuntu much more than Windows. I'd say I boot into Ubuntu about 90% of the time on my desktop. Hopefully I can get some more Windows time (i.e. gaming) at some point!
 
Z

zoku88

Member
I really just put Linux on my SSD without even thinking about mount options.

I'm sure there are things about minimizing writes and what not, but most people aren't very IO intensive anyway....

opticalmace said:
Good point, but about the bolded bit, I use Ubuntu much more than Windows. I'd say I boot into Ubuntu about 90% of the time on my desktop. Hopefully I can get some more Windows time (i.e. gaming) at some point!
Click to expand...

I pretty much do the same. That's why my Windows only has a 100GB partition on my HDD (which is annoying. I have to trick Windows into thinking it's on hd(0,0) )
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
zoku88 said:
I really just put Linux on my SSD without even thinking about mount options.

I'm sure there are things about minimizing writes and what not, but most people aren't very IO intensive anyway....



I pretty much do the same. That's why my Windows only has a 100GB partition on my HDD (which is annoying. I have to trick Windows into thinking it's on hd(0,0) )
Click to expand...

Why do you have to trick it? I assume if you're using a new version (aka not XP) it should just find it?
 
P

Pctx

Banned
Tworak said:
UC Berkeley Associate Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer Shel Waggener provides an overview of the recent calmail interruptions. In case anyone is interested in email/sendmail. x]

I use VMware Player since Oracle is worse than satan.
Click to expand...

2nd on VMplayer. Virtualbox I think is garage tinkering with attempts at being enterprise level with some features missing that for Linux (like proper visualization for the kernels) is what made me switch. Plus, we are a VM shop so using VMplayer is more natural.
 
C

CountAntonius

Member
anyway to get my xbox live vision cam working on xubuntu? Looked around online and can't find a suitable driver. Same for my Madcatz te it will read buttons but not the joystick.
 
Z

zoku88

Member
Brettison said:
Why do you have to trick it? I assume if you're using a new version (aka not XP) it should just find it?
Click to expand...

It just .. doesn't work, I guess.

I mean, when you put the Windows disc in, at least, I don't remember being able to select my second disk.

Maybe I don't remember correctly.


I use vmplayer, btw. Though, I've been having problems with vmplayer and gnome-shell.
 
I

IceCold

Member
So guys, I've installed vmware with Xubuntu 11.10. Everything works perfectly except for two things: 1) I'm unable to make compiz work and 2) There is no sound. I tried to add the line "sound.virtualDev = "es1371"" in the .vmx file but it doesn't work. I already have alsa installed and also reinstalled vmware tools. Anyone know how I can fix this?

edit: This is the output that I get when I do compiz --replace ccp:

hvhoM.png


I followed the steps from this website: http://www.howtoforge.com/enabling-compiz-on-xubuntu-11.10-oneiric-ocelot
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Probably some bullshit pulse audio fubar. I'll look around and see if I can help you!

PS: I'm feeling a strong pull to just move to stock Debian. Don't ask me why.
 
tfur

tfur

Member
The problem might be right there. You are software rendering. Check glxinfo or xdpyinfo, and look for direct rendering. If that's not working make sure you have the vmware tools installed to allow hardware rendering from host to guest.
 
I

IceCold

Member
Brettison said:
Probably some bullshit pulse audio fubar. I'll look around and see if I can help you!

PS: I'm feeling a strong pull to just move to stock Debian. Don't ask me why.
Click to expand...

I "fixed" the issue by getting vmware workstation. The issue seems to come with the newer version of vmware player.


edit: I did some more research and turns out that vmware doesn't support open gl on linux right now. Bummer. I have to say though, using a virtual machine is pretty damn awesome.
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
What's your main distro that you run if you don't mind me asking?

Also what are your impressions of Xubuntu beyond this issue of course.
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
So how do you Linux Server peeps determine when you are going to update to a new minor version or upgrade to a new major version?

I ask this because both RHEL and CentOS both got minor updates in the past week or so. Do you update say to 6.2 RHEL ASAP or do you wait? What about going from say CentOS 5 to 6?
 
C

close to the edge

Member
Hi!

I recently bought a new SSD (Crucial m4, 128 GB) and installed Windows on it and I intended to put Xubuntu on there as well. Installation went smoothly, but when I rebooted, there was no GRUB (booted straight into Windows 7). I tried installing again but still nothing. I just tried two different (BootRepair and Rescatux) live images that are supposed to fix GRUB, but neither worked. Is there any BIOS setting (or some quirk with SSDs in general) that I might have overlooked? I have my SSD selected as the default start drive.

Here's the log of the BootRepair application: http://paste.ubuntu.com/771254/
sda is the SSD, sda3 is the partition on which I installed Xubuntu.
 
Z

zoku88

Member
close to the edge said:
Hi!

I recently bought a new SSD (Crucial m4, 128 GB) and installed Windows on it and I intended to put Xubuntu on there as well. Installation went smoothly, but when I rebooted, there was no GRUB (booted straight into Windows 7). I tried installing again but still nothing. I just tried two different (BootRepair and Rescatux) live images that are supposed to fix GRUB, but neither worked. Is there any BIOS setting (or some quirk with SSDs in general) that I might have overlooked? I have my SSD selected as the default start drive.

Here's the log of the BootRepair application: http://paste.ubuntu.com/771254/
sda is the SSD, sda3 is the partition on which I installed Xubuntu.
Click to expand...

Uhm, according to this, grub isn't probably installed on sda. When you install Windows, it usually wipes GRUB. You'll have to reinstall grub.
 
V

Vanillalite

Ask me about the GAF Notebook
Hey this might be premature, but I was thinking since it's almost 2012 that I would maybe create a new |OT| for the new year and beyond. I also might include a little more info in the OP to help out with the newbies. I suck at making good banners though so I'll probably reuse the one we already have made unless someone wants to make a new one and I can give you full credit! :p
 
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