Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[shikitohno]

fdisk -l

Looks like you're missing that space. Fdisk -l works perfectly fine on my install of Fedora over here, and nothing in what I'm updating at the moment would change that. By the way, it's important to keep your system up to date for security and stuff, so I'll teach you how to do that in case you haven't already. I'd say at least once every day or so, you should run either

sudo yum update

or

sudo yum -y update

The -y answers yes to all questions automatically, instead of yum giving you the list of updates and then prompting you to hit y or n to either continue or abort the upgrade. Generally speaking, by the time things leave the testing repos, they're pretty well tested on Fedora and aren't likely to break your system, but you can check here for any news beforehand if you'd like. You could also subscribe to the Fedora announcements mailing list and you'll get announcements of changes and events in your email. Note that the -y flag will work for any yum operation, but I personally only use it for updates and installing packages. Using it for removing a program can bite you in the ass if the package you're removing is a dependency for something important. I managed to accidentally uninstall my entire GUI like this once and had to fix it from a tty. I can't imagine you're looking forward to that, so I'd advise against using -y when you use erase or remove.

I forgot, and lx reminded me, but I did want to mention man pages. Generally, most packages will have some sort of documentation explaining how they're used and the various options for them. These are called man pages, and you can read them by typing

man foo

with foo being replaced with whatever the program is you want to learn about. Not all packages have a man page, but most of them that I've needed one for do.

Man, this turned into a massive post...

Edit2: And while I'm thinking of it, I forgot to mention tab completion. When you're in the terminal, you can hit the tab key to auto-complete command or file names once you've typed enough of the name for the computer to be completely sure of what command or file name you intend to use. For example, you can type fdi and hit tab, and it'll fill it out as fdisk for you. However, in cases where there's ambiguity (you have .Xresources and .Xdefaults in your ~/ and you hit tab after entering .X), hitting tab once will do nothing.

Also, if you come across any instructions for something you're looking to do that tell you to edit a file or enter a directory with . in front of them, like that .Xresources file, the . means it's a hidden file or directory. In Nautilus, the default Gnome file manager, you need to enable the "show hidden files and folders" option in one of the menus. In the terminal, type

ls -a

to see a list of all files and folders in your current directory. To keep you well stocked on reading material, have a tutorial on how to get around in the terminal. I quickly looked through it, and that looks like it'll teach you most of the basic commands for how to navigate and interact with your machine from the terminal. Also worth reading for a good number of people, the article "Linux is NOT Windows." And finally, have this little gem. It'll basically teach you how to ask questions or try and get help with a problem in a way that'll work out best for both you and the people helping you out. It's not something I'm blaming you for, but it takes some time to get used to posing your questions and request for help in an effective manner. The way you posted your problem over at Fedora Forums probably had something to do with why you didn't get any responses at all, despite there obviously being people active on that board. In that post, it doesn't look like you did any of the things in the "Before You Ask" section of that article. It also doesn't really meet the "Be precise and informative about your problem" section's criteria. In the future, if you ask questions on the forum in the manner laid out in this article, you'll make it a lot easier for people to help you, and in turn more likely that they'll take the time to actually do it.

Finally, I was going to tell you this when I woke up this morning, but you'd already managed to install Fedora on your own, so it was a bit late. 10GB of swap space is pretty much overkill. The general rule of thumb used to be make swap the same as your RAM, but it doesn't really hold true any more. 2GB of swap is likely more than sufficient, and 4GB is pretty much safe as you can be. If you're doing something and you get 4GB into swap, you've got some issues to fix with your machine, or you really need to upgrade your RAM if you actually need that much.

And by the way, if you still use torrents at all, I'll recommend rtorrent as a pretty good client. You can do quite a bit to automate things with its config file.

[sgreger1]

So I ran sudo f-disk (the error before was that I didn't start it with 'sudo") and this is what I get. Based on this, does it not appear that the partitions are on sda, but the boot is on sdb?

[samizdat@localhost ~]$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 1500.3 GB, 1500301910016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 182401 cylinders, total 2930277168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x05cd9cda

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048      206847      102400    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2          206848  2741876735  1370834944    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3      2741878782  2906247167    82184193    5  Extended
Partition 3 does not start on physical sector boundary.
/dev/sda4      2906247168  2930274303    12013568    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda5      2742382592  2758004735     7811072   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6      2758006784  2759030783      512000   83  Linux
/dev/sda7      2759032832  2850971647    45969408   83  Linux
/dev/sda8      2850973696  2861361151     5193728   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda9      2861363200  2906247167    22441984   83  Linux

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdb'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


Disk /dev/sdb: 3000.6 GB, 3000592982016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders, total 5860533168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x20075f75

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1            2048  4294963199  2147480576    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

I'm just curious why it says:

 Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System 
/dev/sdb1            2048  4294963199  2147480576    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

Does this mean the device is booting from sdb?

And is it normal that there appear to be 2 swap partitions? Is one of them perhaps used by windows or something?

[shikitohno]

No, that's just the column names. You see the asterisk under Boot by /dev/sda1? That indicates that /dev/sda1 is the only partition marked as bootable. I don't fully understand the boot process, but I'd imagine GRUB puts something in there so that when the computer boots, there's a file that says "Hey, look at this /boot partition over here!" and hands things off to GRUB. And I don't know why you would have to use sudo. Just plain ol' fdisk -l works fine here.

[shikitohno]

For bumpage, sgreger1, since we haven't seen this thread shoot up to the top again, is it safe to say all is going well with your system for the time being? Or just not playing around with it, since it's a weekday and all? Anyway, when you've got time to play with it again, feel free to bump this thread up with your questions, and I'll do my best to answer them.

[sgreger1]

For bumpage, sgreger1, since we haven't seen this thread shoot up to the top again, is it safe to say all is going well with your system for the time being? Or just not playing around with it, since it's a weekday and all? Anyway, when you've got time to play with it again, feel free to bump this thread up with your questions, and I'll do my best to answer them.

Oh no i've been using it every day. I only booted to Windows once to work on some photos in photoshop but have been using Fedora ever since. The desktop interface is very minimalist and very snappy, both things I prefer over Windows.

I am kind of confused about how to install things, as in Windows it all comes in an .exe installer file that does all the work for you but in Linux it seems that there may be a different process depending on what you are installing. I am still playing around with all of the software that comes in the "add/remove software" section so havn't gotten around to downloading anything online yet. Lots of indie games in there that are pretty cool, including some classics. The one I really want to work though (Glest, kind of a warcraft 3 kinda game) doesn't run properly because again my graphics card doesn't jive with it. I guess the graphics card issue is something I will need to work with for the time being. I may try tonight to get photoshop installed there using Wine, but i'm not quite that far yet.

Anyways, everything has been running smoothly and I am loving it. As an OS it is much cleaner, simpler, and faster than Win7 imo. If I had a laptop it would be Linux only. Everything has a small file size and runs without taking up any processor speed which I think would be great for lower end laptops or netbooks.

[lxskllr]

Have you tried using Gimp for images?

For your video card, searching can be fruitful. In my case "8800gt ubuntu 10.04" would likely turn up some good results.

[sgreger1]

Have you tried using Gimp for images?

For your video card, searching can be fruitful. In my case "8800gt ubuntu 10.04" would likely turn up some good results.

Yah i've used GIMP. I know it's allegedly just as powerful but I don't have time to learn a whole new interface and workflow. Easier to just boot into Windows for me. I did download it in Fedora and am going to try and play with it and hopefully learn something.

Also this:

[shikitohno]

Lol, if you think Gnome3 is minimalistic, try installing WindowMaker or ratpoison. I use ratpoison in day to day use, and it makes the default interface look cluttered as all hell. For installing software, first check if it's in the repos.

yum search something

will print out any matches for the search term, and if you see what you want, you can install it with

sudo yum install something

. Photoshop may run through wine, and it might even run pretty well, but you may want to invest some time in learning how to use native tools. They're a lot less likely to suddenly crash on you right after you finish doing some important work and leave you with nothing but a cryptic error message. There's two ways to install programs in Fedora, aside from using yum. You can install from rpms or by compiling the source code yourself. Rpms are relatively easy to use, but don't offer much benefit compared to compiling from source, and I'd consider them inferior for most purposes to just installing binaries from the repos, when they're available. Compiling from source allows you to optimize the code for your specific hardware, so that it'll run as efficiently as possible. In the past, this used to make a huge difference, but these days the difference can often be negligiable, especially when you take into account all the time you spend compiling software and mucking about with your CFLAGS and stuff. I'd recommend waiting until you've got some time to sit down, and learn how to install things from source properly. That'll account for 99% of what you download off the internet to install, if it doesn't come as a pre-compiled binary you can just run immediately. Something relatively simple that could serve as a basic example that covers most aspects of source compilation would be compiling rtorrent. I think the Fedora repos are somewhat out of date, and they still haven't included the patc enabling support for magnet links in the main branch. So compiling that would teach you the basics of applying patches, tracking down dependencies and compiling software. Let me know when you've got a couple hours free, and we can have a back and forth in a chat or something to go over it.

[sgreger1]

I'm going to give installing rtorrent right now. Is there anything worth torrenting software-wise in Linux? I didn't think most programs were even compatible with it?

What I would like to do is figure out how to run Usenet on it. Gonna have to figure that out next.

[sgreger1]

The questions who's answer wouldhelp me the most is letting me know which words are used to describe things. I.e. if something says

[code]cd /home/rtorrent[/quote]

Does CD mean something, like should I replace it with something or just type it as is?

When reading instructions on what to enter into the terminal I just want to be clear on which things I should copy verbatim and which things require me to modify them to my specific system.

While trying to install rtorrent I am using this guide from the rtorrent website:

http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/wiki/Install



[quote]
Building

./configure; make; make install

Building from latest development version (trunk)

(note: you need to have SVN installed)
Before the first use, you have to get the latest trunk version. This needs to be done only once. In this example, the directory in which you store the sources is /home/rtorrent/trunk

cd /home/rtorrent 
svn co svn://rakshasa.no/libtorrent/trunk

Then, everytime you want to update your copy and recompile libTorrent and rTorrent:

cd /home/rtorrent/trunk svn up cd libtorrent ./autogen.sh ./configure make make install cd ../rtorrent ./autogen.sh ./configure make make install

(hint: you can put that in a file and run it everytime you want to recompile from trunk)


So here for example I am entering cd /home/rtorrnet but it says no such file or directory. I already did yum install rtorrent and also yum install svt + it's dependencies.


If you could help me understand some of the syntax here so that I know what to copy verbatim and what to modify that would be a big help. Example, I don' know what a "trunk" is.

[sgreger1]

I am guessing I have to first install the trunk so that when I point to it, there is something there for it to find.

Under the install page it takes me to this link of "releases", but I not sure which release is the correct one. Should I choose the one at the bottom which appears to be the newest release?

http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/downloads/

[sgreger1]

Also, what is the best IRC client for linux? I see lots of them but am not really into IC and am not sure which is best for linux.

[lxskllr]

cd means change directory; just like DOS

rtorrent should be in the repos. Compiling from source should be the last step you take. Check your package manager first. I prefer qTorrent btw for a desktop client.

[sgreger1]

cd means change directory; just like DOS

rtorrent should be in the repos. Compiling from source should be the last step you take. Check your package manager first. I prefer qTorrent btw for a desktop client.

Okay so i figured out that cd lets me change the directory I am pointing it at like you said. Oddly if I for example have a folder called rtorrent in my home folder I can't cd /home/rtorrent, it won't recognize the folder.

I need to figure out how the file structure works so that I can get the directories right, do I need to enter my username in the path like /sgreger1/home/rtorrent? I need to play around with it more tonight to figure that out.


Is qtorrent better than utorrent? What exactly are "repos"?

[lxskllr]

Okay so i figured out that cd lets me change the directory I am pointing it at like you said. Oddly if I for example have a folder called rtorrent in my home folder I can't cd /home/rtorrent, it won't recognize the folder.

I need to figure out how the file structure works so that I can get the directories right, do I need to enter my username in the path like /sgreger1/home/rtorrent? I need to play around with it more tonight to figure that out.


Is qtorrent better than utorrent? What exactly are "repos"?

Unless you've done something strange, when you first open your terminal, you're in your home directory. In your example above cd rtorrent should get you there.

qBittorrent looks very similar to uTorrent. Honestly, it isn't quite as good, but for the average user, it works just as well, and looks familiar. Put it this way, I like it well enough that I'll use it on Windows if I go back to that system. Being free is more valuable to me than the features uTorrent provides.

rTorrent is probably a better client, but perhaps not as user friendly. If you have a fringe need, like setting up a torrent server, or doing weird stuff, rTorrent might be better for you. I haven't used it, but ruTorrent is a graphical front end that makes rTorrent look like uTorrent. That might be worth a shot if you stick with rTorrent.

"repos" is just a slang term for repositories, or "app store" if you prefer. Every distribution has a repository where you get software, and updates to your software. The "Software Center" you were playing with earlier is a graphical front end for fedoras repository. Synaptic(which I believe you also have) is more finely grained, and lists all the little things. That's what I prefer to use on my systems.

Anyway, if you want rTorrent, qBittorrent, Chromium, or what ever, your first stop should be the repository. Open up Synaptic, or Software Center, and search "rtorrent" it should then popup, and you click to install it. You'll then get updates whenever that package is updated in the repository. When you compile from source, you don't get those updates. You'll have to keep track of it yourself, and update as necessary. That's why compiling isn't ideal, aside from being a minor PITA.