Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[lxskllr]

Oh okay I didn't realize it came pre-packaged. I thought I would have to go track them down and figure out how to open them from within ubuntu.

It's not prepackaged, Your downloading them, but you do it from the command line in one string, and it'll take care of any dependencies those packages may have. If a guide says you need packages x y and z, those packages may have dependencies of a b and c, which in turn have dependencies of l m and n so on, and so on... Trying to sneakernet something like that can be a real nightmare. I've had to do that before. If you have a net connection though, it all gets taken care of for you.

You'd type sudo apt-get x y z It'll tell you all the other packages needed, and after you give it the ok, it downloads, and installs them.

[sgreger1]

It's not prepackaged, Your downloading them, but you do it from the command line in one string, and it'll take care of any dependencies those packages may have. If a guide says you need packages x y and z, those packages may have dependencies of a b and c, which in turn have dependencies of l m and n so on, and so on... Trying to sneakernet something like that can be a real nightmare. I've had to do that before. If you have a net connection though, it all gets taken care of for you.

You'd type sudo apt-get x y z It'll tell you all the other packages needed, and after you give it the ok, it downloads, and installs them.

Wow that is incredible. Shit like this is why i want to give linux a try.

[shikitohno]

Man that would be outstanding if you could at least help me make any amount of progress on this. You can take over the whole computer if you want and do whatever. I can watch and learn from the experience. I at least know how to make partitions so hopefully we can fill in the gaps if it boots you out!

I wouldn't be opposed to trying it. You would have to forward port 22 on that computer so that I could access it remotely. You can just do this by logging in to your router (usually typing 192.168.1.1 in a browser will bring you to it's control panel) and choose to forward port 22 for the computer we'd be installing on. You can usually find pretty exact instructions on how to forward ports by googling "port forwarding router-model guide" or something similar. You'd have to do the first two commands here. After that running dhclient eth0, yum install openssh and /etc/init.d/sshd start, one after another and in that order should be enough to get us started, and we'd be able to make an attemp. And for that second command in the guide /usr/bin/anaconda -liveinst -method=... should work fine. You don't need to have as much space in between things as it shows in that guide, and I doubt it would work if there was more than one space in between the separate bits.

Do you have anything on the 3TB hard drive? If not, I'd try to install to that just to minimize any potential damage just in case something goes wrong. And not that I think you'd try and screw me over, but just to cover my ass, I'll warn you that as with any installation of an OS, there's always the potential that something could just go mind-bogglingly wrong. I don't foresee any issues, but if we go with this, you're taking the risk onto yourself that something might go bad and you just wind up with a computer even more broken than before. While I would say the chances of this are very slim, I can't be held responsible for any damage resulting from this, and unless you find a computer vendor that takes payments in snuff, I doubt any sort of legal action would really fix the issue for you. With asses covered, I believe that this is something well within my abilities, and if at any point I feel like some element of it was beyond my ability to safely pull off, I'll abort the install and tell you so. That said, let me know if you still want to go ahead with this, and if so I'll try my best to get things working for you. If you've got a spare computer and you want to talk about it or just be able to get feedback from me while in the process, feel free to drop into ##snus on irc.freenode.net and we can discuss to your heart's content.

Edit: Unrelated, but since you're in here lx, I figure you'll see this relatively quickly. All night tonight, I'll go to hit 'Submit Post' and the forum acts as if I'm clicking off to another page before submitting my post, popping up the "Are you sure you want to leave?" bit while submitting my post anyway. Anyone else getting this tonight, or just me?

[lxskllr]

Wow that is incredible. Shit like this is why i want to give linux a try.

It's a positive, and a negative. With Windows, everything gets packaged into a single installer, and you end up with larger file sizes, and duplicate files throughout your drive, but it sure is easy if you don't have net access. Linux keeps the file sizes down, and doesn't have the duplication, but if your working without the net, you end up running back and forth a hundred times cause it'll error out when you try to do the install wanting extra packages. Get those packages, and it wants more, and more, and more... :^D

Overall I prefer the Linux method. It's tidier, and generally less problematic, but god help you if you need to install something without a network...

[shikitohno]

Looks like it might not just be myself experiencing some buggy posting tonight. Server seems kind of sluggish here too.

[lxskllr]

I keep double posting, and have to delete one. The server's running like ass :^S

Edit:
and yea, I get that stupid script asking about leaving. I hate that, and get it a lot due to my crappy internet. The internets good tonight, but the server appears not to be.

[shikitohno]

Any idea what's bogging it down, or is it just a classic case of assy server?

Edit:: Actually, sgreger, I'm about to call it a night. 11:20PM here, and I've been up since 5PM yesterday. I'll be back tomorrow, though, so let me know if you're still interested.

[lxskllr]

No idea. That would take an admin, or maybe someone at the datacenter to see where the problem is. In general, I think we get a lot of buggy behavior due to the database, but that's me not really knowing much. Just inferring it, and comparing it to other sites with problems of known causes. The server we're on is Debian btw.

[sgreger1]

I wouldn't be opposed to trying it. You would have to forward port 22 on that computer so that I could access it remotely. You can just do this by logging in to your router (usually typing 192.168.1.1 in a browser will bring you to it's control panel) and choose to forward port 22 for the computer we'd be installing on. You can usually find pretty exact instructions on how to forward ports by googling "port forwarding router-model guide" or something similar. You'd have to do the first two commands here. After that running dhclient eth0, yum install openssh and /etc/init.d/sshd start, one after another and in that order should be enough to get us started, and we'd be able to make an attemp. And for that second command in the guide /usr/bin/anaconda -liveinst -method=... should work fine. You don't need to have as much space in between things as it shows in that guide, and I doubt it would work if there was more than one space in between the separate bits.

Do you have anything on the 3TB hard drive? If not, I'd try to install to that just to minimize any potential damage just in case something goes wrong. And not that I think you'd try and screw me over, but just to cover my ass, I'll warn you that as with any installation of an OS, there's always the potential that something could just go mind-bogglingly wrong. I don't foresee any issues, but if we go with this, you're taking the risk onto yourself that something might go bad and you just wind up with a computer even more broken than before. While I would say the chances of this are very slim, I can't be held responsible for any damage resulting from this, and unless you find a computer vendor that takes payments in snuff, I doubt any sort of legal action would really fix the issue for you. With asses covered, I believe that this is something well within my abilities, and if at any point I feel like some element of it was beyond my ability to safely pull off, I'll abort the install and tell you so. That said, let me know if you still want to go ahead with this, and if so I'll try my best to get things working for you. If you've got a spare computer and you want to talk about it or just be able to get feedback from me while in the process, feel free to drop into ##snus on irc.freenode.net and we can discuss to your heart's content.

Edit: Unrelated, but since you're in here lx, I figure you'll see this relatively quickly. All night tonight, I'll go to hit 'Submit Post' and the forum acts as if I'm clicking off to another page before submitting my post, popping up the "Are you sure you want to leave?" bit while submitting my post anyway. Anyone else getting this tonight, or just me?

First of all:

1) I am having the same issue re: it asks me "are you sure you want to leave the page?"
2) Snuson is running slow as shit, it's the only website that takes me forever to load today
3) Every post by Lx is duplicated.

I am going to forward my port to you now, just gotta log into my router real quick.

1) My X: drive (3TB) actually has my most important information on it. Most but not all of it is backed up currently. Let's try to reduce **** ups.
2) I understand **** ups happen and will not hold you legally or in any other way responsible for damaging anything if something goes wrong. This statement is admissible in court

Give me two seconds and I will be right back.

[shikitohno]

Ah, well I was hoping it was free if only for a couple things. One, if it doesn't give me the option to make custom partitions, I'd have to bail out immediately because I wouldn't be able to tell the installer to just use /dev/sda5-9, rather than formatting the whole disk and giving you a 1.2TB /home. And secondly, if somehow the partitions were made as they should be on /dev/sdb and something happened to cause issues with them (say they somehow got corrupted at the end of the install), if it was installing to /dev/sdb then you'd still have your Windows install perfectly intact, rather than rebooting to find you have no OS at all. They aren't things that I would consider serious risks, but I'd prefer to err on the side of caution if I could help it, especially when dealing with someone else's machine.

Also, lx, it seems the common thread in our problems today is Debian linux or its descendants.

Anyway, off to bed, I'll post in here again when I wake up tomorrow.

[lxskllr]

Also, lx, it seems the common thread in our problems today is Debian linux or its descendants.

Anyway, off to bed, I'll post in here again when I wake up tomorrow.

:^D

Goodnight :^)

[sgreger1]

God damnit. My router won't let me log in and I called tech support but xfinity charges $40 per call to answer any tech support questions now. Absolute bullshit in every way, they literally asked me to pay $40 to reset my password. Give me another minute to figure this out.

[sgreger1]

Ah, well I was hoping it was free if only for a couple things. One, if it doesn't give me the option to make custom partitions, I'd have to bail out immediately because I wouldn't be able to tell the installer to just use /dev/sda5-9, rather than formatting the whole disk and giving you a 1.2TB /home. And secondly, if somehow the partitions were made as they should be on /dev/sdb and something happened to cause issues with them (say they somehow got corrupted at the end of the install), if it was installing to /dev/sdb then you'd still have your Windows install perfectly intact, rather than rebooting to find you have no OS at all. They aren't things that I would consider serious risks, but I'd prefer to err on the side of caution if I could help it, especially when dealing with someone else's machine.

Also, lx, it seems the common thread in our problems today is Debian linux or its descendants.

Anyway, off to bed, I'll post in here again when I wake up tomorrow.

K so I will transfer the contents of my 3TB drive to my primary one and then we ill do everything on the 3TB drive so nothing gets messed up or lost. I'll do that tonight but as it takes a few hours given that there's like 500GB of shit on there we will pick this up in the afternoon tomorrow whenever you come around. Thank you again for your help! Hopefully I can get my router issue figured out by then too, I cannot believe comcast charges $40 to reset your password, absolute ****ing nonsense. This is what happens when you allow monopolies.

[sgreger1]

Hah! Checked out Fedora 16. Burnt the liveCD, plopped it in, it immediately deleted Ubuntu and installed itself, no problems. Using Fedora 16 now, took 10 minutes, GPT not a problemo. Dualbooting like a boss. Loving it.


Edit: For the record I kind of liked Ubuntu better (only because I used to use a mac so it looks more familiar) but Fedora is awesome too. I'll take it considering it took me literally 10 minutes to install. I'll learn more about Linux and then switch if necessary later on. Thanks for the help all both fo you!

Edit 2: Is it just me, or is there no minimize/maximize options in Fedora? I can't maximize a window or anything, I have to manually change it's size. Wtf?

[lxskllr]

Edit 2: Is it just me, or is there no minimize/maximize options in Fedora? I can't maximize a window or anything, I have to manually change it's size. Wtf?

Welcome to Gnome3, where everything's been simplified to the point of retarded. :^D

There's a Gnome tweak tool, but I don't know what all it does. I think the best way of fixing it is installing Xfce.

Edit:
My smartassery aside, give Gnome3 a try, and do some reading on it. Some people love it, though I'm not one of them. Keep in mind there's differences between the different GNU/Linux disros. While Linux is Linux, they all have a bit of a different spin, and if you're reading a guide for one distro, it may require some tweaking to work for you.

Remember the niches I was talking about before? fedora's niche is it's a test bed for RedHat. New ideas get tried out, and they stay on the leading edge of development. That means new packages/technologies will generally hit fedora before many distros. Get involved in their community forums, and read up. There may be a free n00b book on fedora out there. I have one for Ubuntu. That'll give you an idea of how things are done, as opposed o Windows, or OSX.

Edit:
Here's a book on fedora14. It won't exactly match what you're using, but it's close enough for the general concepts.
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/...uide-en-US.pdf