Linux [Mint]

[scarecrow]

Hey folks, i just changed my OS from Windows to Linux. Cant say its the best decision I've made but it certainly isn't the worst. It runs alright. But it takes a while to get used to considering the fact that most important commands are done through the command line. It has a lot of softwares such as Word processors and Image Editing softwares. Linux has a lot of custon effects, but it slows down my comp when i enable them [i have compiz fusion installed]. Furthermore, I have an ATI Reidon graphics card. ATI drivers dont have good support for Linux, [hence my comp slows down when the effects are enabled]

But its not all that bad without the Effects. UT actually runs on Linux. I just installed it last night, but its running hilariously slow. I guess there'll be no UT for me untill i fix this bug XD.

Anyhow, I'm posting this Thread to hear all of your opinions of Linux XD.

[This is not my Desktop, but I have similar effects]
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Y4wB3GUemVw&feature=related

[Coyote]

I've been using Linux as my desktop system for almost ten years now. I've gone from Slackware to Red Hat to Debian to Ubuntu now and have had a great time with it. I finally upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 and it's been running great on my big honkin' flashlight (thx, Moo). I boot into Windows when I need to for work, but otherwise spend most of my time in Linux there as well. There's very little reason to switch back to Windows I find. Yeah, there's a number of web sites that have movie content that isn't flash so I can't download it, but that's never been a big deal for me.

I don't know what distro you're using, but even Radeon accelerated graphics have pretty good support in Ubuntu. The reason I got into UT99 and UT2K4 was because of the Linux support. Other than the Half Life series, I played only games that would play under Linux (Quake Wars and Enemy Territory included) and never had a problem. Only recently with the huge selection of great FPS games out there have I gone back to gaming exclusively in Windows. By keeping gaming separate from productivity, I keep my Windows install pretty lightweight.

[HTM~ZenEye]

I was running Ubuntu feisty fawn for a while and I really liked it. Linux > Windows in a lot of ways however the gaming support is not there. I too, use ATI graphics and the driver support isn't the greatest. So I switched back to windows for gaming. In a production environment Linux is king, as well as an inexpensive server OS.

[Coyote]

So if you're really insistent on using Linux as a gaming machine, I hear that Wine (http://www.winehq.org/) and, more specifically, the commercial version of Wine called Crossover (http://www.codeweavers.com/) can allow you to run Windows-only games on Linux pretty well. In all, its probably cheaper in the long run than paying for an XP license anyway.

I've found though that Ubuntu's restricted ATI drivers work pretty well on my laptop... the only downer is that I can't suspend due to a stupid flag not being sset in the default kernel. I don't run 3D games on my laptop anyway, so I just use the open-source (e.g. SLOW) drivers instead so I can get the benefit of suspending. Anyway, if your compiz is slow, then you probably don't have an accelerated X server working properly. You might want to try Ubuntu if that's not what you're running now. The device support is really impressive in general. Just my $0.02 on the distros...

So, I have to ask... kingofhearts, you do know that MINT also stands for Mint Is Now TOS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiNT), right? Although, I guess that would actually properly be spelled MiNT. This was an interesting little POSIX-like system that I played around with back in the mid-nineties. However, after doing a bit of Googling, I guess you must be referring to Linux Mint (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint) as the distribution you're running now? I'm curious what you meant by [MINT] in your subject title for this thread.

[HTM~Par]

I have an ATI card and played UT on linux before (mine was fedora 7) and it ran fine. Good ATI drivers are a little hard to find, but they are out there.

[Coyote]

Yeah, ATI's support is nowhere near as awesome as NVIDIA's, but they're a heck of a lot better than they were a few years ago. The closed-source accelerated drivers should work pretty well and depending on your distro, should not be difficult to install. YMMV though.... I have no experience with anything besides NVIDIA.

[HTM~ZenEye]

I just downloaded the new Ubuntu 8.04 and there were catalyst drivers listed in with the software packages. I was only running from live cd so i didn't actually get to install or play with them. Ubuntu seems to be trying really hard to make a user friendly desktop os, maybe give it a try there hearts.
I read somewhere that this newest version was being considered for public release as a commercial desktop OS. It even has a "one click" dual boot install option, says it will install right along with an existing windows system.

To me it seems to be a monkey in the middle OS, still to advanced for the average joe and too crippled for the linux pro.

"Linux is not for wimps" - ComTIA Linux+ Intro video

[Coyote]

I agree with most of that but disagree with the statement that it's too crippled for the linux pro. Name one thing that you can't do with Ubuntu that you can do with any other Linux distro (assuming the same architecture and standard PC hardware...) If you don't want a specific package because its too old or you want to patch the source, you just uninstall the Ubuntu binary and install everything from source into /usr/local/... no difference there from any other linux distro. If you don't like Gnome, KDE, or whatnot, there's nothing stopping you from installing any window manager of your choice or running just from the text console either.

On a slightly tangental topic, I just upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 (amd64).

[HTM~ZenEye]

ok maybe crippled was too strong a term lol. I'm a linux noob, forgive me ;)

[Coyote]

Perhaps a more accurate sentiment is that the linux desktop environment (regardless of distro) is too crippled for the *nix pro. While yes, there are lots of pretty apps and control panels to do things, I do damned near everything save for reading email and surfing the web from the command prompt. The only thing I use the GUI tools for is handling the network since in Ubuntu they work pretty well. Frankly, for the longest time, the only reason I ran X windows was because I could open a ton of individual command lines simultaneously. Oh and it was useful for viewing graphics once in a while as well. lol

<Standing on soapbox>
I like Ubuntu for the following reasons

1) It is derived from one of the strongest completely community-supported Linux distributions: Debian. Because they share the same core, packages from both distros can be shared between them with ease.

2) Ubuntu is sponsored by a South African company called Canonical and has an emergency backup fund so that Ubuntu can be run like a company w/o having to chase profit essentially. They can instead focus on making releases every 6 months with long term-support releases LTS every 18 months I think. So you can either wait 1.5 years to upgrade to a new stable distro or take a chance and upgrade every 6 months to get the latest and greatest that they have to offer (and submit bug reports!!!)

3) It's got a huge support forum where you can find pretty much everything you need to know about a problem if you dig long enough. The large forums are a detriment too since often times questions just fall off the front page w/o being answered because people don't bother to take the time to read the forums to see if there is already an open thread on that topic. In general, the knowledge contained within the forums outshines the noise by a long shot.

Read more here. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Linux)
</Standing on Soapbox>

4) And the name is just so darn fun to say. :D

Anyhow, I'm posting this Thread to head all of your opinions of Linux XD.


Well, kingofhearts, you've certainly got me spouting off my opinions on Linux...

[HTM~Par]

I liked ubuntu, mainly because of it's more user friendly interface. Even my computer illiterate parents could use ubuntu as "easily" (I use the term loosely) as windows xp. The main reason any linux pro might hate ubuntu is its lack of a default root account that is readily accessible, but with some playing around you can get into the true root. Other than that, sudo works fine for anything you need to do.

Speaking of root/sudo...I'm hungry, eye :)
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sandwich.png

[Coyote]

The main reason any linux pro might hate ubuntu is its lack of a default root account that is readily accessible, but with some playing around you can get into the true root. Other than that, sudo works fine for anything you need to do.

I hate having to type sudo in front of everything so when I want root, I just do 'sudo -s' to get a root shell so I have access to everything I need. This is nicer than using 'su' on Debian or whatnot because it seems to properly preserve the DISPLAY variable so I can open X apps as root if I need to.

Now, if you want a proper root account that you can log in remotely to, it turns out it's pretty easy to enable. I did a quick Google and found this:

http://www.ducea.com/2006/06/21/ubuntu-how-to-enable-the-root-account/

Essentially, you just give the root account a password and you have a fully functional root login that you can log into from the console or that you can do a 'su' into. However, for security and safety issues (e.g. protect yourself from yourself) it's better to just keep using sudo IMHO.

[HTM|Minion]

I hate having to type sudo in front of everything so when I want root, I just do 'sudo -s' to get a root shell so I have access to everything I need. This is nicer than using 'su' on Debian or whatnot because it seems to properly preserve the DISPLAY variable so I can open X apps as root if I need to.

Now, if you want a proper root account that you can log in remotely to, it turns out it's pretty easy to enable. I did a quick Google and found this:

http://www.ducea.com/2006/06/21/ubuntu-how-to-enable-the-root-account/

Essentially, you just give the root account a password and you have a fully functional root login that you can log into from the console or that you can do a 'su' into. However, for security and safety issues (e.g. protect yourself from yourself) it's better to just keep using sudo IMHO.

<explode> my head </explode>

[HTM~Par]

<explode> my head </explode>
or, in php:

<?php
$head = MINIONS_HEAD;
explode $head;
echo "Head destroyed!";
//PHP is much more powerful :P
?>

[scarecrow]

lol, nice to see such great feedback. :)

I've named this Forum Topic Linux [Mint] simply because I'm using the Mint Distro of Linux XD
[simply stated; there is no clever message within the thread title]

I'm surprised that there's someone here [coyote] who has been using Linux for over 10 years. I've been using Linux for only about 1 week. I'm sure there's much i can learn from [all of] you. [including Parlatz]

I've actually used Ubuntu as my first Live CD. I liked it, but i actually found Linux Mint more user friendly than Ubuntu. As far as being a noob is concerned, I've had only a few problems with Linux. Otherwise, everything about Mint is running smooth. The only crappy thing about Linux [or ATI as i should say] is that there are no decent ATI drivers for linux. I've searched everywhere for a decent ATI driver for my Linux Mint. I've come across "Envy" and "EnvyNG". They both installed a ATI driver which [for now] works. But the graphics is just horrible. When i turn on my effects [if i dare], my whole comp almost crashes..... As far as i can see, There's no hope for people who wish to run Linux flawlessly [3D-graphics-card-wise] through an ATI graphics card. As you can see, my main concern is my ATI graphics card acting retarded due to the lack of a decent Driver. Furthermore, perhaps thats why even though i installed UT2K4 flawlessly, my computer hilariously lags when i play.

I might even create a partition for Windows XP [Professional] just for UT....
Actually, i was going to do that just a few days ago but my EX-gf started bitching so i guess I have to fix my X-girlfriend before i fix my PC....
I cant wait to fix my Comp and get back to playing UT with the HTM clan.

Linux cant help but make me feel stupid.... whenever i get error messages... i always render them to be something like these....

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Bad Command or File Name. Good try, though."

"Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue."

"Scandisk is now checking your hard drive. You can start praying."

"Smash forehead on keyboard to continue."

"Bad command or filename. Go stand in the corner."

"C code. C code run. Run, code, run! PLEASE!"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Coyote]

I started mucking around with Slackware Linux on x386 and x486 PCs back in 1992 or 1993 (I think) back in college as it was a suitably CS-major-geek sort of thing to do in my spare time (that and playing Doom when it first came out...lol). In grad school my advisor used SunOS and Solaris and I quickly started using Red Hat Linux at home since that's what the department recommended for installing on PC hardware. I used Linux all through grad school and now I use it almost exclusively where I work. I still need to work in XP and MacOS sometimes though and try to make sure my software runs in all 3 operating systems (Python is a beautiful thing) but Linux is where I'm most comfortable.

My favorite error from a Linux machine was: You don't exist. Go away. What happened was that the /etc/passwd file had become corrupted on the filesystem I was using and when I tried to execute a command, it tried to determine my UID but couldn't. Not knowing what else to do, it insulted me. I could just imagine the greybeard who wrote that thinking "this isn't likely to happen very often, and if it does the machine is probably hosed... I'll make the error message witty"

One final thought... maybe the installer had a few quirks to it, but I've been very happy with Ubuntu's ATI support in general. The drivers went in automatically on my laptop and they worked very well.

[scarecrow]

how come the thread disappeared ?

[HTM~Par]

disappeared? its still here

[Coyote]

Do you mean that it fell off the listing on the listing of recent threads in the HTM home page? I noticed that, too but I haven't thought of why.

[HTM|Minion]

Do you mean that it fell off the listing on the listing of recent threads in the HTM home page? I noticed that, too but I haven't thought of why.

This particular forum section wasn't on the list for the "recent threads" on the homepage to pull from, but I did add it just now. I'm not sure what exactly he is referring to by "disappear".

[scarecrow]

lol, this if the first site where I'm participating in the Forum [trying my best actually].

when i said "disappeared", i meant to say that i couldn't find it. I'd usually click "Forum>Linux[Mint]"
But yesterday, i did the exact thing but i couldn't find this thread. Hence, i thought it "disappeared"

But i just figured out the "show threads" section which was an unfamiliar action to me. so thanks for the help Minion.

[HTM|Minion]

lol, this if the first site where I'm participating in the Forum [trying my best actually].

when i said "disappeared", i meant to say that i couldn't find it. I'd usually click "Forum>Linux[Mint]"
But yesterday, i did the exact thing but i couldn't find this thread. Hence, i thought it "disappeared"

But i just figured out the "show threads" section which was an unfamiliar action to me. so thanks for the help Minion.


I see now,you are talking about the "most recent post" for the forum section on the right side of the main forum page. If another thread in the same section gets a post last it will reflect that instead.

If you click "User CP" you can see a list of all threads you are participating in that have new posts.

[Coyote]

I just check under my avatar on the main page for if there are any new threads and, if there are, click on the link to see them.

Minion, don't you have to actively subscribe to a thread to see the note about new posts in thread that you're participating in? I haven't subscribed to any by default and so clicking the User CP link doesn't show anything for me.

[HTM|Minion]

You may be right Coyote, I was under the impression that any thread you reply to was "subscribed" to. I see threads under "User CP', but only the ones I've replied to.

I think the "New Posts" function shows any new post regardless if you are subscribed or not. I usually just open the forum main page and look for new posts there. We've had Vbulletin for a while now and I'm still trying to learn all the different functions. :)

[HTM~Par]

I just check under my avatar on the main page for if there are any new threads and, if there are, click on the link to see them.

Minion, don't you have to actively subscribe to a thread to see the note about new posts in thread that you're participating in? I haven't subscribed to any by default and so clicking the User CP link doesn't show anything for me.

Ditto.

[HTM|Sp@ceMonkey]

Great if you have massive amounts of free time on your hands just to learn an operating system. I used to favor dos over windows. rofl...

[Coyote]

True, if all you're doing is working on it in your spare time. For me it was an absolute necessity as the work I was doing at my university pretty much required it. It's amazing how quick you can pick something up when you go for the "full-immersion" approach.

[scarecrow]

Ok.. i need some major help..

I was extremely disappointed with ATI when i discovered that ATI has stopped Linux driver support for most of its Graphics cards. UT wont run at all with my current driver.

Currently I'm tired of Linux and want XP back. I have the genuine Window XP pro CD. But, the problem is, my computer wont boot into the XP CD. Furthermore, when i get to controls [BIOS], its some weird language [with English ALT letters....]. I need a way to overwrite Linux. Can someone help me?

[HTM|Minion]

Installing linux has changed your motherboard's bios settings page? I've never run linux, but that sounds awful scary....

[HTM~ZenEye]

Linux wouldn't overwrite BIOS. You can't navigate through the BIOS at all?

You have to somehow get your pc to boot from CD. Can you boot from a linux disc?

If the language thing becomes a problem you can reset your BIOS settings with a jumper on the motherboard. Please tell me you have your motherboard book? If not, its going to be a pain finding the BIOS reset jumper. If you don't have your book you might be able to find one for download on your motherboard manufacturer's website.

[scarecrow]

After 12 hours of intense struggle. I've finally managed to re-install window's back in my PC.

With the help of a really good friend, i learned that the window's CD wont boot into any HD if it already has an OS running [i guess other then Windows]. Hence, I've used the Live CD of linux to get into my partitions [through the use of GParted]. I've gotten rid of all of my partitions. After that, i still kept on getting language errors. Finally, fed up, i just kept on hitting 'enter' and all of a sudden, window's was being installed on my PC

o_O"

I'm still having trouble installing the ATI driver for my graphics card... but that shouldnt be such a major issue.... i should be back to playing UT when i wake up [too tired.... worked all night installing windows....]

[Coyote]

Just to dispel any unnecessary FUD... I've never heard of Linux mucking with ANYONE's BIOS before. It sure as heck has never happened with any machine I've ever used with Linux.

ATI's Linux support has always been sub-par AFAIK. I've been an NVIDIA fan from day 1 and since those cards have amazing Linux support, I've never EVER looked back if I have a choice in the graphics card I use. The only time I deal with ATI is on my work laptop where I didn't have a choice in the card and I typically just run the open-source non-accelerated drivers there because it's too much of a pain to get accelerated GL working (and I don't need it anyway.)

When installing Linux, I HIGHLY recommend installing a second harddrive just for it. You keep your Windows install on the first drive and let Linux do its thing on the 2nd drive. I typically disconnect the Windows drive completely as an added precaution. I manually add the dual boot functionality back to the GRUB (or LILO... LOL) menu after reconnecting the drive. If you don't want to muck around with that, you can choose which OS to boot by changing the boot HD from your BIOS. I know Ubuntu is good about Doing The Right Thing (TM) when it comes to installing the boot loader, but that depends entirely on the age of your motherboard I find. (I've had Linux install the boot loader on the first drive on my IDE chain when I wanted it on the 2nd Linux drive instead--that's why I play it safe these days.)

[Coyote]

Whew.

I finally bit the bullet and got hardware accelerated 3D support AND suspend/resume working on my work Thinkpad T60p with an ATI graphics card. There were a number of issues to contend with...

1) Instead of using the Ubuntu restricted driver, I opted for using a useful utility called Envy http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html which is a great graphical front-end and set of scripts for downloading both ATI and NVIDIA drivers for your system, installing them, and configuring your X11 system to work with them. No problems there.

2) Because the restricted drivers were disabled, I had to manually edit several config files to remove the newly created fglrx driver from the modprobe blacklist so that the stupid driver could be loaded on startup.

3) Then I had to remember how to re-enable compiz so that I could verify that my desktop effects actually worked. XD This was in the appearance manager rather than the advanced desktop settings dialog.

4) One of the benefits of using the ATI driver is that you get ATI's cool GUI for setting the parameters of your display as well as enabling clone or extended desktop on an external monitor attached to the display. After some hacking around, I figured out how to make it work consistently well (I do seem to have to restart X when I plug in the external display...meh).

5) Finally to get suspend/resume working, I had to change several options in the /etc/default/acpi-support file AND edit a script that was invoked whenever suspend was invoked so that the scripts in the pm-utils package were not invoked but rather acpi script /etc/acpi/sleep.sh with the 'force' option.


Narf


Each one of those items up there took a fair amount of Googling, hacking, and rebooting mainly so that I could learn what was going on under the hood and so that I could properly isolate the problems that I was dealing with. The good thing was that each of these issues has been run into before and solved with someone's post to a blog or forum. The downside is that most of those posts are older and refer either to a different version of the hardware or an older version of the OS. Thus, some creative interpretation on what I could use from each of those posts was required in addition to some extrapolation and a bit of guesswork.

I love Linux and use it for 99% of my work and personal efforts (I game only on Windows these days). When Linux works, it's a beautiful thing. There's so much about Ubuntu that _just_works_. However, when Linux doesn't work so well, expect to have to spend as much time learning about what's under the hood as one would do if you were trying to learn how to manually hack the Windows registry to fix a driver problem or something.

The problem here that I'm having is mainly that ATI doesn't have particularly stable drivers for Linux. I NEVER have these sorts of problems with NVIDIA cards. When I was running the non-accelerated open source graphics drivers before, suspend/resume worked 99.9% of the time and it was great. So help me, I will NEVER buy another laptop with an ATI card. You'd think that I would have learned my lesson with the T40p that I got a few years ago... very similar issues there...


::Sigh:: At least it's all working now. I'll have to do a lot more testing, but so far so good. I did notice that my reported temperature on the ATI chip idles at 80C and in operation hits around 105C. I wonder if that's accurate... I'll have to boot into Windows sometime and measure the temps there to see.

[Coyote]

More fun Ubuntu 8.04.1 issues with my Thinkpad laptop...

So during one of the kernel updates, someone at Ubuntu thought it would be a good idea to change the wifi driver for the Intel PRO 3945ABG chipset from a version that used a proprietary set of firmware info that you had to download from Intel directly (this is the ipw3945 driver) to a version of the driver that is completely free and contains no proprietary extra stuff (this is the iwl3945 driver). I haven't read any of the Ubuntu discussion lists regarding all of this, but I suspect the reason is just because of the desire to remove drivers that require special proprietary data to work. This makes them somehow "less free" than otherwise.

So, I didn't even know that this was a problem. I got the kernel upgrade and it worked fine at home for me on my Linksys router. Most of the time it worked just fine at work for me as well since I typically don't use my laptop in my office and only use the wifi when I'm walking around to meetings in different parts of the buildings where I work. What's important here is that the problems only really started to crop up when I was in my _office_. I've had wifi problems in my office before. Apparently, I'm right directly between two of the access points in my hallway and so I've had issues with really weak connections in years past. Apparently they fixed that but the fact remains that I seem to be in a strange access point configuration in there.

So, in my office, I had started to notice weird issues with my trackpad and keyboard. Essentially the keyboard would start skipping or repeating keystrokes and the trackpad became almost unresponsive for periods of time. After seeing weird errors cropping up when I read the syslog (via the command: dmesg) I finally tracked the issue down to the iwl3945 driver. Apparently LOTS of people have been having problems with this driver and to make matters worse, they removed the ipl3945 driver completely from the latest kernel upgrade! Grrr... I tried to make the iwl3945 driver work using the tips recommended to me from the forums but it was still very problematic in my office. Finally, I found a website that showed me how to manually install the ipw3945 driver back in the latest Ubuntu distribution which I did and everything seems to work. I'll be testing this again in my office in Monday to see if it's really the driver or something else with my laptop. Note, I don't see this problem generally in Windows XP on this machine.

I haven't considered rolling myself a custom kernel for my Ubuntu distributions mainly because I really don't want to get into the habit of having to support that level of detail for myself. I haven't done that since I had a Debian installation a few years ago and frankly, I don't miss it. I just want to get work done and don't want to worry about kernel hacking these days. That would be the right solution to the problem since then I could compile in any driver that I wanted. The problem with that is that with each new kernel release, I'd have to remember to recompile those changes back in with a new kernel and there would exist the possibility that other parts of Ubuntu might not work as advertised because other services that expected some kernel setting might also not work.

In case anyone cares, here's how to get the older ipw driver working on a laptop with the 3945 Intel wifi chipset on the very latest (as of Aug 2, 2008) Ubuntu 8.04.1:

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/using-ipw3945-instead-iwl3945-in-hardy.html

[HTM|Minus]

i tryed it before.. mandrake 10.. got teamspeak working,played tux racer and supertux,crack attack... but i couldent get games to install.... and i coudlent get ut2004 to install. i couldent mount the disk. so i said f*ck it and killed the dualboot with xp

[Coyote]

Bummer. ut2004 has always worked great for me on Linux.