Mandriva - Day 2

Armed with my WEP key, retrieved from my security spreadsheet, I booted into Linux after managing my morning emails.

The configuration went without a hitch, and the wireless network burst into life using the Windows driver and ndiswrapper. I began to wonder whether I'd have been able to read this value using OpenOffice Calc.

The trick I was missing yesterday is that (as far as I can tell) there are two standard ways of navigating the filesystem, and an application can use one or the other. Some apps have an entry for each disk that uses the disk label. I wasn't recognising my original disk because it still has the manufacturer's label (a six-digit numerical value). I'll have to relabel this as "Windows". Other apps - and this includes OpenOffice - navigate below the Linux root only.

In this case - as I remembered eventually - all the hard disks are under /media. hd is my original Windows disk, hd2 and hd3 are the two partitions on the new disk. And there under '/media/hd', as if by magic, is all my familiar filestore.

One problem though. My security spreadsheet is secured with an Excel password, and this seems to crash Calc. It will happily open any of my other spreadsheets, but the password protected one is a certain app killer.

I had a brief poke around at some other applications, including the Gwenview photo viewer and KMail Mail client, but before long it was time to head out to pick the girls up.

On my return I discovered the network had stopped working. I tried reconfiguring it, but this threw some error about not being able to find the ndiswrapper service! I rebooted and the network came back to life, but after 20 minutes or so it fell over again. This time I managed to resuscitate it using the Network Center. Not sure if there's a timeout value somewhere I haven't seen, or it's just a bit flaky.

Anyhow, with a live network I published my first blog entry from Mandriva (the Brideshead book review below), and WROTE my first entry (this one). That's two activities I can tick off my list.

Problems/weirdness so far identified:

1. The automatic update utility is failing to find one of the updates it says I need (rpmdrake)
   
2. Whenever I click on "Help" it ALWAYS says the help file doesn't exist
3. I really need to make a list and attack this in a coherent way, cos at the moment I'm jumping from one cool tool to another. A lot of fun, but not much discipline ;o) I noticed there's a personal organiser included in this distro - KOrganizer - which might be a good place to keep the list!
4. Sometimes when I launch something, it'll say "oh, I need an update" and bugger off somewhere to get it. This has, on occasion, taken 20 minutes.
   

I'm loving it though. And Nat's already said "can you put Linux on my laptop, please?" lol. Probably not until I'm a bit more up to speed meself. I feel like I don't have a clue what I'm doing, but it's too exciting to leave alone.

Mandriva - Day 1

I finally had some free time yesterday to begin playing with Mandriva - my chosen Linux distro.

I'd already downloaded and burnt the CD image I needed. This is "Mandriva One" - which includes everything I need for a basic system and comes as a "live" CD, meaning the system can be booted from the CD before installing onto disk.

So feeling a small frisson of excitement, I booted the CD. About 15 years ago I remember a colleague at work taking the - then extraordinary - step of installing Linux on a works desktop. Back then he'd had trouble getting it started on account of there not being a video driver for the proprietary video card in that model of PC. This was the first time the massive benefits of the open source community had been brought home to me in a concrete way. He posted the spec of the video card on a Linux forum and when he came back into work the next day, someone in the States had written him a driver.

Fifteen years on, and I expected no such problems. Linux has matured into an OS that is suitable for moderately computer literate users to use, and the hardware I'm using has become much less proprietary. What I DID expect to have a problem with, is the fact that I haven't touched any flavour of Unix for about ten years, so I'll be crawling up that learning curve again almost as a novice (but with some dimly remembered snippets of information about file systems, forks, processes, and strangely-named utilities).

Mandriva booted without incident, and I ran through the initial config to set language, keyboard layout, and timezone. Faced with a desktop that was at once familiar and different, I launched Firefox. The Linux version looks very slightly "clunkier" than on Windows but other than that it appeared unchanged. However, I had no network connection. There is no LAN cable in this PC, and the wireless network was not configured. After a few seconds scratching around I found the right place to set up a wireless connection, but the distro did not include a native driver for my Netgear WG111T USB wireless dongle, so (I discovered) I'd need to use the Windows driver with something called an ndiswrapper.

I marked this down for future reference as I figured there wasn't much point doing the configuration while booted from the CD, and moved on to try a Live Install. I quickly learned that I couldn't install onto an NTFS-formatted partition. The boot partition has to have a native Linux filesystem (thus negating my formatting of the new disk earlier in the week). I used the Linux partitioner to recreate a boot partition. This looked extremely scary and reminded me how powerful Linux is and how easy it is to wreck an entire system if you don't keep your wits about you. I was glad I'd chosen to install Linux onto a completely separate disk. It was easy to stay away from doing any damage to Windows, as that is all on "sda" (Mandriva's name for my primary hard disk) while Linux is going on "sdb".

Having created a boot partition I tried the Live Install again, only to find it was asking where I wanted it to put the swap space. I backed out of the install. I'd rather spend some time reading up exactly what I need to do, instead of attacking each new requirement as it arises and getting through the process one painful step at a time.

Before closing down, I took a look at Open Office Writer - the Linux equivalent of MS Word. Again, it looks kind of familiar but with some differences. I had hoped that I'd be able to hold a single central document store and access it from both Windows and Linux (while I'm in this transitory stage), but I couldn't get the Writer file open dialogue to navigate outside the filestore of /usr/guest. I'm hoping this will be a restriction of the CD boot.

It was time to reload Windows and do some reading. I found out where the Netgear driver is, and I read up a few forum entries on installation prerequisites. Apparently, I need:

1. A swap file. Formatted as "Linux swap" and about 512MB in size. One of those dim memories tells me the swap space needs to be at least as big as the PCs memory, so I figured I'd give it a gig.
2. A root partition, mounted as "/" and formatted as "ext3" (Linux has a bewilderingly huge list of alternative file systems, which as a long-time Windows user, where you have the choice of FAT, FAT32, or NTFS, I found somewhat daunting. But as usual with such things, you appear to be able to ignore most of them - which probably have specialist functions - and stick with one or two basic types). The forum said 1GB is "more than enough" for this, but since space isn't a problem for me, and the entry may be outdated, I decided to go with 5GB
   
3. A home partition (where all the user files are kept). This can be "as big as you like" but given that it's readable only by Linux I decided to restrict it to 50GB to start with. At some point once everything is working I'll format the rest of the disk as NTFS and use it for media files, which should be readable by either system

Armed with this new information, I rebooted from the Mandriva CD and completed the Live Install successfully, choosing a graphical GRUB loader to replace the Windows loader. At one point the install told me it had found a whole load of hardware drivers that I didn't need, and asked whether it was OK to leave these out. I figured yeah, why not? Going ahead and rebooting from the hard disk, my first task was to get the wireless connection working. I think some of you will be ahead of me here, but guess what? Yep - the wireless package was one of those things the install had decided I didn't need. Ouch.

I tried to search for a way to install the wireless package from the CD, but with my woefully limited knowledge I couldn't find a way of mounting the CD so it was accessible to the software installer, and using the file browser I couldn't find anything on the CD that looked like it might be a wireless package. Time to reinstall.

I hoped there'd be a way to select individual packages to include - the wireless one was clearly visible in the list - but it is an "all or nothing" exclusion, so this time round obviously I had to elect to include them all. Rebooting AGAIN (this could get boring!) I navigated successfully to the Wireless configuration page and hit my final frustration of the day - I'd forgotten to make a note of our WEP key. I'd run out of time for playing with Mandriva - and almost run out of patience if I'm honest - but I'd learned a lot even though it didn't feel as though I'd achieved much. Better luck next time, hopefully.

More room please

Having dumped the contents of Paul's iPod onto my PC when he was here in March, and continued to take 3-400 photos of each Chorlton Players' dress rehearsal this year, I found recently I was down to my last 10GB on the 250GB disk that came with this puter.

At around the same time, the appalling performance of this machine (running Windows) finally became too much to bear. Whether it was the dreadful McAfee AV code, which seems to hang everything up while it does its updates, or Firefox, which begins to behave like a dog once you get beyond 8 open tabs, or Windows itself, which regularly goes into a coma doing the simplest of tasks, that represented the final straw I couldn't tell you, but one thing became clear: I couldn't go on like this.

These two threads came together when Nikki found an incredible deal on a Samsung 1TB (terabyte) disk from Microdirect. SATA-2, 7200rpm and a 32MB onboard cache, for barely more than £70 including VAT and carriage. I couldn't resist. The disk arrived shortly after Nikki's folks flew back to Canada and I've been waiting for an opportunity to fit it. Said opportunity finally arose yesterday afternoon, when we arrived home from Chesterfield.

There were a few head-scratching moments. Firstly, from what I'd remembered, Fujitsu-Siemens PCs have a pretty comprehensive wiring loom included - enough to populate the cabinet with as many disks as it is designed to take. I was half right. The loom is IDE-only. Fortunately Annie just happened to have a spare SATA signal cable and power adapter lead in her bottomless bottom drawer. Once I'd collected those I came to the second minor headache.

The FJ disk cradles are a little different to the ones I'm used to, bearing in mind it's more than ten years since I fiddled around inside a PC case. All the hard disks I've fitted in the past have screwed into the baseplate from underneath. This PC has two double-height cradles that are sprung on one side and accept the screws - 3 - through the other side. Once I'd figured that out, the new disk went in just fine.

With the original system disk being SATA, there was only one remaining SATA port on the motherboard, so I'll be in trouble if I need another extension disk. I'll probably have to get hold of a copy of Ghost and clone the original disk onto a new larger unit.

BIOS and Windows recognition of the disk was all automatic (I'd read some forum entries that suggested earlier BIOSs would baulk at large disks, but I haven't had that problem so I must be up-to-date) and once I'd solved the final hurdle (remembering how to partition and format a disk using Windows - it's been so long since I did it that I used fdisk last time!) all was fine.

Formatting the whole disk took a little under 3 hours, and I now have a nice clean 50GB M: (for Mandriva) partition and a 882GB N: (for New data) partition all ready to take my first steps to Linux. After threatening to do it for at least five years, I'm finally going to give it a go. Next stop Mandriva installation! :o)