Personal computing discussed

Moderators: renee, SecretSquirrel, notfred

 
CampinCarl
Graphmaster Gerbil
Posts: 1363
Joined: Mon Jul 04, 2005 9:53 pm

Thu Apr 12, 2007 6:29 pm

*nods* I plan to get one that supports Linux when I head off to college. I'm not quite sure of the printer situation on the student network at OSU, but I'll probably pick up my own just to be sure.
Gigabyte AB350M Gaming-3 | R7 1700X | 2x8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3200 (@DDR4-2933)| Samsung 960 Evo 1TB SSD | Gigabyte GTX1080 | Win 10 Pro x86-64
 
PRIME1
Darth Gerbil
Posts: 7562
Joined: Mon Apr 22, 2002 5:07 pm
Location: , location
Contact:

Thu Apr 12, 2007 9:40 pm

Posting in support of Kubuntu.

Not a fan of Gnome
Image
"Give me a scotch. I'm starving" ~ Tony Stark
 
BerserkBen
Gerbil Elite
Posts: 867
Joined: Mon Oct 20, 2003 2:40 am
Location: Detroit

Thu Apr 12, 2007 10:17 pm

PRIME1 wrote:
Posting in support of Kubuntu.

Not a fan of Gnome


If you like Kubuntu I suggest you try the new Mepis 6.5. The install is really nice and easy, has options to automatically loads Nividia drivers if you have newer Nvidia cards and also has an option for people with p965 chipsets so that it recognizes the Jmicron IDE crap. The default is a KDE desktop with Beryl already installed and ready to go. It uses the Ubuntu/Debian repositories so adding repositories is almost the same as if you were using Kubuntu. Give it a shot.
 
bitvector
Grand Gerbil Poohbah
Posts: 3293
Joined: Wed Jun 22, 2005 4:39 pm
Location: San Francisco, CA

Thu Apr 12, 2007 11:06 pm

axeman wrote:
The final word on Linux printing is... get an HP printer. Love 'em or hate 'em, they have about the best support.

I'd say any printer that speaks native Postscript qualifies as having "about the best support."
 
notfred
Maximum Gerbil
Posts: 4610
Joined: Tue Aug 10, 2004 10:10 am
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Fri Apr 13, 2007 9:25 am

axeman wrote:
The final word on Linux printing is... get an HP printer. Love 'em or hate 'em, they have about the best support.

http://hplip.sourceforge.net/

Yup, I checked things out when my 7 year old Epson inket died recently and treated myself to a Laserjet 3350. Network printing and scanning from any PC in my house FTW!
 
BerserkBen
Gerbil Elite
Posts: 867
Joined: Mon Oct 20, 2003 2:40 am
Location: Detroit

Fri Apr 13, 2007 9:34 am

notfred wrote:
axeman wrote:
The final word on Linux printing is... get an HP printer. Love 'em or hate 'em, they have about the best support.

http://hplip.sourceforge.net/

Yup, I checked things out when my 7 year old Epson inket died recently and treated myself to a Laserjet 3350. Network printing and scanning from any PC in my house FTW!


WERD! I got my Dell 3100cn to work as a network printer with my Linux box as well! Weird thing was the instructions I found on the web to get it to work had me using Lexmark drivers. As long as it worked I'm happy though.
 
PRIME1
Darth Gerbil
Posts: 7562
Joined: Mon Apr 22, 2002 5:07 pm
Location: , location
Contact:

Fri Apr 13, 2007 9:36 am

BerserkBen wrote:
PRIME1 wrote:
Posting in support of Kubuntu.

Not a fan of Gnome


If you like Kubuntu I suggest you try the new Mepis 6.5. The install is really nice and easy, has options to automatically loads Nividia drivers if you have newer Nvidia cards and also has an option for people with p965 chipsets so that it recognizes the Jmicron IDE crap. The default is a KDE desktop with Beryl already installed and ready to go. It uses the Ubuntu/Debian repositories so adding repositories is almost the same as if you were using Kubuntu. Give it a shot.


I shall look into it. I have a 2.4c that's waiting for something to do. Although it's been resisting a bios upgrade and I would hate to spend any more money on it.
Image
"Give me a scotch. I'm starving" ~ Tony Stark
 
steelcity_ballin
Gerbilus Supremus
Topic Author
Posts: 12072
Joined: Mon May 26, 2003 5:55 am
Location: Pittsburgh PA

Tue May 01, 2007 6:33 pm

Hey guys, so far still enjoying linux and learning a bit. I am currently having a hard time with using a wireless nic with my router. My laptop in the living room (much farther than my bedroom in proximity to the signal) can get a "very good" signal, I don't think linux detects it at all.

I tried setting it up manually using all the same settings. Is there some trick to it?
 
monts
Gerbil Jedi
Posts: 1537
Joined: Sat May 07, 2005 7:58 pm
Location: Western Australia (Gods Own Country for those uncertain)

Tue May 01, 2007 6:50 pm

pete_roth wrote:
Hey guys, so far still enjoying linux and learning a bit. I am currently having a hard time with using a wireless nic with my router. My laptop in the living room (much farther than my bedroom in proximity to the signal) can get a "very good" signal, I don't think linux detects it at all.

I tried setting it up manually using all the same settings. Is there some trick to it?


A lot depends on the level of security that you are using. I use wpa_psk here on my two gentoo boxes (one access point, other client) and while it took a bit of setting up it works fine. I've also had macs hook into to the access point as well.
iMac 27” | MacBook Air.
Cricket and AFL (Fremantle Dockers) tragic.
 
mattsteg
Gerbil God
Posts: 15782
Joined: Thu Dec 27, 2001 7:00 pm
Location: Applauding the new/old variable width forums
Contact:

Fri May 04, 2007 2:40 am

Heh, (k)ubuntu's installer does NOT like my machine(figured I'd give a few *nix desktop apps a shakedown and see if they suck any less. Since some of them are kde stuff I figured I'd go that way). The boot would dead-end unless I did the noapic nolapic dance (then it worked two out of three times). When it got into the live environment and I clicked on the installer, the screen where you choose your install partition would just sit there blank for extended periods of time. Then, as wonderful icing, grub ordered my drives differently when in the OS than when booting, so the all of the entries in the grub boot menu were wrong. No worries, it installed grub to the wrong drive's boot record anyway. Took two tries to get the livecd to boot again so I could put grub where it actually belonged.

I can't imagine how someone who didn't know what they were dealing with would even begin to respond to that.

It was nice being able to use a web browser while installing, but I can think of few installers that have tried to throw that many obstacles in my path. I hope it does a much better job on other people's hardware, for their sake.
...
 
elmopuddy
Graphmaster Gerbil
Posts: 1041
Joined: Thu Dec 27, 2001 7:00 pm
Location: Montreal, Canada
Contact:

Fri May 04, 2007 8:39 am

The only issues that I have run into are:

- can't install easily onto Intel RAID, not a big deal, if it was mission critical RAID 1, I could mess around with DMRAID and get it working

- Ubuntu 64 will not boot/install with BIOS memory re-map enabled, again not a show stopper, 64bit 'nix is a PITA IMHO :)

So right now, I only see 3 gigs of RAM, have Vista 32 on 74g raptor, Ubuntu 7.04 32 on 36 gig raptor, and have a 7200.10 320g NTFS for my files (with an external 300g for backups)

7.04 is quite a bit easier to install/use than previous versions, I am in love with it!

All my apps working now, just messing with lm-sensors now.. fun fun 8)

EP
Gamer - i7-7700K, 16GB, GTX1060, 950 PRO, 840EVO
 
bhtooefr
Lord High Gerbil
Posts: 8198
Joined: Mon Feb 16, 2004 11:20 am
Location: Newark, OH
Contact:

Fri May 04, 2007 8:49 am

FWIW, on printing, check OpenPrinting. Lists of available drivers there.

I'm running the official Minolta driver for the magicolor 2430DL with my 2300DL - foo2zjs (the driver included with Ubuntu) wasn't printing in color. I did have to use Alien (sudo apt-get install alien) to convert the RPM to a Debian package.

As for the 3100cn using a Lexmark driver, I'm not at all surprised - most Dell printers are rebadged Lexmarks. I believe their low-end black and white lasers are rebadged Samsungs, though.
Image
 
steelcity_ballin
Gerbilus Supremus
Topic Author
Posts: 12072
Joined: Mon May 26, 2003 5:55 am
Location: Pittsburgh PA

Fri May 04, 2007 8:50 am

I had a spare router that I changed the subnet on, and am using it as a switch. It's wireless as well so now my fine friends and family have two networks to choose from. :lol:

Yea I just hardwired that in. I'd rather not use wireless myself anyhow. Oddly enough, this older First gen wireless G router (among the first linksys) is broadcasting a much stronger signal from my room (buried in the back of the apt.) than the main router in the master bedroom. Meh.
 
notfred
Maximum Gerbil
Posts: 4610
Joined: Tue Aug 10, 2004 10:10 am
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Sun May 06, 2007 8:58 am

mattsteg wrote:
Heh, (k)ubuntu's installer does NOT like my machine(figured I'd give a few *nix desktop apps a shakedown and see if they suck any less. Since some of them are kde stuff I figured I'd go that way). The boot would dead-end unless I did the noapic nolapic dance (then it worked two out of three times). When it got into the live environment and I clicked on the installer, the screen where you choose your install partition would just sit there blank for extended periods of time. Then, as wonderful icing, grub ordered my drives differently when in the OS than when booting, so the all of the entries in the grub boot menu were wrong. No worries, it installed grub to the wrong drive's boot record anyway. Took two tries to get the livecd to boot again so I could put grub where it actually belonged.

mattsteg, that sounds really bizarre that it would have THAT many problems. Given the need for "noapic nolapic" I'm wondering if your BIOS is feeding some screwy ACPI data to the OS. Have you checked for any BIOS updates for this machine? Or tried some of the methods suggested at places like http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Fix_Common_ACPI_Problems
 
mattsteg
Gerbil God
Posts: 15782
Joined: Thu Dec 27, 2001 7:00 pm
Location: Applauding the new/old variable width forums
Contact:

Sun May 06, 2007 10:50 am

notfred wrote:
mattsteg wrote:
Heh, (k)ubuntu's installer does NOT like my machine(figured I'd give a few *nix desktop apps a shakedown and see if they suck any less. Since some of them are kde stuff I figured I'd go that way). The boot would dead-end unless I did the noapic nolapic dance (then it worked two out of three times). When it got into the live environment and I clicked on the installer, the screen where you choose your install partition would just sit there blank for extended periods of time. Then, as wonderful icing, grub ordered my drives differently when in the OS than when booting, so the all of the entries in the grub boot menu were wrong. No worries, it installed grub to the wrong drive's boot record anyway. Took two tries to get the livecd to boot again so I could put grub where it actually belonged.

mattsteg, that sounds really bizarre that it would have THAT many problems. Given the need for "noapic nolapic" I'm wondering if your BIOS is feeding some screwy ACPI data to the OS. Have you checked for any BIOS updates for this machine? Or tried some of the methods suggested at places like http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Fix_Common_ACPI_Problems
I don't really care since it wasn't a huge deal to get stuff working. The drive issues were just due ide and scsi being flip-flopped, for example. It was relatively trivial to get everything going, just annoying to run into all of those little bugs. The ACPI issue is something that I've run into with other installers on this machine at times as well. No biggie to work around.
...
 
sativa
Grand Gerbil Poohbah
Posts: 3044
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2002 7:22 pm
Location: lafayette, la

Sun May 06, 2007 11:13 am

I'm posting from ubuntu 7.04 w/ desktop effects on. The more I use it, the more I like it.

Some issues though: My creative x-fi is not supported.
I can't get flash installed on 64bit firefox.
Science is forbidden. Laboratories manufacture danger!
 
sativa
Grand Gerbil Poohbah
Posts: 3044
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2002 7:22 pm
Location: lafayette, la

Sun May 06, 2007 11:53 am

well I fixed flash on firefox 64, although it uses a ton of processor power (guess thats no different from the windows version)...

still would like to get some x-fi action :/
Science is forbidden. Laboratories manufacture danger!
 
FroBozz_Inc
Darth Gerbil
Posts: 7363
Joined: Mon Apr 21, 2003 9:35 am
Location: Hockeytown, MI

Wed May 16, 2007 7:43 am

I fired up Ubuntu last night on my wife's old machine.
(P4 Northwood 1.6, only 256Megs RAM, 7200rpm disk, ti4200 video).

All I can say is, WOW.
It's been nearly 2 years since I last tried it out (this is probably my 5th time). The state of Linux on the desktop is coming right along.

I only messed with it for like 20mins, but I was quite impressed.
Even with only 256MB of RAM, it performed well.

The automatic updates: very cool feature! Works better then Windows Update.

I then tried to access my Windows network. I was amazed to see this "just work" like it did. First time I ever had an experience like that. Configuring Samba to work used to be a pain in my ass IMHO. This was seamless and wonderful.

Then I tried to play a XVID movie, to see how that would work. It said it couldn't do it, then immediately popped up a dialog to download the codecs it needed. I did this, and again - it just worked, and I was playing the movie in like 45 seconds.

Then I was tired and went to bed. But, WOW - so far so good. Much better then my last experiments with Suse Linux awhile back. There's a lot of polish on Ubuntu. No wonder MS is getting nervous.

Next up: Testing sound, printing over the network, testing Open Office, CD/DVD burning, Bittorrent, etc.
 
mattsteg
Gerbil God
Posts: 15782
Joined: Thu Dec 27, 2001 7:00 pm
Location: Applauding the new/old variable width forums
Contact:

Tue Jun 05, 2007 1:13 pm

Interestingly enough, a friend recently installed Ubuntu and had grub misnumber his drives as well. I'm wondering if this happens consistently when you boot off of sata/scsi with IDE drives present.
...
 
5150
Minister of Gerbil Affairs
Posts: 2389
Joined: Wed Jun 04, 2003 6:22 pm
Location: Sales Tax Is For Commies

Tue Jun 05, 2007 1:33 pm

I installed Ubuntu 64-bit last night but decided that I'm going to switch to 32-bit since I'm already running into some software incompatibility (Flash). I started the DVD torrent download when I left for work (don't know what comes with the DVD download versus the CD download) so I'm going to take another crack at it tonight.

edit: Also, not having X-Fi drivers for Linux really blows.
 
bitvector
Grand Gerbil Poohbah
Posts: 3293
Joined: Wed Jun 22, 2005 4:39 pm
Location: San Francisco, CA

Tue Jun 05, 2007 2:33 pm

mattsteg wrote:
Interestingly enough, a friend recently installed Ubuntu and had grub misnumber his drives as well. I'm wondering if this happens consistently when you boot off of sata/scsi with IDE drives present.

I don't know if this is the same situation, but I've seen this happen a few times when the installer image uses a different (typically older) kernel than whatever is current in the distro. Since a lot of mobos have a melange of different IDE and SATA controllers (on chipset, off chipset extra SATA, off chipset RAID, etc.) you can get changes with the ordering. And, of course there are always issues when a driver moves to using libata since that makes everything go from hd* to sd*. I've seen it also happen when messing with BIOS AHCI/IDE/Native/etc. settings, BIOS upgrades, solar flares, etc.
 
mattsteg
Gerbil God
Posts: 15782
Joined: Thu Dec 27, 2001 7:00 pm
Location: Applauding the new/old variable width forums
Contact:

Tue Jun 05, 2007 2:40 pm

Seems like a poor idea for 1) anything short of major kernel versions have changes like that 2) installers to use different kernels than they install, knowing this.
...
 
bitvector
Grand Gerbil Poohbah
Posts: 3293
Joined: Wed Jun 22, 2005 4:39 pm
Location: San Francisco, CA

Tue Jun 05, 2007 3:10 pm

mattsteg wrote:
Seems like a poor idea for 1) anything short of major kernel versions have changes like that 2) installers to use different kernels than they install, knowing this.

#1 depends on your view of what the Linux kernel people should be doing with their releases. They don't see their job as to provide releases that can immediately be booted by the average end-user without the potential for pain. They have a narrower focus and I think that's appropriate. Although "releases" aren't just like checking out the current git revision, they are checkpoints and it is somewhat left to the upstream "consumer" (typically the distro, but sometimes an experienced end-user) the job of making a release GA-quality.

For #2, distros like SLES, Debian stable and RHEL don't tend to have installers with different kernel versions than what the distro runs although the kernels are often heavily patched and stuff is backported (in the case of RHEL), but changes are less drastic and more controlled. Distros that update much more frequently and like to be more bleeding edge tend to suffer from this a lot more. There's a tradeoff, because people want them to support brand new hardware, but it's tough to do that and update your installation images frequently because of the large bandwidth cost of distributing to mirror sites. This is part of the reason why the kernel that shipped on the FC5 CDs was broken for binary drivers. They knew it before it was actually released, but they couldn't afford to repush 5 CD ISOs + 1 DVD ISO times N architectures to a bazillion mirror sites. If people used netinstalls much more ubiquitously, it would probably be more feasible to solve #2.

My favorite experience like this was the reverse: using an install image for Debian testing with a kernel from unstable that someone had built specially. I used it because my IDE controller was not supported in the testing kernel. It installed testing on my system and then promptly failed to boot since it had installed the older testing kernel.
 
mattsteg
Gerbil God
Posts: 15782
Joined: Thu Dec 27, 2001 7:00 pm
Location: Applauding the new/old variable width forums
Contact:

Tue Jun 05, 2007 3:16 pm

bitvector wrote:
mattsteg wrote:
Seems like a poor idea for 1) anything short of major kernel versions have changes like that 2) installers to use different kernels than they install, knowing this.

#1 depends on your view of what the Linux kernel people should be doing with their releases. They don't see their job as to provide releases that can immediately be booted by the average end-user without the potential for pain. They have a narrower focus and I think that's appropriate.
Even if you do buy into that style of development as appropriate, why the insane disconnect between"big, scary changes" and tiny little version number increments? Big change, big modification of version number. Small change, small modification.
...
 
bitvector
Grand Gerbil Poohbah
Posts: 3293
Joined: Wed Jun 22, 2005 4:39 pm
Location: San Francisco, CA

Tue Jun 05, 2007 4:13 pm

mattsteg wrote:
Even if you do buy into that style of development as appropriate, why the insane disconnect between"big, scary changes" and tiny little version number increments? Big change, big modification of version number. Small change, small modification.

Well, that's part of the reason they went to four part kernel numbering. I preferred the old split odd/even minor version devel/stable branch system, but there are long threads on lkml about the merits of either approach. But as far as "big, scary changes" go, the renaming of devices in doesn't necessarily count as a big scary change from their perspective, even if it could be from an inexperienced user's perspective. Similar, a major SMP locking change would be a big scary kernel change that would have virtually no impact from a user's perspective. Since they're using a different viewpoint for classifying the "scope" of their changes, their choice of version increments may seem puzzling (and, of course, sometimes they're just wacky and inconsistent from any perspective). There's also a huge variance in how people and developers think about version numbers. Ruby does the same thing with 1.8.x having seemingly major and incompatible changes from 1.8.x-1. And I don't get the popularity of never changing the major version number and then dropping it in favor of the minor version number either (a la Java). But all of that is perhaps a matter of taste.

From a broader perspective, the x86/amd64 desktop market with super-rapid hardware changes is really quite a pain to support and the scope of Linux kernel is way bigger in terms of architecture support. When you look at it through the x86 lens, though, it looks a bit weird, because driver changes are the majority of changes that echo through that area (in terms of their perceptible impact on end users), but they're not necessarily considered big deals from the larger view. If their goals were only supporting that segment, I'm sure they'd make different choices. Sometimes it's simple like, "mobo A has ICH8 SATA ports and ChinaCom ver2.0 SATA ports -- the latter were unsupported in version 2.6.X, but they added the proper PCI ID in version 2.6.X+1 and now those other SATA ports are active and now the numbering changes." Adding a PCI ID isn't a major change necessarily, though.

BTW, when I say it's "appropriate," I mean they have the right to define the scope of their responsibility how they want, and I don't think it's unreasonable for the kernel developers to not worry about end-to-end concerns of making releases for an individual user rather than to distros or integrators. Of course, who handles that last part is unclear. The Linux community is not coherent or monolithic like the BSDs when it comes to end-to-end issues. There's a bit of a disconnect in philosophy between different distros and people, but I don't want to get into a huge philosophical debate about "the right way to do X."
 
mattsteg
Gerbil God
Posts: 15782
Joined: Thu Dec 27, 2001 7:00 pm
Location: Applauding the new/old variable width forums
Contact:

Tue Jun 05, 2007 4:18 pm

bitvector wrote:
But as far as "big, scary changes" go, the renaming of devices in doesn't necessarily count as a big scary change from their perspective, even if it could be from an inexperienced user's perspective.
I'm sorry, only a fool considers changes that can break booting to be "minor"
bitvector wrote:
Similar, a major SMP locking change would be a big scary kernel change that would have virtually no impact from a user's perspective.
And only a fool would consider that minor as well. So?
...
 
bitvector
Grand Gerbil Poohbah
Posts: 3293
Joined: Wed Jun 22, 2005 4:39 pm
Location: San Francisco, CA

Tue Jun 05, 2007 4:24 pm

Whether they break booting depends on your bootloader and many other factors.

But, dude, can you ever be civil? Next time I'll remember not to reply to your perpetual Linux trolling.
 
mattsteg
Gerbil God
Posts: 15782
Joined: Thu Dec 27, 2001 7:00 pm
Location: Applauding the new/old variable width forums
Contact:

Fri Jun 08, 2007 11:29 pm

Awesome, kernel upgrade broke booting again (through no fault of the kernel).

When writing grub configuration files, whatever upgrade process used by "standard" ubuntu installs and kernel upgrades consistently misnumbers my hard drives, improperly enumerating the IDE drives ahead of SCSI. Will altering my device.map to be correct instead of the incorrect BS that it's been filled with be understood by the ubuntu tools so I don't have to fix this crap with every kernel upgrade, or do they use some silly nonstandard tool with a proprietary configuration file somewhere?
...

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest
GZIP: On