Messages

1

General Software Discussion / Re: Making the Switch-03: First impressions and first problems after installation

« on: June 25, 2007, 01:35 PM »

Glad I could shed some more light on this "crazy linux" thing.

lanux128: Thats a bummer. The next version of Ubuntu should will get _real_ proprietary winmodem driver support thru the new restricted driver manager. Now that Ubuntu actively has people working on it, maybe they will be able to come up with something. For the time being, if you have a copy of the windows drivers, theres a good chance ndiswrapper will work; originally created to run proprietary wifi driversm it basically runs the drivers thru wine. But be forewarned it can be quite a vexing mistress at times...

Ubuntu 7.10 Announcement - https://lists.ubuntu...007-June/000304.html

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General Software Discussion / Re: Making the Switch-03: First impressions and first problems after installation

« on: June 19, 2007, 01:47 PM »

lanux128: The problem you are having is related to using WinModems (A.K.A Softmodem), is a modem with minimal hardware capacities, designed to use a host computer's resources (mostly CPU power and RAM but sometimes even audio hardware) to perform most of the tasks performed by dedicated hardware in a traditional modem. The modem hardware tends to be nothing more than a telephony port with the modem firmware being run inside the windows driver. They are much cheaper to make, so that are becoming more and more common. You might be luckily and have a model that you can use the generic minicom to connect with, otherwise linmodems.org (as you found) will try to sell you a linux driver.

More Info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winmodem

good research, zridling.. i must be like light years behind as only recently i found out that GNU/Linux doesn't support dial-up modems (serial or USB).. instead you have make a trip to http://www.linmodems.org to complete the process..

P.S. i was installing Ubuntu 6 & Vector Linux 5.8 on a P3 with 328MB RAM..

-lanux128 (June 10, 2007, 05:42 AM)

I would suggest anyone considering using automatix to read https://help.ubuntu....ty/RestrictedFormats first, and most if not all of the things you are trying to enable (mp3, wma, dvd, etc.) can already be done using the existing tools. Automatix is known for ignoring your apt database and can really screw up your system with broken dependencies. I have heard a lot of horror stories; RPM hell for DEP if you will.

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General Software Discussion / Re: Making the Switch-04: The "User Guide" as life raft, more n00b problems

« on: June 19, 2007, 12:57 PM »

Sorry didn't see your reply there!

Don't ask me why, but as I understand it going forward all disks are doing to be treated as scsi; you'll have sd* instead of hd* and everyone will be encouraged to use the new UUID system. So stick with them and you shouldn't have any problems going forward.

[For future reference.] As for your fstab, you should just be able to put the UUID, like so:

UUID=34hj34h-34jhg-434h-8345-k3h434k5hkjh / ext3 defaults 0 0

Instead of having to use the full symbolic link path. The mount command hasn't been updated with UUID "automagic" yet, which is why I told zridling to use to full paths above.

Tonurics: thanks for the tip on mounting a disk by UUID. An update breaking my mountpoint is exactly what happened. I fixed it in /etc/fstab as I described above, but I've been worrying about what will happen next time.

-Edvard (June 18, 2007, 07:36 PM)

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General Software Discussion / Re: Making the Switch-04: The "User Guide" as life raft, more n00b problems

« on: June 19, 2007, 12:36 PM »

That is weird the system only reported the one disk UUID... I still recommend trying to use the virtual symbolic links since they should never change between distributions or kernel updates.

I don't like it as much as it goes by the disk serial number but use this: ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/

It should out put something like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  9 2007-06-19 08:41 scsi-1ATA_ST3160021A_5KJ2348LN -> ../../sdb
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-06-19 08:41 scsi-1ATA_ST3160021A_5KJ2348LN-part1 -> ../../sdb1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  9 2007-06-19 08:41 scsi-1ATA_ST3160022A_5VX84HJB -> ../../sda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-06-19 08:41 scsi-1ATA_ST3160022A_5VX84HJB-part1 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-06-19 08:41 scsi-1ATA_ST3160022A_5VX84HJB-part2 -> ../../sda2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-06-19 08:41 scsi-1ATA_ST3160022A_5VX84HJB-part5 -> ../../sda5

You'll need to identify the first partition on your second disk, in my cause that is scsi-1ATA_ST3160021A_5KJ2348LN-part1 which you'll want to use in place of hdb1 (sdb1 in my case).

Since you should already have the /mnt/2drive folder in place, your next command would be (change the disk id to match yours): sudo mount /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-1ATA_ST3160021A_5KJ2348LN-part1 /mnt/2drive

And you should be able to read and write to your second disk by going to /mnt/2drive.

For your fstab you would put (again use your disk id): /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-1ATA_ST3160021A_5KJ2348LN-part1 /mnt/2drive ext3 defaults 0 2

That should be it. I don't know where you are getting the rest of your information from but /dev/mapper/ is a container for _special_ file systems, such as in the case of on the fly encryption using luks, you would unlock your encrypted disk and have luks create a virtual device in /dev/mapper/ for you to mount with (as if it was a normal hard drive).

Even by switching to KDE your keystrokes here for mounting disks would be the same... However, I know Kubuntu has a easy to use GUI file system management tool similar to the one in windows that would let you do all of this without having to use the shell or edit fstab manually. Since you are just getting started with learning Linux, it might be better for you to stick with GUI tools for these sort of processes. The worst thing is for you to get needlessly frustrated with trying to learn a small manual process when there are tools to do this for you, and ultimately have a negative experience. Last time I'll say it, but to reiterate my KDE suggestion, if you are a windows user, KDE is still a world of difference but with a similar methodology. Personally (not to start a flame war of anything), I think gnome looks great with wonderful fonts and themes, but mind numbingly irritating to use.

Since then, here's what I've done:

              ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

which returned:

              total 0
              lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-06-14 04:36 6068b6ae-9b08-4ce9-a6fe-08add83228c0 -> ../../sda1

So I did the following:

              mkdir /mnt/2drive

Open fstab file and added this line:

              /dev/hdb1 /mnt/2drive ext3 defaults 0 0

__________________________________
I read this, but I didn't understand the following command:

              mount /dev/mapper/<other_thing> /<mountpoint_directory>

What is the "other thing"?

Oy, nothing. Maybe I should consider doing this under KDE as Tonurics suggests. Gnome is making my tiny dinosaur brain hurt.

-zridling (June 14, 2007, 09:06 PM)

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General Software Discussion / Re: Making the Switch-04: The "User Guide" as life raft, more n00b problems

« on: June 14, 2007, 11:55 AM »

Hard drives in linux are quite a bit different that what we are used to from windows. One of the big things that most people don't pick up on (especially when dealing with two hard drives) is that you are not locked into only mounting your hard drive at a fixed location (in windows, your stuck using a drive letter) you can mount your drive anywhere you want; for example you could mount your second drive at /home (think of /home like the windows profile folders, inside you have your desktop folder, my documents, my music, etc) which would make your system save all your personal data on the second drive, leaving your root drive (first hard drive, which has the os installed on it) untouched. This all happens transparently so if you removed your second hard drive and put it in another linux computer (and mounted /home there) all your files would travel with you, your original would also continue to work as /home would default back to the root drive.

Anyways, hopefully that is enough back-story to give you a better understanding on linux hard drives. Now for mounting your disk.

Firstly using /dev/[device] seems to be slowly going the way of the dodo (not that it wont work) but there is a good chance a kernel update to your system later on will break your mount points. Also the /dev/[device] links are pretty organic, you may plug in a new hard drive later and find all your device numbers has shifted (/dev/sda could become /dev/sdb etc.). But there is a simple fix:

In a shell run: ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

You should see something like:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-06-14 08:23 34hj34h-34jhg-434h-8345-k3h434k5hkjh -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2007-06-14 08:23 s7d7sd7-76s75-34k5-k34h-k3j4h5k3j4h5 -> ../../sdb1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root  9 2007-06-14 08:23 s78ds67-sd635-34kj-34k5-sfb23478623c -> ../../sdb

The above command shows you all the Universally Unique Identifiers for your detected hard disks and partitions. (You can also visit the directory: cd /dev/disk/ to find other disk identification information, such as cable location and serial number.) Assuming that your second hard drive is sdb1, you'll want to use: /dev/disk/by-uuid/s7d7sd7-76s75-34k5-k34h-k3j4h5k3j4h5 going forward when creating mount points.

Now is a good time to decide where you want to mount your disk, the above solution told you /media/seconddrive that will work, but personally I think it makes much more sense to mount it in the actual mount directory: /mnt/ Of course I could be just talking crazy (you _can_ mount anywhere you want); KDE on the other hand will do all kinds of nice auto icon creation and such if you use /mnt/ so thats what I recommend (yes, I know you are using gnome; you made baby Jesus cry).

To make the folder you will be mounting type this in the shell: sudo mkdir /mnt/seconddrive

It will ask you for your root password (sudo = super do) and create the new empty folder at /mnt/seconddrive of course you can change "seconddrive" to be anything you want.

Next to tell the system to use the folder as a mount point: sudo mount /dev/disk/by-uuid/s7d7sd7-76s75-34k5-k34h-k3j4h5k3j4h5 /mnt/seconddrive

Replace the UUID from your own system, you should not have to give the type like in the above solution the mount command _should_ auto detect it. Now you should be able to go to /mnt/seconddrive in your favorite  file explorer and be using your second hard drive, a quick left click to compare free space between /mnt/seconddrive and /mnt/ can be used to verify your other drive is in use. If gnome doesn't make you nice drive icons, you can create links to /mnt/seconddrive on your desktop (left click drag drop).

To un-mount your hard drive use: sudo umount /mnt/seconddrive

If you turn off your computer, the drive will be un-mounted automatically, to make it permanent you need to edit /etc/fstab with a text editor as root. You should probably make sure the above worked before doing that... Since I am lazy, and you can probably figure out the rest by using the above info and googling fstab I leave you there.

*rant* If you are a window user, you should have went with KDE; gnome is more geared towards mac users. The gnome ideology seams to be "it's easier because you have limited options"; like how one button mouses are suppose to be easier than two button mouses.