Re: I give in.
- From: robertharvey@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:26:48 -0700
On 22 Aug, 22:49, Andy Burns <usenet.july2...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
IF not can you just "dd" the disk/partition somewhere using another
live-CD that does have SATA drivers (e.g. F7)
Thanks for that.
It was obviously black wednesday [-8]. That, and the latest Knoppix,
and a couple of live cds, just failed to download. I kept getting
resets during the connections. The gparted live cd recognised the
SATA ports on the mother board, but did not see the disks so
attached. I think that is asus' bios fault.
I did the disk clone in the end with "clonezilla" which was not
elegant. But worked perfectly. I had never heard of it, and only
came across it in some funny forum somewhere where a chap reported
that -some-other-rescue-disk- took 6 hours to do 300G, and clonezilla
took 30 mins. Only oddity was that it claimed it was going to put the
extra space on the end of the boot partiton, which would have left me
with a 260G /boot. But when I ran gparted from the host, after
rebuilding, it had done nothing of the sort and I was left with a nice
264G extra partition which I have formated fat32 and will use for
sharing picture access between billware and linux.
Now that is the next problem.
I have always run Suse, but on the machine I am replacing I had wifi
access, not wired (don't ask, it is all to do with decorating). Suse
10.1 had dropped support for the rt2500 wireless chip set and I had to
add the module myself, fairly easy. When I slopegraded to 10.2 I
could not get the module to compile, or install if obtained pre-
compiled, so in a fit of pique I switched to Mandriva Spring 2007.
The automatic updater in 10.2 stunk like stinking fish that had gone
off a bit too.
Nice product, Mandriva, although I felt a bit lost without Yast. I
flirted with the support scheme, but they reminded me of Del boy,
bombarding me with money off offers for things I had bought from them
a couple of days before at full price. I bought the madriva-on-a-
stick thing to use with my company flatpot, but that does not boot usb
so I still needed a cd and I got fed up with that. However,
Madnriva's repository based updater is about a thousand times better
than the zenjunk that had replaced yast and you on suse 10.2 for
updating. OpenSuse has now ditched that, although the underlying
zzzzzyyyppp is still there.
On this beast, with it's nvidia sli graphics (I don't need it, but
hey!) I eventually tried installing suse as the linux boot,
anticipating the arrival of 10.3 . It was appalling. sax2 detected
two graphics cards and persisted in thinking there were two screens.
The X i got was always display 2! I ended up hacking the references
to the second display out of xorg.conf to get it sort of working. But
it was unreliable. It would freeze solid at a momen't notice.
I had had installer problems, complainging about acpi timers, with
suse, mandriva, and mepis until I updated the bios in the mother
board. I had had problems with locking up when the DVD writer was
accessed until I updated the firmware in that. I did manage to
install fedora 7, and a fine system that looks as well. But I wanted
to persist with what I knew so I installed suse again. It changed the
bios settings for AMDlive, glod knows why (or indeed how). It was
confused about graphics, as mentioned, and it had this habit of
locking up at random after half an hour or so.
I got fed up and decided to try ubuntu - I never had - and it seemed
to do everything first time. Fedora, Suse, and ubuntu all found the
HP inkjet printer, but only ubuntu did not require a reboot to get the
queue running, for example.
Snag is, it feels a bit like "my first linux". It uses sudo and
sudo'ers list, so that you use your login password for administrative
events, not the root password. In fact, I was able to set the root
password (ubuntu tries not to have root accessible at all) by running
the setup tool over my login password. That isn't "right" but it has
long been possible with sudo'ers lists, so hey. But it is simple,
straightforward, and works. I think I may stick with it for a bit.
The grub bootloader is not as pretty as Suse or Fedora's version,
being old fashioned text, but if that is the only irritation it is
pretty good.
My word, the repository and update system is fast. Much faster than
anything else I have seen. I am impressed, really, apart from the
toys-r-us feel. I did not have kubuntu to hand, and wonder if I can
install KDE as an alternative desktop via gdm. Oh, of course I /can/,
I just mean can I do it with a couple of clicks through the supplied
tool. I could have gone back to Fedora, but there is something
slightly creepy about red hat, I don't know what.
[-8] It probably was black wednesday. My new WD mybook world edition
2 (1Tb of nas for 224 squid) comes with some horrid thing called
mionet, which they implied was essential for setting up. It would not
jbex because it could not on-line register, because the remote server
was borked. Turns out it is not essential for setting up at all,
there is an http server in the nas itself. And my ISP was borked too,
for a while. Could not connect to it's credit card server when In
tried to change my card number.
The WD thingy came with dantz retropsect express for backing up. I
tried it on the widnoze setup, and my god is it awful. It is slow,
and has been made "user friendly" by dumbing it down to the point
where it is barely usable. Snag is, I don't want to leave the WD
powered up all the time (it uses 30 watts for a start) and this
mindjunk is predicated on the idea that it sits there all the time
doing backups when you are not looking. sbackup on ubuntu backed up
the whole linux setup in under 35 minutes, while retrospect took close
on 5 hours to do the windows setup, which admittedly includes 4Gb of
pictures not backed up via linux.
I half regret obl'ing the WD box - it does not do nfs, ftp, or
anything else but windows sharing. But it jbex with both windows and
linux, and as long as you realise it is only a big hard disk it is
fine. It will do for what I bought it for - backing up.
.
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